PREFACE
by François Bougard
The Kingdom of Italy during the Carolingian period does not stand out certainly as an area of prolific historical text production. For instance, the writing of annals, which was so diffuse north of the Alps, failed to gain any popularity in Italy, and the entire period passed as if not only the court of Pavia, but all areas of Carolingian Italy simply lacked any identity in terms of the writing of history. Between Paul the Deacon (ca. 720s-ca. 799) and the works ot the late ninth century (the chronicle of Andreas of Bergamo and the so-called Small book on the imperial power in the city of Rome, probably composed in Spoleto), the absence of historical production is unmistakable. We know that a people without problems is often a people without a history, and one of the reasons for this rarity may simply be attributed to the relative state of domestic peace within the Kingdom of Italy, at least until the «great distress» that followed the death of Emperor Louis II (875). Another explanation might be the demand for historical writing of the Church on the borders of the Kingdom of Italy. In Ravenna and in Naples the deeds of local bishops were narrated. Rome, in particular, experienced its own cultural "renaissance" in the ninth century and attracted the brilliant scholar Anastasius Bibliothecarius, who proved capable of composing letters for the Frankish emperor and who placed his talent as a historian at the service of the Book of the Pontiffs.
Given this state of affairs, we must make use of everything that we can lay our hands on. We should, of course, utilize the "major" works, but we should also employ anonymous texts and the less extensive works, both those in prose and those in verse, which are often mentioned only in passing, as if no more than a cursory glance were sufficient to extract from them the scanty information that they contain.
The texts edited and translated by Luigi Andrea Berto constitute a welcome invitation to re-explore this literature and place it in an appropriate context. They cast a light on two distinct periods. First comes the happy reign of Pippin (781-810), who governed Italy at the orders of his father Charlemagne. The History of the Lombards of Gotha’s codex (hereafter HLCG), which is in no way derived from Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, but has been completely out-shown by it in terms of popularity, first emphasizes that the Lombard conquest of Italy was the will of God, and then goes on to clearly state how decisive the transition to Carolingian rule proved to be: «The rule of the Lombards ended and the Kingdom of Italy began.» But continuity from one regime to the next was assured by the production of laws whose corollary is justice (let us keep in mind the fact that this chronicle occupies three folios of a manuscript, and the rest of that manuscript is juridical in nature). Laws were issued by the Lombard King, Rothari, by Charlemagne, and then by Pippin, under whose rule "law” was synonymous with «abundance and quietness.»
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The poem King Pippin’s Victory oner the Abars, on the other hand, describes an episode that occurred outside Italy. It sings Pippin’s praises and points out that his reign was also notable for the victorious campaign of 796 against the Avars, hailed as the submission of the pagan world to the armies of the Catholic king, who was buttressed by Saint Peter. Both the HLCG and the poem were produced at Pippin’s court, which was the sole court until the rule of King Berengar († 924) to boast a full-fledged literary existence, both in terms of original creations and of the transcription of existing works.
The other two texts offered here, written three-quarters of a century later, do not possess the same degree of unity. Certainly, the chronicle by the priest Andreas of Bergamo and the Rythmus on Emperor Louis’s Captivity both feature Louis II as their main character. But the first work has a largely local focus, extending, at most, to include the interests of the Church of Milan, and its links to the court are only represented by the accounts of those who took part in the campaigns in southern Italy in the 860s and 870s. The Rythmus, on the other hand, seems to have been a product of the milieu of Benevento, which was much more productive in literary terms than its northern Italian counterparts. Its aim is far narrower and more specific. A careful and accurate translation provides a new interpretation of this text. Rather than seeing it as a parody of the misadventures of Louis II, who was imprisoned for a month in Benevento immediately after he conquered Bari in 871 and freed it from Muslim control, why not view it as a text composed on the occasion of the embassy of the southern Italian Lombards, who went to Louis II’s court in 872 asking for aid against the Saracen threat, entreating a sovereign who had recently been betrayed, but who had been able to reacquire full political legitimacy through a new imperial coronation?
The assembling of texts in verse with works that are more traditionally examined by historians, who are often all too willing to overlook the existence of poetry, is one of the many merits of this volume. Among those merits, the most notable is how light is cast on the many ways in which the events of Carolingian Italy were narrated. Another considerable merit is found in the substantial challenge involved in translation. Translations are frequently considered with a degree of condescension by purists. Those purists are wrong on this point, because it is not merely a matter of rescuing the entire humanist education as well as popularizing texts that are increasingly beyond the understanding of readers who have been failed by questionable education at the primary, the secondary, and the university levels. Translation is also key to a better understanding and, therefore, a better utilization of sources by historians. Luigi Andrea Berto has been carrying this task forward for some time and with success with some Venetian and Cassinese texts. We all owe him a considerable debt of gratitude for his gift of these works.