Saxon military revolution, 912

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Original Article

Saxon military revolution, 912–973?

B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

Saxon military revolution, 912–973?:

myth and reality

B.S. B



D. B



For more than a generation Karl Leyser’s inﬂuential thesis, which credited
Henry I with undertaking a military revolution which made possible the
Saxon dynasty’s rule of

Francia orientalis,

has dominated the scholarly

literature. According to Leyser, Henry radically reformed the Saxon mil-
itary by building a large force of heavily armed mounted ﬁghting men.
These men provided the means necessary to assure Saxon domination. It
is argued here, by contrast, that this Saxon military revolution is a myth
and that the continental Saxons, as contrasted to those in England, saw
the gradual development of a heavily armed mounted ﬁghting force fol-
lowing their conquest by Charlemagne in 805. The real Saxon military
revolution was Henry’s creation of the

agrarii milites

and the building of

frontier fortiﬁcations

It is generally agreed that the Saxon kings of east Francia (west and
west-central Germany) in the tenth century enjoyed great military and
political success. They descended from Liudolf, who became duke
under the later Carolingians (

.850). Henry the Fowler, the fourth duke

of this line (912), became king of the eastern part of the Frankish
kingdom in 919. Following in the tradition of Charles the Great,
Henry’s son, Otto I (936–73) acquired the imperial title in 962.

Over

the past decades, many scholars have worked diligently to identify the
conditions and causes which made possible the rapid rise of this dynasty
to dominance in western and west-central Europe as well as ultimately

For an overview of the history of this period with a focus on the Ottonian/Liudolﬁng
dynasty, see T. Reuter,

Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800 –1056

(London, 1991). For an

older account covering the Ottonian period exclusively, see R. Holtzmann,

Geschichte der

sächsischen Kaiserzeit 900–1024

, 4th edn (Munich, 1961).

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in northern Italy.

In 1968, Karl Leyser, Chichele Professor of modern

history at Oxford, published what today remains the most inﬂuential
explanation for the success of the Saxon dynasty.

Leyser’s thesis is that Henry I, the Saxon duke and later king,

along with his son Otto I, were successful, in large part, because they
were able to defeat militarily their rivals in the duchy of Saxony,
overcome opposition in the kingdom of east Francia, and ultimately
gain dominance in the neighbouring kingdom of Italy as well as
over the Magyars and Slavs on their eastern frontiers. The key to their
military success, according to Leyser, was the development of a large
body of heavily armed mounted ﬁghting men. Leyser believes that
such troops, whom he often calls ‘knights’, dominated the battleﬁelds
not only of Saxony but also of western and central Europe from 933
onward.

As Leyser understood military development in the early Middle Ages,

the recruitment and training of signiﬁcant contingents of expensive
heavily armed cavalry was initiated throughout the Frankish kingdom
by Charles Martel (716– 41) following his victory over the Muslims at
Poitiers in 732. These efforts were vigorously pursued by Charles’s

The question of how the Liudolﬁng dynasty rose to power has generated considerable scholarly
interest for more than a century and a half. For an introduction to the vast literature on this
topic, see G. Waitz,

Deutsche Verfasssungsgeschichte V: Die deutsche Reichsverfassung von der

Mitte des neunten bis zur Mitte des zwölften Jahrhunderts

, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1874; repr. Darmstadt,

1954); H. Keller, ‘Reichsstruktur und Herrschaftsauffasung in ottonisch-frühsalischer Zeit’,

Frühmittelalterliche Studien

16 (1982), pp. 74–128;

idem

, ‘Zum Charakter der “Staatlichkeit”

zwischen karolingischer Reichsreform und hochmittelalterlichem Herrschaftsausbau’,

Früh-

mittelalterliche Studien

23 (1989), pp. 248–64; T. Reuter,

Germany in the Early Middle Ages

800 –1056

(London, 1991), pp. 136–48 and

idem

, ‘The Medieval German

Sonderweg

?: The

Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages’, in Anne J. Duggan (ed.),

Kings and Kingship

in Medieval Europe

(Exeter, 1993), pp. 179–211; G. Althoff and H. Keller,

Heinrich I. und Otto

der Grosse: Neubeginn auf karolingischem Erbe

, vol. 1, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 1994); and Gerd

Althoff,

Die Ottonen: Königsherrschaft ohne Staat

(Stuttgart, 2000).

The clearest statement of K. Leyser’s thesis is ‘Henry I and the Beginnings of the Saxon Empire’,

The English Historical Review

83 (1968), pp. 1–32 and reprinted in K.J. Leyser,

Medieval

Germany and its Neighbours 900 –1250

(London, 1982), pp. 11–42. All citations are to the latter

publication. Leyser deals with several of his major premises concerning the military organization
of Saxony in ‘The Battle at the Lech, 955: A Study in Tenth-Century Warfare’,

History

50 (1965),

pp. 1–25 and reprinted in

Medieval Germany and its Neighbours

, pp. 43–67 (latter pagination

used in this study); and ‘Early Medieval Warfarre’, in

Communications and Power in Medieval

Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries

, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), pp. 29–50.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 23;

idem

, ‘Battle at the Lech’, pp. 53, 56 and 57; and

idem

, ‘Medieval

Warfare’, p. 41. With regard to Leyser’s views concerning German knighthood, also see ‘Early
Medieval Canon Law and the Beginnings of Knighthood’, in L. Fenske, W. Rösener and T.
Zotz (eds),

Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Josef Fleckenstein

zu seinem 65. Geburtstag

(Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 549–66, and reprinted in

Communications

and Power

, pp. 51–71. Note that Fenske, Rösener and Zotz’s study, like Leyser’s, is concerned

fundamentally with the military organization of the Saxon duchy. Those interested in the
problematic mater of Saxon ‘identity’ and ‘ethnogenesis’ may see the relevant work of M. Becher,

Rex, dux, gens: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des sächsischen Herzogtums im 9. und 10. Jahrhundert

(Husum, 1996).

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successors Pippin (741–68) and Charlemagne (768– 814). Leyser believed
that the development of these forces was accomplished through the
course of the later eighth and ninth centuries in west Francia, Lotharingia,
and some of the more westerly parts of east Francia, as these regions are
represented in the

divisio regnorum

that was ratiﬁed by the treaty of

Verdun in 843. He argues, however, that the Saxons did not keep pace.
Thus, prior to the accession of Henry as duke in 912, the military forces
of the Saxon duchy had not participated in or, at least, had not participated
as fully as necessary in the process of building a major force of heavily
armed and mounted troops. This problem was solved, according to
Leyser, no later than 933 when Henry deployed a sufﬁciently large number
of mounted and heavily armed ﬁghting men (

armati

) to ‘encourage’ a

large force of lightly armed Magyar horse archers to avoid battle at
Riade and to retreat precipitously from south-eastern Saxony.

It should be made clear that Leyser appears not to have been much

interested in matters of military strategy and technology. His study was
focused on the social impact of the creation of heavy cavalry, and he
used the term ‘knight’ frequently in his work as a translation of the
Latin term

miles

. In this way, he seems to have drawn on the then

current thesis, ﬁrst published in 1887 by Heinrich Brunner, which was
widely popularized and imaginatively augmented by Lynn T. White Jr.
in 1962. The Brunner-White thesis postulated a ‘military revolution’
in the Frankish kingdom and held that Charles Martel’s early Caro-
lingian military establishment, which had been inherited from the last
Merovingians, was radically altered. In this model, the armies of the
Merovingian kings prior to 732 lacked a signiﬁcant cavalry component,
much less a dominant heavy cavalry component capable of sweeping
lightly armed horsemen and foot soldiers from the ﬁeld of battle by dint
of shock combat realized through a mounted charge. Thus, it is Charles
Martel who is thought to have reorganized the Merovingian military by
creating a force of heavily armed mounted troops that dominated
warfare in the west not only in the Carolingian era but throughout the
Middle Ages.

It was this ‘military revolution’ in the Frankish kingdom, accord-

ing to the Brunner-White thesis, that also brought about a tenurial

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 32.

H. Brunner, ‘Der Reiterdienst und die Anfänge des Lehnwesens’,

Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung

für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abtheilung

8 (1887), pp. 1–38, reprinted in Brunner,

Forschungen zur Geschichte des deutschen und französischen Rechts

(Stuttgart, 1894), pp. 39–74;

and L.T. White,

Medieval Technology and Social Change

(Oxford, 1962), pp. 1–38 and 135–53.

For a recent defence of the validity of the Brunner-White model for understanding early
medieval warfare, see J.F. Verbruggen, ‘The Role of Cavalry in Medieval Warfare’,

Journal of

Medieval Military History

3 (2005), pp. 46–71, here p. 62.

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revolution with the supposed advent of ‘feudalism’ when Charles
Martel allegedly initiated the systematic granting out of church lands as
beneﬁcies to support this new force composed of royal vassals. These
revolutions in military structure and tenurial practices also are
believed to have paved the way, as a result of continuous military suc-
cess, for the Carolingian mayor of the palace, Pippin, to arrange his
elevation to the royal throne in 751. Charlemagne, of course, continued
the process and obtained the imperial title in 800. The obvious
similiarities of this Carolingian success story based upon military
dominance to that of the Ottonians certainly was not lost on Karl
Leyser.

Since 1970, the Brunner-White thesis has been shown to be untenable

in terms of both military history and technology.

In a parallel vein, the

magisterial work of Susan Reynolds,

Fiefs and Vassals

, demonstrated that

the supposed institutional revolution in landholding, i.e. ‘feudalism’,
also did not take place in pre-crusade Europe.

Leyser, of course, argued

for a military revolution in the Saxon duchy before the Brunner-White
thesis was systematically discredited. While his interests, as already
noted, were primarily with the political implications of social changes
taking place within the nobility, in seeing the crucial development as
the creation of a heavy cavalry force of soldiers, whom he felt able to
designate as ‘knights’, his underlying interpretative scheme was heavily
inﬂuenced by these received ideas. In fact, the term

miles

, often translated

by Leyser as ‘knight’ retained its basic meaning of soldier during the
Ottonian period, and was not an indication of social standing.

Since

he wrote, moreover, it has been established that real warfare aimed at
conquest and the control of enemy territory was dominated by sieges

Concerning the challenges to the Brunner-White thesis see, R.H. Hilton and P.H. Sawyer,
‘Technological Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough’,

Past and Present

24 (1963),

pp. 90–100; D.A. Bullough, ‘

Europae Pater

: Charlemagne and his Achievement in the Light

of Recent Scholarship’,

English Historical Review

85 (1970), pp. 59–105, here pp. 84–90; and

B.S. Bachrach, ‘Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup and Feudalism’,

Studies

in Medieval and Renaissance History

7 (1970), pp. 49–75, and reprinted with the same pagi-

nation in idem, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (Aldershot, 1993), esp. pp. 49–
52. Concerning the general acceptance by specialists in military history of Bachrach’s rebuttal
of the Brunner-White thesis, see K. DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough,
1992), pp. 95–122.

S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994; repr. 2001).

In this context, it should be noted that Leyser used the term ‘knight’ frequently in his work
to denote milites, a usage that runs counter to the observations regarding the meaning of this
term as developed by J. Bumke, Studien zum Ritterbegriff im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, 2nd rev.
edn (Heidelberg, 1977), which maintains the same basic view regarding the use of the term
milites as the ﬁrst edn (Heidelberg, 1964). This work was translated into English as The
Concept of Knighthood in the Middle Ages, trans. W.T.H. Jackson and E. Jackson (New York,
1982), where Bumke emphasizes (p. 38) that the term miles is not an indication of social
standing, but rather retained its basic meaning of soldier during the Ottonian period.

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B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

and not by battle in the ﬁeld.

Further, it has been established that

mounted shock combat was a minor aspect even in the rare battles in
the ﬁeld that were fought throughout pre-crusade Europe.

Finally,

the tenurial history of pre-crusade Europe needs rewriting in light of
Reynold’s argument that the construct of feudalism was the result of a
reading back of legal views developed centuries later.

Leyser cannot be held accountable for failing to take into account

the subsequent major developments in scholarship regarding the
exceptionally complicated relationships between military organization
and social status. However, it must be emphasized that Leyser’s model
of the rise of the army of mounted ﬁghting men, and the concomitant
emergence of a knightly class, is still the dominant model among scholars
specializing in the history of early medieval Germany, particularly in
the Germanophone tradition.

It has long been understood by specialists in early medieval warfare, that military efforts
intended to capture and hold enemy territory, and to defend one’s own territory against
conquest, were dominated by sieges. H. Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der
politischen Geschichte, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1923) – translated into English as History of the Art of
War within the Framework of Political History, vol. 2. The Germans and vol. 3 The Middle
Ages, trans. Walter J. Renfroe (Westport CT, 1980, 1982) – argued III, p. 324, ‘Throughout
the entire Middle Ages we ﬁnd . . . the exploitation of the defensive in fortiﬁed places.’
Delbrück’s contemporary, Charles Oman, History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages,
2 vols, 2nd edn (New York, 1924; repr. 1964), II, pp. 52–4, took much the same position.
With regard to the state of the question in the later twentieth century, Philippe Contamine,
La Guerre au Moyen Age (Paris, 1980), trans. by Michael Jones as War in the Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1984; repr. 1993), p. 101, argued ‘In its most usual form medieval warfare was made
up of a succession of sieges accompanied by skirmishes and devastation . . .’ With regard to
the centrality of siege warfare to the speciﬁcally Carolingian context, see B.S. Bachrach, Early
Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia, 2001), passim.

See, for example, two articles by B.S. Bachrach, ‘Charlemagne’s Cavalry: Myth and Reality’,
Military Affairs 47 (1983), pp. 181–7, and reprinted in Bernard S. Bachrach, Armies and Politics
in the Early Medieval West (London, 1993), pp. 1–20; and ‘Caballus et Caballarius in Medieval
Warfare’, in The Study of Chivalry, ed. H. Chickering and T.H. Seiler (Kalalmazoo, 1988),
pp. 173–211 and reprinted with the same pagination in B.S. Bachrach, Warfare and Military
Organization in Pre-Crusade Europe (Aldershot, 2002).

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 1–16.

Leopold Auer, ‘Zum Kriegswesen unter den früheren Babenbergern’, Jahrbuch für Landeskunde
von Niederösterreich 42 (1976), pp. 9–25, here p. 16, argues, for example, that the central
problem of medieval military history is the connection between Kriegswesen and social structure.
In this regard, see also H.-J. Bartmuß in Deutsche Geschichte in zwölf Bänden, vol. 1 (Berlin,
1982), p. 370; R. Wenskus, ‘Die soziale Entwicklung im ottonischen Sachsen im Lichte der
Königsurkunden für das Erzstift Hamburg-Bremen’, in L. Fenske, W. Rösener, and T. Zotz
(eds), Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Joseph Fleckenstein zu
seinem 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 501–514; R. Wenskus, ‘Die ständische Entwick-
lung im Sachsen im Gefolge der fränkischen Eroberung’, in Angle e Sassoni al di qua e al di
là del mare, Settimane de studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 32 (Spoleto, 1986),
p. 614; Helmut Beumann, Die Ottonen (Stuttgart, 1987), p. 44; Otto Ackermann, ‘Comites
und Milites: Grafen und Krieger im Hochmittelalter’, Werdenberger Jahrbuch 7 (1994), pp. 11–20,
here p. 11; and Franz-Reiner Erkens, ‘Militia und Ritterschaft: Reﬂexionen über die Entstehung
des Rittertums’, Historische Zeitschrift 258 (1994), pp. 623–59, esp. p. 629. Special attention
should be drawn to the seminal article by Karl Ferdinand Werner, ‘Heersorganisation und
Kriegsführung im deutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts’, Settimane di Studio

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The present state of the question regarding a supposed Saxon

military revolution creates something of a paradox. There has been very
little new research on this topic since Leyser’s inﬂuential studies. Thus, it
is fair to suggest that the ‘Saxon Military Revolution’ has been sustained
largely as a result of inertia among scholars in the ﬁelds of Saxon political,
institutional and military history.

It should also be noted that the major

issues of debate have been royal representation and ritual, in large part
because of the seminal inﬂuence of Leyser’s work. The purpose of this
study is to re-examine aspects of the military organization of the Saxon
duchy from the late Carolingian era through the reign of Otto I in order
to ascertain if a military revolution, in fact, took place during this period.

Leyser’s evidence for a military revolution

Leyser bases his view that there was a military revolution in the Saxon
duchy on the Res gestae Saxonicae written after c.973 by Widukind, a
monk from the monastery of Corvey.

Widukind was a member of a

noble Saxon family, named after and likely related to the Widukind
who led Saxon military resistance to Charlemagne during the late
eighth century.

He spent his youth and adult life as a student and then

de Centro Italiano Sull’alto Medievo 15 (1968), pp. 791–843. Werner, although accepting the
general model of the rise of the armoured Ritterheer, nevertheless argues (esp. pp. 791–806) for
fundamental continuity in military organization from Charlemagne through to Otto I. In this
context, Werner points out particularly that the military resources of the Saxon regnum were fully
integrated into the overall Carolingian military organization by the end of the ninth century.

The view that heavy cavalry dominated warfare in the tenth-century Reich was common
before Leyser wrote ‘Saxon Empire’. See, for example, H. Fehr, ‘Das Waffenrecht der Bauern
im Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 35
(1914), pp. 111–21, esp. p. 118; and P. Schmitthenner, ‘Lehnskriegwesen und Söldnertum im
abendländischen Imperium des Mittelalters’, Historische Zeitschrift 150 (1934), pp. 229–67.
Leyser’s views regarding the dominance of mounted troops in the wars of the tenth-century
German kingdom also have garnered considerable support over the past three decades from
specialists in early medieval German history. In addition to the studies listed in the note
above, L. Auer, ‘Zum Kriegswesen unter der früheren Babenbergern’, Jahrbuch für
Landeskunde von Niederösterreich 42 (1976), pp. 9–25, esp. pp. 16–19 and idem, ‘Formen des
Krieges im abendländischen Mittelalter’, in Manfried Rauchensteiner and Erwin A. Schmidl
(eds), Formen des Krieges (Graz, 1991), pp. 17–43, esp. pp. 19–23; H. Keller, ‘Reichsstruktur
und Herrschaftsauffasung in ottonisch-frühsalischer Zeit’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 16 (1982),
pp. 74–128, esp. p. 82; G. Althoff and H. Keller, Heinrich I. und Otto der Grosse: Neubeginn
auf karolingischem Erbe, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (Göttingen, 1994), p. 87; T. Reuter in a series of
articles, ‘Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 5th ser. 35 (1985), pp. 75–94; ‘The End of Carolingian Military Expansion’, in P. Godman
and R. Collins (eds), Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of Louis the Pious
(814– 840) (Oxford, 1990), pp. 391–405; and T. Reuter, ‘Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare’,
in Maurice Keen (ed.), Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford, 1999).

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 14.

For a useful brief overview of Widukind’s life and text, see Richard Engel, ‘Widukind von
Corvey’, in Ulrich Knefelkamp (ed.), Weltbild und Realität: Einführung in die mittelalterliche
Geschichtsschreibung (Pfaffenweiler, 1992), pp. 85–92.

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monk at the prestigious Saxon monastery of Corvey where he lived
with numerous other men from noble families, including Ruotger, the
author of the vita of Archbishop Brun of Cologne, the younger brother
of King Otto I (934–73).

Widukind wrote the bulk of his Res gestae

Saxonicae c.968, and then revised and augmented the text sometime
after 973.

The reasons why Widukind wrote his history of the Saxon

gens and the reigns of the ﬁrst two kings of the Saxon dynasty, Henry
I (919–34) and Otto I, and the sources that he had available have been
the subject of considerable scholarly debate since the mid-nineteenth
century.

The answers scholars have posited to these questions have had

a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on their evaluation of the historical value of the
information provided by Widukind in the Res gestae.

The earlier scholarly tradition dealing with the historical value of

Widukind’s work largely was negative. In 1899, Wilhelm Gundlach made
the famous claim that Widukind was a ‘gamester in a monk’s habit’.

In taking this view, Gundlach was maintaining the state of the question
established three decades earlier by Rudolf Köpke, the ﬁrst scholar to
subject the Res gestae to systematic source criticism.

In the new cen-

tury, Widukind’s text still suffered signiﬁcant criticism at the hands of
scholars. Karl Hainer, in his Gießen dissertation of 1914, characterized
Widukind as an epic poet who had no interest in writing history.

Robert Holtzmann, in his revision of Wilhelm Wattenbach’s volume of
source criticism, took an even harsher view of the historical value of the
Res gestae and concluded in 1938 that Widukind was a naive monk who
uncritically wrote down what he heard without leaving the monastery

For Widukind’s age and education at Corvey, as well as his study alongside Ruotger see
Helmut Beumann, Widukind von Korvey: Untersuchungen zur Geschichtsschreibung und Ideen-
geschichte des 10. Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1950), pp. 1–5. With respect to Ruotger’s study at
Corvey, see Heinrich Schrörs, ‘Die Vita Brunonis des Ruotger’, Annalen des historischen
Vereins für den Niederrhein 90 (1911), pp. 61–100, here pp. 61–2.

Regarding the chronology of Widukind’s composition of the Res gestae, see Helmut Beumann,
Widukind von Korvey: Untersuchungen zur Geschichtsschreibung und Ideengeschichte des 10.
Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1950), pp. 178 ff., where Beumann deals with the older scholarly
traditions dealing with the compositional history of the text and concludes that the work was
completed up to Book III, Chapter 69 which dealt with the death of the rebel magnate
Wichmann in 967 or 968. Beumann’s chronology, including the augmentation of the text by
Widukind after Otto I’s death in 973 generally has been accepted by scholars. In this regard,
see Gerd Althoff, ‘Widukind von Corvey: Kronzeuge und Herausforderung’, Frühmittelalterliche
Studien 27 (1993), pp. 253–72, here pp. 258–9.

The ﬁrst systematic effort to subject Widukind’s text to source criticism was Rudolf Köpke,
Widukind von Korvei (Berlin, 1867).

Wilhelm Gundlach, Heldenlieder der deutschen Kaiserzeit, vol. 1 (1894), p. 112, ‘Spielmann in
der Kutte’.

See Köpke, Widukind, p. 70.

Carl Hainer, ‘Das epische Element bei den Geschichtsschreibern des früheren Mittelalters’,
dissertation, Gießen (1914). On the nature of Hainer’s views, see Beumann, Widukind von
Korvey, pp. 51–65.

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of Corvey.

Holtzmann added further that Widukind did not have

access to written sources of information and was, therefore, entirely
dependent on hearsay, which meant that he included numerous fables
in his work.

The process of rehabilitating Widukind’s reputation as a trustworthy

source of information about the tenth-century Saxon duchy began with
Helmut Beumann’s study of the Res gestae in 1950.

In this work, and

in numerous articles over the following ﬁve decades, Beumann makes
a convincing case that Widukind is to be taken seriously as a trust-
worthy source of information about the tenth-century Saxon duchy and
the German kingdom.

In his original study, Beumann stressed that

Widukind not only had available a large number of models of history
writing from his study at Corvey, but that the monk adhered to a
rigorous historical method when he wrote.

Beumann did not obscure

the fact that Widukind made errors, occasionally relating ﬁction as fact,
but concluded, ‘it is unlikely, however, that he was aware of this when
he did it’.

In later studies, Beumann took pains to demonstrate that,

contrary to the argument made by Holtzmann, Widukind had access
to considerable information from a wide variety of sources. Beumann
emphasizes, for example, Widukind’s close connection to leading ﬁgures
of the Ottonian dynasty and his ability to obtain signiﬁcant information
from them.

Even more crucially, Beumann also argued that rather

than simply relying on rumour or anecdotes from acquaintances at his
monastery to write his history, Widukind also had access to written
documents, including those produced by the royal government and by
the papacy.

Although several of Beumann’s ideas concerning Widukind’s work

have not been widely accepted by scholars, including the view that his

Wilhelm Wattenbach and Robert Holtzmann, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter:
Deutsche Kaiserzeit (Berlin, 1938), pp. 27–8.

Wattenbach and Holtzmann, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, p. 28, ‘Was er
hörte, hat er im allgemeinen gutgläubig, aber doch keineswegs immer ohne Kritik aufgenommen
und gebucht.’

Beumann, Widukind von Korvey, passim.

See, for example, Helmut Beumann, ‘Die Historiographie des Mittelalters als Quelle für
die Ideengeschichte des Königtums’, Historische Zeitschrift 180 (1955), pp. 449–88; idem,
‘Historiographische Konzeption und politische Ziele Widukinds von Corvey’, La storiograﬁa
altomedievale: Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 17 (1970),
pp. 857–94; and idem, ‘Imperator Romanorum, rex gentium. Zu Widukind III 76’, in Norbert
Kamp and Joachim Wollasch (eds), Tradition als historische Kraft: Interdisziplinäre Forschungen
zur Geschichte des früheren Mittelalter (Berlin, 1982), pp. 214–30.

Beumann, Widukind von Korvey, pp. 53–60.

Beumann, Widukind von Korvey, p. 61.

Beumann, ‘Historiographische Konzeption’, p. 885 ff.

H. Beumann, ‘Imperator Romanorum, rex gentium. Zu Widukind III 76’, in N. Kamp and
J. Wollasch (eds), Tradition als historische Kraft: Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Geschichte
des früheren Mittelalter (Berlin, 1982), pp. 217 and 221.

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work was written in the context of the controversy surrounding the
establishment of the archbishopric of Magdeburg by Otto I, the Res
gestae now generally is considered by scholars to provide a considerable
corpus of accurate information about affairs in the Saxon duchy and
the broader German kingdom, from both his own day and from earlier
periods as well.

The value of Widukind in presenting details about

important aspects of royal ceremonial, for example, was emphasized
by Josef Fleckenstein.

Karl Leyser, as noted above, trusted implicitly

Widukind’s testimony regarding Saxon military organization.

In a more wide-ranging study of historical value of the Res gestae,

Gerd Althoff stresses that the quality of the information provided by
Widukind must be assessed in the context of the intended audience for
the work.

Pursuing this theme, Althoff emphasizes that Widukind was

commissioned by a leading member of the Ottonian royal family, i.e.
Archbishop William of Mainz, the queen mother Mathilda, or Otto
I himself, to write the Res gestae as a didactic tool for Princess Mathilda,
the abbess of Quedlinburg, in order to prepare her for a major role
in the governance of the kingdom.

As a consequence, according to

Althoff, the information provided by Widukind had to be a trustworthy
representation of reality. Althoff concludes his study by observing, ‘In
Widukind’s work, we have presentations of this century [the tenth
century] which were written down in the context of a very serious work.
It would require considerable intellectual arrogance for anachronists to
belittle this work as unserious.’

More recently, Karl Morrison independently came to the conclusion

that Widukind’s Res gestae had the very important real-world purpose
of preparing the princess and abbess Mathilda for her responsibilities as
a member of the ruling dynasty.

In this context, Morrison stresses that

Mathilda did exercise considerable political power from 968, when she
was the sole member of the Ottonian family north of the Alps, until
her death in 999.

In an effort to prepare her, and her entourage, for

this role, Widukind, according to Morrison, was commissioned to write

With respect to Beumann’s view regarding the connection between the writing of the Res
gestae and the establishment of Magdeburg, see Beumann, Widukind, p. 195 ff.; and idem,
‘Imperator Romanorum’, pp. 214–30, here p. 221. For a critique of this conclusion, see
Althoff, ‘Widukind von Corvey’, p. 258.

Josef Fleckenstein, Grundlagen und Beginn der deutschen Geschichte (Göttingen, 1974), p. 141.

This is the gravamen of ‘Widukind von Corvey: Kronzeuge und Herausforderung’.

Althoff, ‘Widukind von Corvey’, pp. 262–72.

Althoff, ‘Widukind von Corvey’, p. 272.

Karl F. Morrison, ‘Widukind’s Mirror for a Princess: An Exercise in Self-Knowledge’, in Karl
Borchardt and Enno Bünz (eds), Forchungen zur Reichs-, Papst- und Landesgeschichte. Peter
Herde zum 65. Geburtstag von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen dargebracht, 2 vols (Stuttgart,
1998), I, pp. 49–71.

Morrison, ‘Widukind’s Mirror for a Princess’, p. 50.

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a text that would not only provide the princess and her advisers with
considerable valuable information, but would require them to partici-
pate in their own education by ﬁlling in the gaps in the narrative that
Widukind purposely left there.

Thus, rather than composing a bricolage,

as some of his modern critics had claimed, Widukind, in Morrison’s
view, had a high opinion of the knowledge of his audience about both
historical matters and current affairs, and expected them to consider
what he had left out of the text and to discuss these matters.

Widukind’s

appreciation of the considerable knowledge of his audience is, of course,
critical in evaluating the trustworthiness of the Res gestae as a source of
accurate historical information. In addition to the requirement of
providing useful, and thus accurate, information for didactic purposes,
Widukind also laboured under the rhetorical obligation of keeping the
trust of an audience that already was familiar with the events that ﬁlled
his text.

The only signiﬁcant modern critique of the historical value of the

information presented by Widukind in the Res gestae is Johannes Fried’s
effort to return to the model presented by Holtzmann, discussed above,
that is of Widukind as a recorder of oral information.

In this context,

as part of a broad-gauged attack on the historical value of all early
medieval narrative sources, Fried argues that written texts based on the
transmission of information through oral means simply cannot be
trusted. Fried conspicuously does not address in his studies the speciﬁc
arguments made by Beumann that Widukind had access to written
sources of information. In addition, Fried does not answer the argument
of Althoff and Morrison that Widukind’s patrons not only thought
that the monk could provide accurate information for Mathilda,
but that he had been commissioned to do so. Indeed, for Widukind
to have provided Mathilda with inaccurate information might have

Morrison, ‘Widukind’s Mirror for a Princess’, p. 53.

Morrison, ‘Widukind’s Mirror for a Princess’, pp. 67–8, and passim.

With respect to the imperatives of style, organization and content of historical works
intended for oral presentation, with a focus on Widukind and his later contemporary Dudo
of St Quentin, see Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Stylistic Choice in a Reborn Genre: The National
Histories of Widukind of Corvey and Dudo of St. Quentin’, in Paolo Gatti and Antonella
Degl’Innocenti (eds), Dudoni de San Quintino (Trent, 1995), pp. 78–102, especially pp. 94–102.

See in this context, Johannes Fried, ‘Die Kunst der Aktualisierung in der oralen Gesellschaft:
Die Königserhebung Heinrichs I. als Exempel’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 44
(1993), pp. 493–503; idem, ‘Die Königserhebung Heinrichs I. Erinnerung, Mündlichkeit und
Traditionsbildung im 10. Jahrhundert’, in Michael Borgolte (ed.), Mittelalterforschung nach
der Wende 1989 (Munich, 1995), pp. 267–318; idem, ‘Erinnerung und Vergessen. Die Gegenwart
stiftet die Einheit der Vergangenheit’, Historische Zeitschrift 273 (2001), pp. 561–93; and idem,
Die Schleier der Erinnerung: Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich, 2004). This same
concern had been raised in somewhat less breathless form two decades earlier by Franz-Josef
Schmale, Funktion und Formen mittelalterlicher Geschichtsscreibung (Darmstadt, 1983), especially
pp. 19–20.

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caused signiﬁcant difﬁculties for the young abbess in her efforts to help
govern the German kingdom. The failure to provide accurate informa-
tion, available from other people, would also have undermined the
reputation of Widukind, who, as noted above, beneﬁted from royal
patronage for his work. Finally, Fried does not distinguish in his studies
between the information that is central to the author’s parti pris, and
the information that provides the context in which the central narrative
is told. Thus, if Widukind can be shown to have provided a version of
a particular event that was desired by his patrons, it is speciﬁcally here
that one would expect to ﬁnd that the information not directly related
to the author’s storyline is accurate. For all of these reasons, it is not
surprising that Fried’s efforts to marginalize the historical value of the
information provided by Widukind in the Res gestae have not gained
the acceptance of specialists in Ottonian history and historiography.

From the perspective of evaluating Widukind as a source of informa-

tion for speciﬁcally military matters, as contrasted with, for example,
singularly important political events, three factors must be taken into
account. First, Widukind was, himself, a member of a noble Saxon
family and probably had close relatives, including his own father, who
either served personally in a military capacity in ducal or royal armies,
or had to provide soldiers for military service.

In this context, Widukind

speciﬁcally mentions in his text the service of a nobleman named
Reginbern in the army of Henry I.

Widukind notes that Reginbern

was descended on his mother’s side from the famed Widukind, the
author’s namesake who had fought against Charlemagne, and thus was
probably a cousin to the Corvey monk.

Second, in addition to the

information gained from members of his own family about military
matters, Widukind lived among a large number of men who were also

See, for example, the survey of this question by Johannes Laudage, ‘Widukind von Corvey und
die Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft’, in Johannes Laudage (ed.), Von Fakten und Fiktionen:
Mittelalterliche Geschichtsdarstellungen und ihre kritische Aufarbeitung (Cologne, 2003),
pp. 193–224, especially pp. 209–24; Markus Brömel, ‘Widukind von Corvey: Kronzeuge und
Herausforderung’, in Auf den Spuren der Ottonen III (Halle, 2002), pp. 17–25, here p. 18. See
also the effective critique of Fried’s methodology by Althoff, ‘Geschichtsschreibung in einer
oralen Gesellschaft’, pp. 151–69; and Keller, ‘Widukinds Bericht’, pp. 406–10.

With regard to Widukind’s high-ranking relatives, probably including the royal family itself,
see Brömel, ‘Widukind von Corvey’, pp. 17–25, here p. 17.

Widukind, Res gestae I.31.

Widukind, Res gestae I.31. It is now well recognized by scholars that writers from this period
frequently used their texts to provide a memorial to their friends and relatives, and it seems
likely that this is what Widukind was doing here. On this practice, see Lutz E. von Padberg,
‘Geschichtsschreibung und kulterelles Gedächtnis: Formen der Vergangenheitswahrnehmung
in der hochmittelalterlichen Historiographie am Beispiel von Thietmar von Merseburg,
Adam von Bremen und Helmold von Bosau’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 105 (1994),
pp. 156–77, here p. 158 and the literature cited there. In this context, also see Gerd Althoff,
Adels-und Königsfamilien im Spiegel ihrer Memorialüberlieferung: Studien zum Totengedanken
der Billunger und Ottonen (Munich, 1984), particularly pp. 166–72.

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from Saxon noble families and, therefore, had relatives who either pro-
vided military service or provided soldiers to the duke of Saxony and
the king. This group of noble monks provided a rich source of infor-
mation about the military activities of their brothers, fathers and other
male relatives.

Finally, the monastery of Corvey, as a substantial

landholder in the Saxon duchy, had very large military obligations,
including providing a substantial contingent of well-armed mounted
ﬁghting men for service in the armies of the duke and king.

Conse-

quently, Widukind, who clearly had access to considerable information
from both within and outside the monastery, was in a position to know
the ways in which the military forces of Corvey were organized and
deployed. Indeed, he may well have had conversations with the milites
who served in Corvey’s household forces. However, it should be
emphasized that Widukind operated within the context of an aristocratic
parti pris and was writing for an audience more concerned about the
leading members of society than with ﬁghting men from the lower social
and economic ranks of society. Consequently, he tends to emphasize
the former at the expense of the latter.

Leyser, as noted above, treats the Corvey monk as a reliable source

and argues that Widukind, in writing about the middle years of Henry’s
reign, describes the Saxon king as having ‘accomplished something like
a military revolution in his stemland’.

This military revolution Leyser

understands to have had two fundamental components. One part was
ostensibly defensive and based upon the construction of numerous
‘fortresses’. The second part was offensive, and based upon the devel-
opment of mobile mounted forces.

While Leyser recognizes the great

importance of Henry’s ‘castle-building’ and the creation of agrarii
milites, he makes clear that his subject is not the ‘farmer-soldiers’, who
were based at these fortresses, but rather he has chosen to focus ‘only
[on] the history of the Saxon exercitus in the early tenth century’.

This

force Leyser sees ultimately as the heavy cavalry weapon that undergirded
the success of the Ottonian dynasty.

Leyser maintains, in this context, that while defence was certainly not

unimportant, ‘the pre-condition for all the opportunities open to the

Regarding the noble inhabitants of Corvey, see Brömel, ‘Widukind von Corvey’, p. 17; and
Helmut Beumann, Die Ottonen (Stuttgart, 1987), p. 15.

The earliest surviving immunity for Corvey requiring the mobilization of its dependants for
service in expeditione was issued in 826 by Louis the Pious. See Die Kaiserurkunden der
Provinz Westfalen 777–1313 vol. 1, ed. Roger Wilmans (Münster, 1867), no. 16, p. 28. With
respect to the continuing military obligation of the monastery of Corvey, see Leyser, ‘Henry
I and the Beginnings of the Saxon Empire’, in idem, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours,
here pp. 16–17.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 14.

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Liudolﬁng rulers and their closer adherents was . . . an effective Saxon
exercitus’.

In order to sustain this notion that Henry I built an effective

exercitus for offensive military purposes, Leyser turns to Widukind’s
well-known discussion of Henry’s views expressed at the fortiﬁed
stronghold within the fortress at Werla (now Werlaburgdorf ) located
in modern Niedersachsen four kilometres from the city of Schladen.

Concerning the troops who were at Werla, Widukind writes that the
Saxon king saw this military force as untrained (rudus) and unaccus-
tomed (insuetus) to bellum publicum against such savage people (saevis
gens), i.e. the Magyars.

Leyser takes the situation at Werla to represent

not simply the forces at this fortress where Henry could evaluate them,
but rather as a characterization of the entire exercitus of the Saxon
duchy as a whole.

Leyer’s expansion of Widukind’s reference to a particular ﬁghting

force at Werla to mean the entire Saxon exercitus is problematic. First,
there is nothing in Widukind’s text to suggest that the rudus and insuetus
contingent at Werla was something more than a local force, that is
militia troops of the general levy obligated to sustain the local defence.
Second, and more importantly, in this very same chapter, Widukind
makes clear that there was at least one effective Saxon military force
operating against the Magyars at this time. Indeed, Widukind makes
clear that this other force, i.e. not the men at Werla, had defeated a
formidable Magyar army and captured one of its major leaders who
then was turned over to King Henry.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 13.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 14. All citations of Widukind are to Quellen zur Geschichte der
sächisischen Kaiserzeit: Widukinds Sachsengeschichte, ed. Albert Bauer and Reinhold Rau from
the original edition by P. Hirsch, M. Büdinger and W. Wattenbach (Darmstadt, 1971).
Widukind, Res gestae I.32. Whether these are, in fact, Henry’s views, is problematic because
the Saxon king had been dead for more than a half century when Widukind wrote.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 14. In ibid., p. 33, Leyser interprets Widukind’s use of the term
miles in this passage to refer to all of Henry’s milites, whom Leyser identiﬁes as heavily armed
mounted warriors who constituted the Saxon exercitus. But Leyser’s claim here is not war-
ranted either by Widukind’s text or by the conditions at Werla. As Leyser, himself, (‘Saxon
Empire’, p. 23) observes, Widukind used the expression manus militum when he wanted to
denote a body of milites. On its face, therefore, it seems unlikely that the singular miles can
stand for the body of Henry’s milites. Indeed, on the few occasions that Widukind uses the
term miles without referring to a speciﬁc person, the Saxon monk invariably is referring to a
particular military force. Thus, for example, when Widukind wished to describe the contingent
of Otto I’s army that engaged his son Liudolf ’s men outside the gates of Regensburg when
Otto put the city under siege in 953, the author used the term miles. See Widukind, Res gestae
III.36. Widukind appears to use the term miles in this context as a collective noun meaning
a group of high-quality ﬁghting men. Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (1009–18), who drew
heavily on Widukind as a source, consistently used the term miles to designate professional
ﬁghting men and eschewed using it for any other purpose.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 14.

Widukind, Res gestae I.32.

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Widukind’s treatment of Henry’s subsequent use of this prestigious

prisoner of war is illuminating in regard to the strength of the Saxon
army in ﬁghting against these invaders. The Magyars sent envoys to
King Henry petitioning him to accept ‘an enormous ransom’ composed
of large quantities of gold and silver in exchange for the captive. The
king, however, is portrayed by Widukind as rejecting the ransom and
using the situation created by the victory won by his troops and the
capture of the Magyar leader as an opportunity to arrange, successfully
as the situation turned out, a treaty of peace (pax ﬁrmatetur).

In this

context, Widukind is portraying Henry according to the model of a
good Christian monarch who prefers peace to war as that tenet was
developed during the later Roman empire and afﬁrmed by Carolingian
political theorists.

As a result of this treaty, Henry sent the Magyar

envoys on their way with gifts (munera), and saw to it that the captured
Magyar leader was set free.

Contrary to the thrust of Leyser’s argument, Henry’s recognition

that the local defence forces at Werla were not well trained was, itself,
not of major importance with regard to the development of contingents
of heavy cavalry. Rather, as will be seen below, it provided the stimulus
for the development of well-trained local levies, i.e. the agrarii milites
to defend the fortiﬁcations.

The major series of events in 924, which

serve to contextualize the information concerning Werla, were the vic-
tory won by elements of Henry’s ﬁeld forces over the Magyars, the
capture of an important Magyar leader, and the negotiation of a treaty
of peace. The success of this treaty – it lasted for nine years according
to Widukind – makes clear that the Magyar leaders, who had been
defeated, greatly respected the strength of Henry’s army.

The overall strength of Henry I’s ﬁeld forces, as contrasted with

militia forces responsible for local defence, should come as no surprise

Widukind, Res gestae I.32. We accept the date of 924 for these events. We do so because we
see Widukind’s comment on the nine-year pax as a statement of its actual duration, rather
than an indication of its intended length. This point is discussed in greater detail below.

See particularly Sedulius Scotus, De rectoribus christianis, ed. S. Hellmann (Munich, 1906),
Ch. XVII, which deals with the obligations of a king to make peace when peace is offered
by an enemy. For very useful background that undermines the traditional Germanist view of
Carolingian kingship see the penetrating study by J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘The via regia of
the Carolingian Age’, in Beryl Smalley (ed.), Trends in Medieval Political Thought (Oxford,
1965), pp. 22–41, and reprinted in J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford,
1975), pp. 181–200. See also H. Anton, Furstenspiegel and Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit
(Bonn, 1968), pp. 261–81, who discusses in detail Sedulius’s views regarding the proper behaviour
of a Christian king.

Widukind, Res gestae I.32.

For an overview of the extensive literature dealing with the agrarii milites, see Leyser, ‘Saxon
Empire’, p. 15; and the more recent survey by E.J. Schoenfeld, ‘Anglo-Saxon “Burhs” and
Continental “Burgen”: Early Medieval Fortiﬁcations in Constitutional Perspective’, The Haskins
Society Journal 6 (1994), pp. 49–66.

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to readers of Widukind’s text. Indeed, it is clear that as early as 912,
when Henry became duke and well before he became king in 919,
he commanded a considerable array of military forces. In 912, King
Conrad I sought to limit the power of the new Saxon duke. However,
the monarch, according to Widukind, realized that Henry commanded
an exceptionally formidable military force including a major contingent
of professional soldiers (fortium militum manus) and also very large
numbers of expeditionary levies such that he could act with the army and
also with a considerable additional force (cum exercitu quoque innumera
multitudine). As a result, the king concluded that he could not deal
with his new duke on the battleﬁeld.

Instead of facing Henry directly, King Conrad used various surro-

gates to try to keep the new duke in his place. Henry, however, deployed
the formidable military organization, noted above, to very good effect.
For example, Henry found himself in conﬂict with Archbishop Hatto
of Mainz, one of the great magnates of the Frankish kingdom and
one of Conrad I’s major supporters. Henry outmanoeuvred Hatto and
conﬁscated all lands belonging to the archdiocese not only in the Saxon
duchy but also in Thuringia.

In the same context, Duke Henry found

it necessary to ﬁght against King Conrad’s brother-in-law Burchard, and
the latter’s close associate Bardo.

The king’s surrogates were defeated

several times, i.e. in bellis frequentibus, and ultimately they found it
necessary to surrender their holdings (terra cederent) that straddled the
border between the Saxon duchy and Thuringia.

In order to secure

the newly acquired territory, Henry divided all of these newly acquired
estates among his own milites.

Shortly after these events, Henry decisively

defeated an expeditionary force led by the king’s brother, Eberhard, in
the environs of the Saxon fortress town of Eresburg on the northern
ﬂank of the Fulda Gap.

Thus, by c.915, not only did Henry demon-

strate that he had a formidable army under his direct command, but he
was able to recruit additional numbers of what would appear to be elite
troops, i.e., milites, by using lands that he had taken from Archbishop
Hatto, Burchard and Bardo.

Widukind, Res gestae I.21.

Widukind, Res gestae I.22.

On this point, see Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 34.

Widukind, Res gestae I.22; and Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 34.

Widukind, Res gestae I.23.

The utilization of military lands to support soldiers is not feudalism. There are a wide variety
of ways to pay soldiers of which land is but one. Furthermore, the use of land or income
from land for this purpose certainly is not a necessary and sufﬁcient deﬁnition for what
some people call feudalism. See in this regard, B.S. Bachrach, ‘Military Lands in Historical
Perspective’, The Haskins Society Journal 9 (1997), pp. 95–122, particularly pp. 113–15.

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With the number of defeats suffered by his surrogates increasing,

King Conrad decided to take decisive action and summoned the
expeditionary levies, i.e., congregata omni virtute Francorum, from all
of the east Frankish kingdom for an invasion of the Saxon duchy.

Henry ensconced himself in the fortress of Grone (located near modern
Göttingen) to await support from his ﬁdeles. Before the king could
establish a siege, however, Thietmar, Henry’s father-in-law, who com-
manded the duke’s army on the eastern frontier, arrived at Grone where
Conrad’s envoys were trying to convince the Saxon ruler to make
peace. Thietmar, who is characterized by Widukind as a man of very
great experience in military matters (vir disciplinae militaris peritissimus)
informed the envoys that he was bringing up a force of thirty units of
professional troops, i.e. trigenti legiones. Although this would appear to
have been some sort of ruse de guerre, both Henry and Conrad’s envoys
would seem to have believed Thietmar, and the king’s army retreated
from Saxony.

As seen above, Henry, in his capacity as duke, commanded a consid-

erable force of his own troops, i.e. a major contingent of professional
soldiers, (fortium militum manus) and also very large numbers of levies
(exercitus innumera multitudine). These were the forces with which
Henry had defeated various of the military expeditions sent against him
by King Conrad. In addition, Henry had access to the army led by
Thietmar and to many other strong contingents that were commanded
by his supporters, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the Saxon duchy.
Among these, we may include the army commanded by Reginbern,
Henry’s brother-in-law, who is credited by Widukind with destroying
Danish settlements in northern Saxony and keeping the frontier safe
from their periodic attacks.

Henry’s strong force of milites would later

be referred to by Widukind as equestri prelio probatum, the elite troops
whom he commanded at Riade in 933.

In 919, when Henry accepted the kingship, he no longer had to rely

solely on the forces that he traditionally commanded, e.g. his own

Widukind, Res gestae I.24, ‘congregata omni virtute Francorum’.

Widukind, Res gestae I.24. Two points need to be made here. First, the fact that the ruse de
guerre worked if, in fact, such a technique was employed at this time, permits the inference
that it was widely believed that Thietmar could mobilize thirty units of professional soldiers.
In so far as Widukind tells the story, it would seem that he believed it to be rhetorically
plausible. Second, Widukind’s use of the term legio, in this context, is not at all a problem.
This was a synonym used for scara by writers throughout the Carolingian and Ottonian eras
to indicate a unit of professional soldiers, as contrasted with various types of levies. For the
Carolingian system, see Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 81–2. Thietmar von Merse-
burg, Chronik, ed. and trans. W. Trillmich, 8th edn (Darmstadt, 2002), consistently used the
term legio to denote a unit in an army commanded by a prince, either German or Slavic. In
this regard, see Chronicon III.19; IV.11; IV.22; V.36, VI.22; VI.27; VII.23; and VII.59.

Widukind, Res gestae I.31.

Widukind, Res gestae I.38.

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milites and expeditionary levies, and those of his Saxon ﬁdeles. Now,
depending upon how effectively he was able to impose his royal authority
on the great men of the kingdom, he would be able to mobilize the
entire military establishment of the east Frankish kingdom, i.e. he would
be able to act congregata omni virtute Francorum. In this context,
Widukind makes clear that in the early years of his reign, while Thietmar
and Reginbern defended the eastern and northern frontiers of the
Saxon duchy respectively, Henry led his forces against the rulers of the
southern duchies, Burchard II (917–26) of Swabia and Arnulf (907–37)
of Bavaria. After subjugating both of these dukes to his authority,
Henry turned his attention militarily to Charles III (898–922), the west
Frankish ruler, with considerable short-term success.

While recounting Henry’s efforts, Widukind provides considerable

insight into the great military resources available to the new king and
the manner in which these resources were regarded by the great men of
the kingdom. For the invasion of Swabia, Henry is reported to have
mobilized the entire expeditionary force available to him from the Saxon
duchy, i.e. cum omni comitatu suo.

Duke Buchard, who is depicted

both as an exceptionally able military leader (bellator intolerabilis) but
also as a very prudent man (valde prudens), recognized, according to
Widukind, that he could not effectively oppose an attack by Henry. As
a result, Burchard handed over (tradit) to royal command all of his
fortiﬁcations (urbes) in Swabia and his entire military force (populus
suus).

By contrast, Duke Arnulf of Bavaria, who learned of Burchard’s

capitulation, initially ensconced himself in the fortress city of Regens-
burg, but soon realized that he was not strong enough to oppose the
new king. Thus, he is reported to have handed himself over to Henry
in dependence along with all that he ruled.

In light of Widukind’s

presentation of the formidable array of Saxon military forces available
to Henry, both as duke and as king, it is hardly surprising that in 924,

Widukind, Res gestae I.30. For an overview of Henry I’s military campaigns, see E. Sander,
‘Die Heeresorganization Heinrichs I.’, Historisches Jahrbuch 59 (1939), pp. 1–16; and Holtzmann,
Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit, pp. 84–96.

Widukind, Res Gestae I.27. In this case, the comitatus clearly refers to the entire expeditionary
force available to Henry, including his milites, the milites of his ﬁdeles, and the expeditionary
levy from Saxony. On the difference between the milites and the men of the expeditionary levy,
see Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 23.

Widukind, Res Gestae I.27. It should be noted that urbs is the standard term used by
Widukind and numerous other authors working in the German kingdom from the tenth and
eleventh centuries to refer to fortiﬁed places, including fortiﬁed cities and other strongholds.
On this point, see J. Ehlers, ‘ “Burgen” bei Widukind von Corvey und Thietmar von Merseburg’,
in Maike Kozok (ed.), Architektur, Struktur, Symbol: Streifzüge durch die Architekturgeschichte
von Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Festschrift für Cord Meckseper zum 65. Geburtstag (Petersberg,
1999), pp. 27–32.

Widukind, Res Gestae I.27, ‘tradito semet ipso cum omni regno suo’. Note that regnum cannot
be considered kingdom here but merely recognition of a placed that is ruled.

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elements of his army decisively defeated the Magyar invaders, captured
one of their most important leaders, and imposed a peace that the
Hungarians were afraid to break for nine years.

Obviously, Leyser did not give sufﬁcient attention to Widukind’s

information, described brieﬂy above, regarding the formidable army
Henry inherited when he succeeded his father in 912, and which he
improved. Rather, Leyser mobilized several other accounts regarding
the operation of Saxon military forces in the ﬁeld during the ninth
century, i.e. more than two decades prior to Henry’s accession to the
ducal ofﬁce, in order to argue that ‘the military standing of the Saxons
in the ninth century was not particularly high’.

Although he never

explicitly makes clear exactly what this comparative statement means,
Leyser adduces two arguments in its support: ﬁrst, continental Saxon
ﬁghting forces were presented by ninth and early tenth-century authors
in a negative light, and second that ‘[w]ith one exception, Lothar’s war
against his brothers in 841, they [the Saxons] played a subordinate role
in the armed clashes of the contenders for possession of power in the
Carolingian Reich’.

In support of the ﬁrst of these two arguments,

Leyser deploys three pieces of evidence. Leyser insists ﬁrst that Einhard
(c.820) ‘looked down’ on the Saxons as auxiliaries. Leyser then attributes
this same sense of ‘looking down’ to the author of a poetic panegyric on
Louis the Pious, Ermold (c.826/28).

Finally, Leyser states that Meginhard,

to whom Leyser, following Friedrich Kurze, attributes the authorship of
the Annales Fuldenses after 863, presents a ‘decidedly unﬂattering’ image
of the Saxons who participated in the Moravian expedition of 872.

Since Leyser attributes such great weight to a total of three passages

from the works of these ninth-century authors to justify his conclusion
that the Saxons were depicted as having a military standing that was
‘not particularly high’ in the ninth century, it is necessary to consider
these particular texts in some detail. According to Leyser, Einhard’s
comments regarding Charlemagne’s deployment of Saxon forces in 789
– an eighth- rather than a ninth-century campaign – permit the inter-
pretation that the imperial biographer wanted to show the Saxons as
‘treacherous auxiliaries’.

In the passage in question, Einhard wrote:

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 31.

Ermold, Poème sur Louis le Pieux et épitres au Roi Pépin, ed. and trans. by Edmond Faral
(Paris, 1932).

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 31. For a full discussion of the question of the authorship of the
Annals of Fulda, see The Annals of Fulda, trans. and annotated by T. Reuter (Manchester,
1992), pp. 1–9. For the Latin text of the Annales Fuldenses, F. Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover,
1891). We follow the practice of Leyser and Kurze in attributing the authorship of the Annales
Fuldenses to Meginhard.

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 26.

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‘during which time the Saxons fought just like the troops from the other
nations that followed the royal banner when commanded to do so.
[The Saxons], however, acted in deceit with less than full devotion.’

A careful reading of this text makes clear that Einhard regards the
Saxons as having served unwillingly in Charlemagne’s army – a view
more than justiﬁed by the further Saxon revolts against Carolingian rule
in the period after 789.

Indeed, Einhard’s work, as a whole, indicates

his deep hostility to the Saxons.

But there is nothing here to suggest

that Einhard ‘looked down’ on the Saxons for serving as auxiliares.
Rather, Einhard is simply making the observation that in 789, at least,
the Saxons were now numbered among the ‘other nations’ subject to
Carolingian rule and were performing the duty incumbent upon a
subject people, namely providing military service to Charlemagne. Leyser’s
use of the English word ‘auxiliaries’ for the Latin cognate auxiliares is
somewhat misleading because Einhard clearly is using the term in a
political rather than in the tactical sense of troops whose task it is to
aid the main battle force. However, even if Leyser were correct to see
Einhard ‘looking down’ upon the Saxon troops serving as auxiliares, it
would then be necessary to argue that Einhard ‘looked down’ on the
ceterae nationes as well. Of course, such an interpretation might well
require that Einhard be construed as a Frankish ‘nationalist’, a factor
that would call into question any negative comments he might make
about all nationes other than the Franks.

Leyser’s identiﬁcation of Ermold’s very brief discussion of the

deployment of a unit of Saxons by Louis the Pious in Brittany as an
example of ‘looking down’ on these men as ‘auxiliaries’, is also prob-
lematic after an examination of the text.

Ermold makes no comment

on the ﬁghting ability of the Saxons. He does not present them in combat.
He does not even discuss the tactics in which they were trained. Rather,
Ermold lists the Saxons, much as Einhard did regarding the campaign
undertaken by Charlemagne in 789, as one of the subject peoples of the
empire required to send troops to serve in expeditione.

Ermold, like

Einhard, is commenting on the political subordination of the Saxons,
as well as, in this passage, the subordination of the Alemanni and

Einhard, Vita Karoli, 4th rev. edn L. Halphen (Paris, 1967), II.12, ‘In quo et Saxones velut
auxiliares inter ceteras nationes, quae regis signa iussae sequebantur, quamquam ﬁcta et minus
devota oboedientia, militabant.’ This edition is to be preferred to the edition by O. Holder-Egger,
MGH SRG (Hanover, 1911).

On the question of the Saxon revolts, see E. Goldberg, ‘Popular Revolt, Dynastic Politics and
Aristocratic Factionalism in the Early Middle Ages: The Saxon “Stellinga” Reconsidered’,
Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 467–501, particularly pp. 475–8, where he discusses the background
of revolts during the 780s and 790s.

On this point, see Einhard, Vita Karoli II.6 and II.7.

Ermold, Poème, lines 1510–16.

Ermold, Poème, lines 1510–16, ‘Caesar Francos et gentesque subactacs/esse jubet placito.’

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Thuringians, to Frankish rule. There is no information in this text that
can be used to show that Ermold presented the Saxons, Alemanni or
Thuringians as inferior to the Franks in a military sense.

In turning to the Annales Fuldenses, and particularly the portion

attributed to Meginhard, it must be emphasized, although Leyser neglects
to mention it, that Meginhard had a strong anti-Saxon parti pris which
is to be taken into account when evaluating his depiction of the Saxons.

In the context of discussing military operations conducted in east Francia
in 872, Meginhard writes that Louis the German sent an army com-
posed of Thuringians and Saxons against the Moravians.

The author

stressed that Louis the German did not accompany the army, and, as a
result, the Saxon and Thuringian contingents could not get along with
each other, causing them to break off the campaign without ever engag-
ing the enemy. Some of the counts leading the army, Meginhard does
not specify whether they were Thuringian or Saxon, then were beaten
by women from the region and knocked from their horses.

Clearly, in

this instance, Meginhard is presenting both the Saxons and the Thurin-
gians as fractious and has some fun at the expense of their leaders
suggesting that even when on horseback they are weaker than women.
Meginhard’s depiction here of the Saxons certainly is consistent with
his anti-Saxon bias. It is to be noted, however, that Meginhard does not
show the Saxons losing in battle against the Moravians, running from
battle, or being deﬁcient in any particular military sense. What is at
issue is, in fact, their level of ‘civilization’.

Nevertheless, if this were the only passage in which Meginhard dis-

cussed the Saxons engaged in war, one might conclude that he had a
low opinion of their military abilities. However, although Leyser fails
to note this, Meginhard discusses Saxon military forces on several other
occasions, depicting them as victorious in battle. In 869, for example,
Louis the German sent an army of Saxons and Thuringians, under the

Thus, for example, Meginhard accurately describes the events of the battle of Andernach in
876, during which Louis the Younger undertook the exceptionally difﬁcult tactic of a ﬁghting
retreat in the face of the enemy in order to lure Charles the Bald’s forces into a trap. The
fact that the Saxons were purposely forgiving the centre of the line rather than simply running
away is made clear by Meginhard’s remark that they parumper terga verterunt, meaning they
retreated for only a brief time. However, rather than giving the Saxons credit for undertaking
one of the most difﬁcult tactical manoeuvres in all of warfare, Meginhard insists on stating
that the Saxons retreated because they were terriﬁed (territi) by the large number of their
opponents. The author of the Bavarian continuation of the Annals of Fulda (see Reuter,
Annals, pp. 5–9) similarly displays his hostile views toward the Saxons in his discussion of the
deposition of Charles the Fat in 887. Following Charles’s illness, according to the author, the
Franks, and the Saxons, the latter ‘in their usual fashion’, entered into an ‘evil conspiracy’ to
depose the emperor. See Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 887, ‘male inito consilio Franci et more solito
Saxones . . . cogitaverunt deﬁcere a ﬁdelitate imperatoris’ (emphasis added).

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 872.

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command of Louis the Younger, against the Sorbs. According to
Meginhard, Louis the Younger was very successful in this campaign
defeating not only the Sorbs but their Bohemian ‘mercenaries’ as well.

In 885, Saxon defence forces, aided by a small Frisian ﬂeet, crushed a
major contingent of Northmen and, according to Meginhard, killed
them almost to the last man.

The three pieces of evidence that Leyser cites to show that the Saxons

were depicted as having a military standing in the ninth century that
‘was not particularly high’, do not, in fact, show this. Indeed, in the
case of Meginhard, it is clear that despite his anti-Saxon parti pris, the
author of the Annales Fuldenses felt compelled to present Saxon military
forces as triumphant in battle against both the Slavs and the Northmen.
But even if Leyser’s three pieces of evidence all pointed toward a low
military reputation for the Saxons in the ninth century, this would not
have been sufﬁcient to make his case, since Leyser omits completely
from his discussion of Saxon military ability the two works that have
the most to say about the ﬁghting forces from the Saxon duchy in the
ninth century, namely the Annales regni Francorum and the Annales
Sancti Bertiniani.

The author of the Annales regni Francorum discusses the deployment

of Saxon military forces by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious on eleven
occasions between 802 and 828.

Indeed, the Annales regni Francorum

consistently presents the military forces from the Saxon duchy as an
important component of the overall Carolingian military organization
with particular responsibilities in the north-east against the Slavs and
the Danes. In 809, for example, it is reported that Saxon forces success-
fully supported the Obodrite duke Thrasco, a Carolingian ally, in his
campaign against the Wilzi, a Slavic polity hostile to the Carolingians.

In 815, Louis the Pious dispatched an army of Saxons and Obodrites to
help the Danish prince Heriold seize political control in his kingdom.

The next year, Louis sent contingents from Saxony and Franconia to
campaign against the Sorbs.

In 819, Louis sent an army of Saxons and

east Franks to put down a rebellion by the Obodrite duke Sclaomir.

In addition to undertaking campaigns into enemy territory, Saxon forces

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 869. Cf. Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 869; for the Latin text, Annales de
Saint-Bertin, ed. Félix Grat, Jeanne Vielliard and Suzanne Clémencet (Paris, 1964).

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885.

Military forces mobilized in Saxony are depicted going to war in 802, 808, 809 (2), 810, 815,
816, 817, 819, 820, 822 and 828. See Annales regni Francorum, ed. F. Kurze MGH SRG
(Hanover, 1895).

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 809.

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 815.

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 816.

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 819.

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also were deployed by both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious to build
and garrison frontier fortiﬁcations. In 809, Charlemagne ordered several
Saxon counts to establish a fortiﬁcation on the River Stör, on the Danish
side of the Elbe River at a place called Esesfelth, and to provide a
garrison there to inhibit Danes from raiding into Carolinian territory.

Similarly, in 822, Louis the Pious sent a Saxon army east of the Elbe to
drive out the Slavic defenders in the area of Delbende on the River
Delvenau at Lauenburg and to build a fortress there. According to the
author of the Annales regni Francorum, Louis intended this fortiﬁcation
and its garrison to inhibit Slavic raids west of the Elbe in this region.

Both Prudentius of Troyes and Hincmar of Reims, as authors of

the Annales Bertiniani, also present Saxon military forces as integral
to Carolingian military operations in the east and north-east, together
recording ﬁfteen engagements in which Saxons took part during the
period 831–80.

In 839, for example, while Louis the Pious was trying

to put down a revolt by the Aquitanians, the Saxons are reported by
Prudentius to have fought and won a major battle against the Sorbs at
Kesigesburg. During the course of the ﬁghting, the Saxons killed the
Sorbian king Czimislav. In the aftermath of the battle, the Saxons cap-
tured eleven Sorbian strongholds.

Hincmar, corroborating the account

in the Annales Fuldenses, reports that in 869, Louis the Younger led a
Saxon army to a major victory over the Slavs.

Even those Carolingian authors not particularly interested in the

Saxons, such as the anonymous biographer of Loius the Pious, generally
referred to as the Astronomer, and Nithard, Charlemagne’s grandson
who served as a military ofﬁcer in the army of his cousin King Charles
the Bald, present Saxon forces as being of crucial importance to
Carolingian military operations against the Slavs and, to a lesser extent,
against the Northmen. Echoing the Annales regni Francorum, the
Astronomer reports that in 816, an army of Saxons and east Franks was
sent to deal with the rebellious Sorbs, and that the rebellious Abodrite
leader Sclaomir was captured by Saxon military forces and handed over
to Emperor Louis at Aachen in 819.

100

He added that in 839, Louis the

German relied entirely on a force of Saxons and Thuringians to invade

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 809.

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 822.

Concerning the authorship of the Annals of St. Bertin, see The Annals of St. Bertin, trans. and
annotated by J. Nelson (Manchester, 1991), pp. 6–13. The deployment of military forces is
presented by Prudentius and Hincmar as taking place in 831, 832, 834, 839(4), 845, 858, 863,
867, 869, 876 and 880.

Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 839.

Hincmar records that the Slavs were Wends, and Meginhard says they were Sorbs. See
Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 869.

100

Anonymi vita Hluodowici imperatoris, ed. R. Rau in Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte,
vol. 1, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1955), pp. 296 and 308.

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B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

Alemannia.

101

Nithard conﬁrms Louis the German’s reliance on the Saxons

in 839, and then goes on to make clear the efforts of both Lothar and Louis
the German to gain the loyalty of Saxon troops during the civil wars of
the next three years.

102

In September 841, Lothar managed to recruit a

substantial Saxon force to serve with him during his campaign against
Charles the Bald in the Paris region.

103

By early 842, however, Louis the

German had expended considerable effort to bring the Saxons back to
his side and had them with him in February of that year when he met with
Charles at Worms.

104

Nithard makes clear in his discussion of the meeting

between the two brothers that their troops were well trained in battle
tactics, including mounted attack, and speciﬁcally records their demon-
stration of the tactic of the feigned retreat in war games conducted by the
two Carolingian kings.

105

Among the soldiers trained in these tactics, Nithard

speciﬁcally mentions the Saxons along with the Bretons and Gascons.

106

Clearly, the claim that ‘the military standing of the Saxons in the

ninth century was not particularly high’ is not tenable on the basis of
the accounts provided in ninth- and tenth-century narrative accounts.
But what of Leyser’s secondary argument that ‘with one exception,
Lothar’s wars against his brothers in 841, they [the Saxons] played a
subordinate role in the armed clashes of the contenders for possession
and power in the Carolingian Reich’? To support this broad-gauged
claim, Leyser points to an account by Regino of Prüm dealing with
Charles the Bald’s deployment of a unit of Saxons in Brittany in 851,
and a report in the Annales Fuldenses of the battle of Andernach (876).

107

Leyser asserts that in 851 Charles employed the Saxons as ‘unskilled
military labour, not to say cannon-fodder’ and that ‘[a]t Andernach,
Louis the Younger did not treat them any better and counted on his
Rhenish Franks to see him through’.

108

In his account of Charles the Bald’s military campaign in Brittany in

851, Regino states that Charles deployed a unit of Saxon mercenaries
(conducti) in front of his lines to blunt (excipere) the charge of the
rapidly advancing Breton mounted troops.

109

In tactical terms, it is clear

101

Anonymi vita, p. 374.

102

Nithard, Historiae I.8 in Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte, ed. R. Rau vol. 1, 2nd edn
(Berlin, 1955).

103

Nithard, Historiae III.3.

104

Nithard, Historiae III.6.

105

Nithard, Historiae III.6. See the discussion of this text by Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare,
pp. 124–30.

106

Nithard, Historiae III.6.

107

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 26.

108

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 26.

109

Regionis abbatis Prumiensis Chronica, ed. F. Kurze MGH SRG (Hanover, 1890), s.a. 851,
‘Saxones, qui conducti fuerunt, ad excipiendos velocium equorum anfractuosos recursus in
prima fronte ponuntur.’

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that Charles deployed these Saxon mercenaries as skirmishers, a standard
type of military deployment used to screen the main force from attack
while it deploys for battle. Indeed, Charles’s army was in the process of
deploying into a phalanx, which required that his mounted troops
dismount and integrate with the foot soldiers. The latter also had to
establish a safe place for the horses as their riders joined the battle line.
Regino then records that at the ﬁrst sight of the spears of the Bretons,
the Saxons grew frightened (territi) and withdrew behind the line of
Charles’s army.

110

Regino’s characterization of the Saxon force as ‘terriﬁed’,

notwithstanding, the withdrawal of skirmishers behind the line once
the main force has completed its deployment was normal practice for
skirmishers in 851 as it was in the ancient world and as it has remained
into modern times.

111

Regino’s account makes clear that the skirmishers did carry out their

task of providing the main force time to create a solid front. By the
time the Bretons reached the Frankish ranks, the latter, Regino notes,
were concerta in acie and the Saxons had done their job.

112

That the

soldiers in the Frankish phalanx subsequently broke ranks in an undis-
ciplined manner to pursue the Bretons as the latter carried out a feigned
retreat, suffering signiﬁcant casualties in the process, can hardly be

110

Regionis abbatis Prumiensis Chronica, s.a. 851, ‘sed primo impetus spiculis Brittonum territi in
acie se recondunt’.

111

The use of skirmishers (velites) is discussed thoroughly by Vegetius. Epitoma rei militaris, Bk III,
Chs 16 and 20. For a general survey of the importance of Vegetius’s work in the early Middle
Ages, see B.S. Bachrach, ‘The Practical Use of Vegetius’ De re militari during the Early
Middle Ages’, The Historian 47 (1985), pp. 239–55, reprinted with the same pagination in
Bachrach, Warfare and Military Organization. With regard to the use of Vegetius by military
leaders in east Francia, see E. Goldberg, Struggle for Empire: Kingship and Conﬂict under Louis
the German, 817–876 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), pp. 40–2. The particular importance of Vegetius’s
text is highlighted in regard to the late Carolingian period by the work of Rabanus Maurus,
who c.856 wrote a military handbook based on De re militari for King Lothar II (d. 869).
Rabanus emphasized that he was only including material that was of value tempore moderno.
See Rabanus Maurus, De procinctu Romanae militiae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, Zeitschrift für
deutsches Altertum 15 (1872), pp. 413–51, at p. 450 for this passage. Separately, a copy of
Vegetius’s De re militari was commissioned by Empress Judith for the education of Charles
the Bald. It can, therefore, be suggested with some conﬁdence that Charles the Bald was familiar
with the concept of skirmishers through Vegetius and that he knew, pace Leyser, that skirmishers
could play an integral role in the conduct of battles. In this context, attention should also be
paid to a recent study by Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900
(London, 2003), which has attracted some attention for its neo-primitivist model of early
medieval warfare. As both the notes and bibliography provided by Halsall make clear, he is
ill-informed – in the authors’ view, deliberately so – about the state of the question regarding
the use of Vegetius’s work in the Carolingian era. He claims (p. 145) that the handbook written
by Rabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mainz under King Lothar, and based in large part on his
editing of Vegetius’s De re militari speciﬁcally for modern use, as noted above, ‘was made in
a monastery . . . and we cannot be sure . . . that it was not mainly a matter of antiquarianism’.
Halsall also fails to deal with the edition of Vegetius’s text by Freculf that was commissioned
at the west Frankish court for use by Charles the Bald in his wars against the Vikings.

112

Regino, Chronica, s.a. 851.

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attributed to any failure of the Saxons.

113

Regino, himself, makes clear

that the Frankish casualties were not to be blamed on the Saxons, but
rather insists that the Franks, who were accustomed to ﬁghting with
their swords while deployed in a phalanx were attoniti because they
were not trained or equipped to pursue the Bretons, nor adequately led
to reform their phalanx once they broke ranks to pursue the apparently
retreating Breton horsemen.

114

Of more importance in the present

context, skirmishers are not ‘cannon-fodder’, to use Leyser’s term, but
rather an integral element of an army’s force with speciﬁc and essential
tactical duties. If this passage has any bearing on the relative military
standing of Saxons and Franks, Regino’s comments can only be inter-
preted to the detriment of the latter.

115

In a similar vein, Leyser’s view of Louis the Younger’s deployment

of his Saxon troops at Andernach again betrays a fundamental mis-
understanding of the tactical situation and a readiness to dismiss the
parti pris of Meginhard in order to make the case for supposed Saxon
military inferiority during the ninth century. The tactical situation at
Andernach was exceptionally difﬁcult for Louis the Younger. Charles
the Bald was able to get his army within a short distance of Louis’ camp
before the latter received intelligence of his approach. Most of Louis’
force was foraging and could not be summoned back in time to partici-
pate in the battle. Since Charles was too close to permit retreat, Louis
decided to set a trap for his uncle. The bait in the trap consisted of
Louis’ Saxon troops whom he deployed on foot in front of his fortiﬁed
camp. The jaws of the trap were Louis’ mounted forces whom he
deployed in hiding on the two ﬂanks. When Charles arrived at Louis’
position, he saw the Saxon foot and immediately ordered a charge. The

113

Regino, Chronica, s.a. 851 states that ‘the Bretons raced up and down on their horses in their
customary manner attacking the tightly packed Frankish ranks, hurling their spears at them
with all of their strength. They then carried out a feigned retreat, and thrust their spears into
the chests of the men pursuing them.’ ‘Brittones more solito huc illucque cum equis ad
huiusmodi conﬂictum exercitatis discurantes modo consertam Francorum aciem impetunt ac
totis viribus in medio spicula torquent, nunc fugam simulantes insequentium nihilominus
pectoribus spicula ﬁgunt.’

114

Regino, Chronica, s.a. 851, ‘Franci . . . attoniti stabant . . . nec ad insequendum idonei nec in
unum conglobati tuti.’

115

Karl Leyser misrepresents these Saxon mercenaries on two counts. First, it is not true that
they fought poorly. Second, it is an open question whether these Saxon mercenaries serving
in Charles the Bald’s army in Brittany were, in fact, recruited from more than 1000 kilometres
to the east, i.e. beyond the Weser. It is also possible that the Saxons were the descendants of
military colonists in the Bayeux region who had served in the armies of various Merovingian
kings in operations undertaken in Brittany. On this point, see F. Lot, ‘Migrations Saxonnes
en Gaul et en Grande-Bretagne du IIIe au Ve siècle’, Revue Historique 119 (1915), pp. 1–40
and reprinted in F. Lot, Recueil des travaux historiques de Ferdinand Lot, 3 vols (Geneva and
Paris, 1968–73), II, pp. 23–62, at pp. 44–5, for the ninth-century Saxon mercenaries. Lot’s
observations, notwithstanding, we have already shown a signiﬁcant number of occasions on
which Saxons troops acquitted themselves well.

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Saxons at this point received the charge and then engaged in a ﬁghting
withdrawal toward their fortiﬁed camp, thereby leading Charles’s force
deeper into the trap by ‘refusing’ the centre and thereby allowing the
eastern Franks to carry out a double envelopment. Once Louis saw that
Charles’s men were fully into the trap and occupied with the Saxon
foot, he ordered the mounted troops on the two ﬂanks to carry out the
abovementioned double envelopment of Charles’s army, utterly surpris-
ing and then slaughtering the western troops.

Meginhard, true to his anti-Saxon bias, depicts the Saxon troops who

participated in the battle as territi, and Leyser accepts this characteriza-
tion as plain text and, therefore, as an accurate description of these
ﬁghting men.

116

But the true nature of the situation is made clear by

Meginhard’s statement that parumper terga verterunt, that is ‘they [the
Saxons] retreated for a short time’.

117

The crucial word here is parumper,

since it makes clear that the Saxons were not routed. To retreat ‘for a
short time’ is not consistent with turning one’s back, throwing down
one’s arms, and running from the ﬁeld. Although he wishes to depict
the Saxons in a negative light, Meginhard is still compelled by the
constraints of rhetorical plausibility to show that the Saxons engaged
in a ﬁghting withdrawal, which is one of the most tactically difﬁcult
manoeuvres in battle. That Louis trusted his Saxon troops to carry out
this manoeuvre indicates a very high level of conﬁdence in them. Far
from depicting the Saxons as inferior troops used badly, as Leyser
would have it, Meginhard, despite his hostility to them, makes clear in
his account of the battle of Andernach that these Saxons were well
trained and highly reliable.

Rather more subtle is Leyser’s next argument that following the

defeat and death of the Saxon duke Brun at the hands of the Danes in
880, the Saxons were only able to defeat the Danes with Frisian and
east Frankish help.

118

Leyser obscures the fact that the extant narrative

sources do not record the Saxons as being defeated by Northmen in the
period after 880. Indeed, as noted above, the Saxons are reported by the
Saxon-hostile author Meginhard to have gained a major triumph over
the Northmen in 885.

119

Moreover, as Leyser himself points out, in 891

Arnulf (d. 899) successfully deployed Saxons as well as east Franks
against an entrenched force of Northmen at the battle of the Dyle, a
campaign in which the Alemanni, long part of the Frankish kingdom,

116

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876; and Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 26.

117

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 876. The Latin expression terga vertere in a military context does not
mean to turn one’s back, but rather to retreat. The difference in meaning is crucial in a
military context since soldiers who have turned their backs cannot ﬁght, while soldiers facing
toward the enemy can, as in this case, carry out a ﬁghting withdrawal.

118

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 31.

119

Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 885.

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disgraced themselves by abandoning the royal army before the battle.

120

At a more fundamental level, Leyser fails to explain why the deployment
of regionally diverse military forces by Carolingian rulers is ipso facto proof
of the weakness of one of these units but not of the others. As shown
above, in the period before 880, Carolingian rulers routinely deployed
mixed regional forces against both the Slavs and the Northmen, drawing
on Thuringians, Saxons and east Franks, as well as the Slavic Obodrites.

Far from portraying a low military standing, a thorough reading of

the relevant narrative sources for the ninth century makes clear that the
duchy of Saxony provided Carolingian rulers from Charlemagne to
Arnulf with substantial and effective military forces for both offensive
campaigns, and for the defence of the frontiers. There is no question that
Saxon military forces occasionally suffered defeats, even substantial defeats,
at the hands of their enemies. The same, however, was true of the
Frankish military forces deployed by the Carolingians. Frankish forces
themselves, for example, even suffered major defeats at the hands of the
Saxons, as at the famous battle of the Süntel mountains in 782 when a
force of heavily armed mounted Franks was butchered by Saxon soldiers
deployed on foot.

121

Indeed, it should not be forgotten in the present

context that Charlemagne spent more than three decades in his effort
to subdue the Saxons. What is more important is the fact that for a period
of more than a century prior to the accession of Henry I, Carolingian rulers
relied on soldiers drawn from the Saxon duchy to ﬁght on their own and
in conjunction with other regionally based military units against a broad
range of enemies, and that these Saxon forces frequently were successful.

Early medieval military organization and the Saxon question

Being integrated into the Carolingian military system entailed the
organization of Saxon military resources into the basic tripartite struc-
ture that dominated the early medieval west on the continent and later
in Anglo-Saxon England.

122

In this context, it should be emphasized

120

Leyser, ‘Saxon Empire’, p. 29; and Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 891.

121

Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 782.

122

Both Saxony and Anglo-Saxon England were, in military terms, Carolingian successor states.
Concerning the Carolingian nature of Anglo-Saxon government, see two important articles
by James Campbell: ‘Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth
Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 25 (1975), pp. 39–54; and ‘The
Signiﬁcance of the Anglo-Norman State in the Administrative History of Western Europe’,
in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (eds), Histoire comparée de l’administration
(IVe–XXVIIe siècles) (Munich, 1980), pp. 117–34. Both of these studies have been reprinted
with additional notes in James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London and
Ronceverte, 1986). In this context, it is of no little importance that Asser’s biography of
Alfred owed much to Einhard’s life of Charlemagne. See M. Schutt, ‘The Literay Form
of Asser’s Vita Alfredi’, English Historical Review (1957), pp. 209–20, and the observations

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that Anglo-Saxon England beneﬁted from military instruction gained
through military advisers recruited in Saxony.

123

The obsequium of the

king along with the military households of his ﬁdeles were troops of the
highest military proﬁciency. The king’s obsequium, of course, was the
largest of all such military households, but these groups collectively
constituted the smallest of the three segments of the early medieval
military. Both lay and ecclesiastical magnates were required by the king,
who initially acquired royal power in the wake of the dissolution of
the Roman empire, to support troops on the basis of their wealth, and
the king mobilized these contingents as he needed them. The men who
served in these households, of course, were the professional soldiers
who had, in effect, replaced the Roman army in the west.

124

When

Widukind discusses Henry’s very powerful manus militum, he is refer-
ring to the duke’s obsequium.

The second level of military organization was composed of expedi-

tionary levies, i.e. men who had attained speciﬁc levels of landed and/
or moveable wealth, and who, on the basis of their possessions, were
required to do military service either in person and/or ﬁnd a substitute.

by M. Innis, ‘The Classical Tradition in the Carolingian Rennaisance: Ninth-Century
Encounters with Suetonius’, International Journal of Classical Tradition 3 (1997), pp. 265–82,
with regard to the importance of Suetonius to the writing of biography in early medieval
England. It also has been noted that the Anglo-Saxon view of Christendom was borrowed
from that of Charlemagne’s court. On this see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom
(Princeton, 1987), p. 8. Concerning the constitutional structure of the basic institutions of
military organization in the Frankish kingdoms, see B.S. Bachrach and C.R. Bowlus, ‘Heerwesen’,
in H. Beck et al. (eds), Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde (Berlin and New York,
2000), p. 14, and pp. 122–36; Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 51–83, and 287–312;
and T. Reuter, ‘The Recruitment of Armies in the Early Middle Ages: What Can We Know?’,
in A. Norgard Jorgensen and B.L. Clausen (eds), Military Aspects of Scandinavian Society in
a European Perspective, AD 1000 –1300 (Copenhagen, 1997), pp. 25–31. Concerning Anglo-
Saxon England, see C.W. Hollister, Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions on the Eve of the Norman
Conquest (Oxford, 1962). The institutional reconstruction by R. Abels, Lordship and Military
Organization in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley, 1988), has been rejected here because it relies
on the unsound notion of the Königsfreien. For a thoroughgoing critique of Abels, see Edward
J. Schoenfeld, ‘Anglo-Saxon Burhs and Continental Burgen: Early Medieval Fortiﬁcations in
Constitutional Perspective’, The Haskins Society Journal 6 (1994), pp. 49–66. Regarding the
failure of the arguments in favour of the Königsfreien, see T. Reuter, ‘The End of Carolingian
Military Expansion’, in Charlemagne’s Heir, p. 395, with the literature cited there. See also
the review of Abel’s book by B.S. Bachrach in Speculum 66 (1991), pp. 109–111.

123

King Alfred of Wessex, for example, gave preferment to a cleric named John, who had come
to England from Saxony and was widely recognized by his contemporaries as a man who was
very experienced in the ‘military arts’. The source for John’s wide reputation in military
matters is Asser, De rebus gestis Aelfredi, Ch. 27 (Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. William Henry
Stevenson, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1959)).

124

See Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 59–82. Reuter, ‘The Recruitment of Armies’, p. 33
gives substantial independent attention to mercenaries, rather than seeing them from an
institutional perspective as a temporary extension of a royal or magnate obsequium. J. France,
‘The Composition and Raising of the Armies of Charlemagne’, Journal of Medieval Military
History 1 (2002), pp. 66–8, criticizes Reuter for failing to recognize the important offensive
role played by what we have called here ‘select levies’ in the armies of the Carolingians.

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B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

If these men or women possessed more than minimum amounts of wealth
they were required to provide additional ﬁghting men for expeditionary
purposes consistent with their assets.

125

In regard to Anglo-Saxon England,

scholars have come to identify these levies as the ‘select fyrd ’ as, in
general, each man who possessed ﬁve hides of land was required to serve
personally or to provide a substitute.

126

In the Frankish kingdom, militia

troops, i.e. non-professionals, raised from this segment of the popula-
tion provided the bulk of the manpower for the large royal armies that
undertook the sieges of fortress cities such as Bourges, Pavia, and
Barcelona under the Carolingians.

127

When Widukind called attention

to the very large army (innumera exercitus) commanded by Duke Henry,
he was referring to Henry’s expeditionary forces of the select levy,
which probably were reinforced by both the king’s milites and the
military households of his ﬁdeles. The many Saxon units that served
various Carolingian kings were composed of such a combination of
forces, as discussed above, as well.

The third element of the military organization was the local levy,

called the ‘great fyrd ’ by specialists in Anglo-Saxon military history.
These forces were also a militia and were composed of all able-bodied
men, who lived in a particular locality, regardless of their legal status.
These men were required only to ﬁght in the defence of the locality in
which they lived. Such forces were the least well trained and least well
armed of the three elements of early medieval military organization.
They fought best from behind fortress walls.

128

When drawn into open

battle (bellum publicum) against well-trained and experienced ﬁghting
men, e.g. Vikings and Magyars, their effectiveness was greatly diminished
due to their lack of training.

With regard to the lack of capacity of such local levies to do battle

in the open ﬁeld, the chronicler Regino of Prüm, who died three years
after Henry assumed the ducal title in 912, explains the situation with
exceptional perceptiveness. Regino takes note of a Viking raiding party
that was plundering in the region of Prüm and indicates that a force of
local men who lacked armour (inermes) and horses, i.e. they were pedites,
was mobilized from the nearby ﬁelds and villages (ex agris et villis) into

125

Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 54–7, with the literature cited on pp. 289–94. In his
section dealing with ‘conscripts’ Reuter, ‘The Recruitment of Armies’, pp. 34–5, is reluctant
to make a sufﬁciently clear distinction between locally raised militia forces used for expeditionary
purposes and local militia forces used only for local defence, which are discussed below.

126

Hollister, Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions, pp. 38–102, where comparisons are made with the
Carolingian system and in addition note is taken of those who have resources of fewer than
ﬁve hides.

127

Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare, pp. 202–42, and pp. 365–76 for the notes.

128

Hollister, Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions, pp. 25–37; and Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare,
pp. 52–4, and pp. 288–9 for the notes.

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a single unit (unum agmen) to engage the Vikings. When this local levy,
which Regino admits was very large (innumera multitudo) advanced
against the Vikings, the latter, although greatly outnumbered, were not
frightened into retreat. Rather, they understood that because these
levies were an ignobilis vulgus and, as a result, untrained, i.e. disciplina
militari nudatum, they did not constitute a serious threat. Thus, the
forces engaged and the slaughter of the levies followed.

129

The Saxon duchy of the later ninth century and early tenth century,

i.e. before the accession of Henry I as duke in 912, possessed this
tripartite military organization. Moreover, as seen above, both the
obsequia of the magnates and the expeditionary levy were very effective
against a variety of enemies, including forces from both within and
from outside of the Frankish kingdom. The weak link in the military
organization in the Saxon duchy, as well as in other parts of east Francia
as bemoaned by Regino, noted above, were the local levies. When the
Magyars attacked Saxony in 924, Widukind makes clear, probably with
some exaggeration, that they moved through the countryside plundering
and burning the settled areas around urbes and oppida. He goes on to
emphasize, again with some exaggeration, that many monasteries were
destroyed and so many people were killed that the Magyars threatened
to depopulate the land.

130

It is in this context that Widukind emphasizes

that Henry’s forces that were supposed to be the ﬁrst line of defence, i.e.
the local levies, were insufﬁciently trained (they were rudus and insuetus) to
engage the Magyars in bellum publicum. As a result, they were not able to
protect the territory around the fortiﬁcations (urbes and oppida), mentioned
above. By contrast, Henry’s ﬁeld forces in 924, as noted earlier, not only
were up to the task of dealing with the Magyars in open battle, but had
defeated one enemy army and captured a prominent leader during this
invasion in 924. In short, the local levies had failed, not the Saxon ﬁeld army.

King Henry recognized that the Saxon local levies, as illustrated by

the rudus and insuetus troops from the area of the stronghold of Werla, were
unable to provide an adequate initial defence against the Magyars, much
in the same way as the local men from the Prüm area had failed against the
Vikings. This was because they were untrained. Thus, Henry decided to
reform this third element of the Saxon military organization. Indeed,

129

Regino, Chronica, s.a. 882.

130

Widukind, Res gestae I.32. In this context, there is no reason to believe that these lightly
armed Magyar horsemen actually laid siege to the urbes and oppida. Rather, their operations
must be seen to have been against undefended homes and other assets in the countryside, e.g.
the monasteries speciﬁcally mentioned by Widukind. It was not until the campaign that
ended in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955 that the Magyars recruited large numbers of foot
soldiers and artillery men to undertake the siege of major fortiﬁcations. See on this point,
B.S. Bachrach, ‘Magyar-Ottonian Warfare: à propos a new Minimalist Interpretation’, Francia
13 (2000), pp. 211–30.

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following his discussion of the levies at Werla and immediately upon
resuming discussion of Saxon military matters, Widukind takes up the
question of Henry’s reform, i.e. the establishment of the agrarii milites, as
the logical result of the inferiority of the rudus and insuetus locals at Werla.

131

Henry’s reforms in this aspect of Saxon military organization were very

successful and were maintained diligently by his successors. Thus, for
example, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (1009–18), the great chronicler
of the Saxon dynasty from the early eleventh century, devoted consid-
erable attention to the successful efforts of Henry I and his successors
down to King Henry II (1002–24) to maintain a system of frontier
fortiﬁcations defended, in large part, by men of the local levy whom he
consistently refers to as urbani.

132

Thietmar draws attention, for example,

to Henry I’s construction of the fortress of Meißen in 928 to protect
an important crossing point over the River Elbe.

133

In addition to his

fortiﬁcation of Meißen, Thietmar credits Henry I with providing the city
of Merseburg with a new stone wall and with building a series of other
fortresses (urbes) ad salutem regni.

134

Following Henry I’s reforms, the

local levies that protected these urbes proved very effective in defending
them. Thietmar notes, for example, that the population of the fortress
of Püchen, located on the left bank of the River Mulde north-west of
the Wurzen, in modern Saxony, provided a safe refuge for a unit of
Henry I’s royal troops that had been defeated by an overwhelming force
of invading Magyars.

135

Thietmar makes clear that it was a local defence

force that manned the walls at Püchen by describing the defenders there
as urbani rather than as members of a presidio which is the author’s
standard term for designating a garrison of professional soldiers. In
return for their loyal service, Henry I rewarded the defenders at Püchen
in such a manner that, according to Thietmar, their descendants enjoyed
greater honour than the other people of the region (comprovinciales) up
to the present day, i.e. up to the time when Thietmar was writing.

136

Thietmar similarly emphasized the role that local levies played in

defending fortiﬁcations in his own day. In 1012, following the death of
Archbishop Walthard of Magdeburg, the Polish duke Boleslav Chrobry
(992–1025) took advantage of the disturbed political situation on the

131

It should be noted that Widukind inserts two chapters dealing with religious matters between
his discussion of the troops at Werla and the subsequent discussion of the agrarii milites.

132

Thietmar, Chronicon III.21 and III.23. In this context, see David S. Bachrach, ‘Memory,
Epistemology, and the Writing of Early Medieval Military History: The Example of Bishop
Thietmar of Merseburg (1009–1018)’, Viator 38 (forthcoming, 2007).

133

Thietmar, Chronicon I.16.

134

Thietmar, Chronicon I.18.

135

Thietmar, Chronicon I.15. The date of this battle is not known despite Trillmich’s suggestion
(p. 21) that it took place in 924.

136

Thietmar, Chronicon I.15.

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frontier to launch an attack on the fortress of Lebusa, located 140 kilometres
east of Merseburg.

137

The stronghold was defended, in part, by a garrison

composed of professional soldiers. However, the main body of defenders
consisted of the urbani of Lebusa. Unfortunately for the defenders,
it appears from Thietmar’s account that Boleslav Chrobry decided to
employ overwhelming force to storm Lebusa. Although the duke paid
a high butcher’s bill with, according to Thietmar, some 500 men killed,
the assault was successful and lead to the capture of the fortress as well
as the surviving defenders.

138

The book of the dead (necrology) from

Merseburg likewise includes a reference to the numerous defenders who
bravely gave their lives defending Lebusa rather than running away.

139

Conclusions

Following the completion of Charlemagne’s conquest of Saxony early
in the ninth century, the armed forces of the region were integrated more
or less gradually into the military organization of the Frankish kingdom.

140

Throughout the greater part of the ninth century, Saxon military forces were
mobilized by various Carolingian rulers for expeditionary purposes in
various parts of the Frankish regna and beyond its frontiers. Indeed, military
units mustered in Saxony were required to serve as far aﬁeld as Spain and
Italy. As we have seen above, Saxon armies, composed of the obsequia of
the magnates and various elements drawn from the select levies, which were
mobilized for expeditionary purposes, very frequently were successful against
whatever enemies they faced. Contrary to Leyser’s view, Saxon military
forces under Carolingian leadership cannot be considered second rate.

When Henry I succeeded his father as duke in 912, he is reported to

have commanded a strong ( fortis) force of milites. Prior to his assump-
tion of the kingship in 919, Henry further augmented this elite force of
soldiers by providing some of his milites with estates that he conﬁscated
from the archbishop of Mainz and other magnates who were used by
King Conrad I to harass the Saxon duke. In this context, it is important
to emphasize that each miles, who held twelve mansi, was required by

137

Thietmar, Chronicon VI.80.

138

Thietmar, Chronicon VI.80. For additional examples of the local militia (urbani ) defending
fortiﬁcations, see Thietmar, Chronicon V.21; VI.33; VI.34; and VII.48.

139

Die Totenbücher von Merseburg, Magdeburg und Lüneburg, ed. G. Althoff and J. Wollasch,
MGH Libri Memoriales et Necrologia, n.s. 2 (Hanover, 1983), fol. 5r, p. 11, records that many
ﬁghting men were annihilated (multi peremientes [sic]) at Lebusa.

140

A full history of Saxon military organization through the end of the Ottonian period is
a desideratum. Various works, such as Holtzmann, Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit;
B. Scherff, ‘Studien zum Heer der Ottonen und der ersten Salier (919–1056)’, dissertation,
Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität (1985); K. Leyser, ‘Early Medieval Warfare’; and T. Reuter,
‘Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare’, in M. Keen (ed.), Medieval Warfare: A History
(Oxford, 1999), pp. 13–35, provide some useful insights but a complete picture is lacking.

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B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

legislation that governed the entire Frankish kingdom, of which Saxony
clearly was an integral part in military terms, to appear at the muster
with a war horse and full armour.

141

Henry, like the previous Saxon

dukes who served the reges Francorum, inherited a probatus force of
heavily armed mounted troops (equites armati ).

As duke, Henry was in a position to call upon his ﬁdeles, both lay

and ecclesiastical, who were settled in the Saxon duchy and those parts
of Thuringia that were under ducal control, to provide auxilium by
placing their obsequia under his command. In this context, speciﬁc
mention has already been made of the military households of Thietmar
and Reginbern, who used their armed forces with continuing success to
carry out ducal military policies regarding the Slavs and Danes, respec-
tively. Of course, when Henry became king he acquired all of the great
men in east Francia as his ﬁdeles, by oath, and, at least in principle, their
obsequia of heavily armed mounted troops were subject to his authority,
in the same manner as were the fortiﬁcations of their duchies or lesser
jurisdictions. As seen above, the dukes of both Swabia and Bavaria
initially sought to resist Henry’s authority but as soon as he brought his
large army into their territories, they recognized his ditio and placed
both their military forces and strongholds under his command.

In addition to his own military household and those of his ﬁdeles,

both within the Saxon duchy and throughout east Francia, Henry as
king was able to mobilize a large exercitus of select levies both from the
duchy and the remainder of the kingdom. Elements of King Henry’s
army, i.e. royal and magnate obsequia combined with select levies, operating
in the ﬁeld not only decisively defeated the Magyars in 924 but won a
series of victories against various peoples, including the Bohemians,
Abodrites, Redarii, Lotharingians, and the forces of west Francia, in the
period prior to the Magyar invasion of 933. Indeed, by the time of the
battle of Riade in 933, Henry’s milites and his exercitus of expeditionary
levies had been winning major victories for more than two decades.

The one weakness that has been identiﬁed regarding Henry’s military

forces, at least in regard to the Saxon duchy, and especially on the
frontiers, were the local levies. These forces, as was the case in most
other parts of the Frankish kingdom, were ill trained and poorly armed.

141

On this point, see H.M. Cam, Local Government in Francia and England (London, 1912),
pp. 127–37; F.L. Ganshof, ‘Charlemagne’s Army’, in Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans.
B. Lyon and M. Lyon (Providence, RI, 1968), pp. 59–68, 151–61, originally published as
‘L’Armée sous les Carolingiens’, Settimane di Studio de Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto medioevo, 2
vols (Spoleto, 1968), I, pp. 109–30, with the citation to the English text (pp. 59–61); and Bachrach,
‘Military Lands’, pp. 109–12. See, for example, Capitularia regum Francorum I, ed. Alfred
Boretius (Hanover, 1883), no. 44, c. 6, ‘De armatura in exercitu, sicut antea in alio capitulare
commendavimus, ita servetur, et insuper omnis homo de duodecim mansis bruneam habeat;
qui vero bruniam habens et eam secum non tullerit, omne beneﬁcium cum brunia pariter perdat.’

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Saxon military revolution

219

It would seem to have become clear to Henry that the local levies of
the Saxon duchy, i.e. the ﬁrst line of defence, were unable to stop the
Magyars in 924 because they were rudus and insuetus with regard to the
demands of combat in the ﬁeld (bellum publicum). As a result, Henry
undertook a signiﬁcant military reform that saw the reorganization of
these forces as agrarii milites and the construction or refurbishment of
extensive fortiﬁcations. This reform was very successful, and Henry’s
successors of the Saxon dynasty into the early eleventh century relied
heavily on the local levies on the frontiers to keep the duchy safe.

There are both myths and realities with regard to the Saxon military

revolution. One myth, effectively propagated by the work of Karl
Leyser and his scholarly successors for more than a quarter century is
that the Saxon duke and his ﬁdeles lacked a fortis manus of heavily
armed mounted troops prior to c.924. The reality is that the integration
of Saxony into the Frankish kingdom resulted in the Saxon military
organization conforming to Carolingian regulations. In short, if we are
to consider the conversion of the Saxon way of war to the Carolingian
way of war a revolution, this change occurred during the earlier ninth
century. A second myth, also propagated by Leyser, is that the Saxon
military forces in the ninth and early tenth centuries were second rate.
The reality is that forces mobilized from within the duchy were as good
as any others in the Frankish kingdom.

Henry I should not be deprived, however, of credit for having under-

taken a revolutionary step that greatly improved the ﬁghting capacity of
Saxon defence forces on the frontiers. Widukind, as far as can be established,
is correct in attributing to Henry the administrative reforms that resulted
in the creation of the agrarii milites, who were to play a key role in defend-
ing the Saxon frontier throughout the tenth century and beyond. Henry’s
equally successful efforts to build strongholds along the frontier were
less revolutionary, as the notion of a ﬁxed border defence system had been
an important part of the strategic thinking of the west since the later
Roman empire and had been followed effectively by the Carolingians.

142

University of Minnesota
University of New Hampshire

142

Concerning the continuity between Carolingian and Ottonian fortiﬁcations, see A.K. Hömberg,
‘Probleme der Reichsgutforschung in Westfalen mit Zwei Karten’, Blätter für deutsche Landes-
geschichte 96 (1960), pp. 1–21, especially pp. 15–21 where he identiﬁes at least twenty royal
fortiﬁcations sustained in southern Westphalia by the kings of east Francia and Germany
during the ninth and tenth centuries; and Walter Melzer, ‘Karolingisch-ottonische Stadt-
befestigungen in der “Germania libera”’, in Gabriele Isenberg and Barbara Scholkmann (eds),
Die Befestigung der mittelalterlichen Stadt (Cologne, 1997), pp. 61–77, who emphasizes that there
is substantial physical continuity between Carolingian and Ottonian fortiﬁcations, particularly
in the region of Westphalia.

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220

B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

Appendix

The peace treaty of 924

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the supposed payment of
tribute to the Magyars by Henry I in an effort to secure a period of truce
that he could use to develop his military defences in Saxony. This putative
effort to ‘purchase’ a truce has been interpreted as the time frame during
which the Saxon military revolution took place. However, Widukind’s
comments regarding the gifts given by Henry I have been misinterpreted
by scholars. Henry did not pay tribute to the Magyars. Rather, he was
giving gifts to the Magyar emissaries in the time-honoured tradition of
western diplomacy dating back to the Roman empire.

Traditionally among German historians, the munera given by Henry I
to the Magyar envoys in 924 and in the nine years thereafter have been
regarded as a tribute that was intended to purchase peace because
Henry believed he could not defeat the Magyars in the open ﬁeld.

143

However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical
situation and Widukind’s terminology. Widukind makes a very clear
distinction between munera, which are voluntary gifts, and tributum,
which is an obligatory payment. He notes, for example (I.34), that under
Henry I the Saxon people went from being tribute-payers (tributaria)
to being free (libera), following the end of Frankish/Carolingian rule.
Similarly, according to Widukind (I.35), following Henry’s capture of
Prague, he made the Bohemians pay tribute (tributaria). In the same
vein, Widukind (I.36) notes that a series of Slavic peoples, including the
Abodrites, Wilzi, Hevelli, Daleminzi and Redarii were forced by Henry
I to pay tribute after he had conquered them. In each case noted here,
the word tributum is associated with the payments made by a conquered
people. As noted above, Henry provided munera to the Magyar ambassadors
after his forces had inﬂicted a serious defeat on the Magyars. Thus, the
Saxons can in no way be seen in this context as a defeated people
required to pay tribute. Rather, it was customary from the later Roman
empire onward for a great ruler to provide gifts to departing envoys if
the former had been satisﬁed with the results of the embassy.

144

It is also important to emphasize that Widukind, in noting that the treaty

remained ﬁrm for nine years (I.32), is stating a chronological fact, not

143

See in this context, for example, Holtzmann, Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit, p. 93; and
G. Althoff and H. Keller, Heinrich I und Otto der Große: Neubeginn auf karolingischem Erbe,
2 vols, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 1994), I, p. 89.

144

A. Gillet, Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411–533 (Cambridge,
2003), pp. 256–8. Regarding the Carolingians, in this context, see, for example, Annales de
Saint-Bertin, ed. F. Grat, et al. (Paris, 1964), s.a. 863 and s.a. 876. For examples of the treatment
of envoys who did not succeed in pleasing the ruler, see ibid., s.a. 870 and s.a. 873.

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Saxon military revolution

221

suggesting that the peace has a nine-year limit. The normal word for truce
is treuga, and he does not use this word in this context.

145

A second point

needs to be made here with regard to the treaty of peace and the munera
that Henry gave to the Magyar envoys as discussed in Widukind, I.38.
Those scholars who believe that Henry paid tribute to the Magyars in 924
traditionally misinterpret the withholding of munera by King Henry in 932,
and see it as a cause for war. This view is fundamentally at odds with our
understanding of early medieval diplomatic protocol as noted above. The
withholding of munera from envoys cannot be understood as the cause of
a conﬂict. Rather, the withholding is to be interpreted as a result of the
failure of the embassy to maintain cordial relations between the two parties.

In dealing with the rupture of the pax that had been imposed by

Henry I on the Hungarians in 924, Widukind presents the king as
rousing the ire of his ﬁdeles against the Magyars through a speech
presented at a royal assembly.

146

In particular, Widukind presents Henry

defending his heavy taxation (expoliare) of the Saxons by insisting that
the funds that he had raised in the duchy by these means had, in fact,
gone to enrich the Magyars. Henry added further that in the future it
would be necessary for him to tax the church and clergy in order to
further enrich these pagans. In this context, Widukind, whose agenda
is obvious, is trying to defend Henry’s overt effort to lead his people to
war, i.e. to break the treaty of 924, rather than to maintain the peace
as was the warrant of a good Christian king.

Two parts of this speech, which Widukind obviously constructed from

whole cloth, are worth noting. First, as intimated above, Henry’s desire
to undertake an offensive war was a fundamental violation of the obliga-
tions of a Christian monarch to maintain the peace. Second, Widukind
places in Henry’s mouth the justiﬁcation that if he did not go to war,
he would have to tax both the church and the clergy very heavily. Such
taxation, at least since the time of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (d. 882),
was regarded as undesirable by the Frankish church. Indeed, Hincmar used
Charles Martel as the ‘poster boy’ for a bad ruler because of his supposed
widespread use of church lands to support his military forces.

147

Thus,

145

With regard to the use of the technical term treuga for truce, see, for example, Widukind’s elder
contemporary Flodoard, Les Annales de Flodoard, ed. Philippe Lauer (Paris, 1905), passim. Widukind,
Res gestae I.38, makes clear that after nine years had passed, the Magyars violated the peace.

146

See Widukind, Res gestae I.38.

147

With respect to Charles Martel’s reputation as a despoiler of the church, see U. Nonn, ‘Das
Bild Karl Martells in mitteralterlichen Quellen’, in J. Jarnut, U. Nonn and M. Richter (eds),
Karl Martell in seiner Zeit (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 9–21; and P. Fouracre, The Age of Charles
Martel (New York, 2000), who summarizes the state of the question. Concerning Hincmar’s
efforts to limit royal access to ecclesiastical resources, see J. Nelson, ‘The Church’s Military
Service in the Ninth Century: A Contemporary View?’, Studies in Church History 20 (1983),
pp. 15–30 and reprinted in J. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London,
1986), pp. 117–32; and Bachrach, ‘Military Lands’, pp. 113–15.

Early Medieval Europe

  ()

222

B.S. Bachrach and D. Bachrach

by claiming that Henry I was faced with the unfortunate choice of
taxing the church heavily or going to war, the latter is supposedly the
more desirable alternative.

In addition to using a variety of topoi, e.g. taxation of the church

and just war, to justify Henry’s intention to break the peace of 924, as
well as the free/subjection motif, the entire economic framework that
Widukind imposes on the situation is factually inaccurate.

148

It is clear

from Widukind’s own account (I.35–37), as noted above, that a series
of Slavic peoples, including the Abodrites, Wilzi, Hevelli, Daleminzi
and Redarii were forced by Henry I to pay tribute after he had con-
quered them. Henry I also had access to a substantial source of wealth
through the ongoing exploitation of the silver mines in the Harz moun-
tains.

149

In short, Henry was not in need of vast sums of money either

to enrich the Magyars or for any other purpose. Whether Henry, in
fact, imposed heavy taxation on the Saxons and/or on the church is a
matter well beyond the scope of this study.

148

With respect to the importance of the freedom/subjection topos in Widukind’s text, see
Beumann, ‘Imperator Romanorum’, pp. 214–30, here p. 228.

149

On this latter point, see L. Klappauf, ‘Zur Archäologie des Harzes im frühen Mittelalter: Eine
Skizze zur Forschungsstand und Aussagemöglichkeiten’, in M. Brandt and A. Eggebrecht
(eds), Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, 2 vols (Hildesheim, 1993), I,
pp. 249–57.

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