Bachrach, David S., The Benefices of Counts and the Fate of the Comital Office in Carolingian East Francia and Ottonian Germany

Abstract

Abstract The long-standing historiographical controversy about the nature of the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany has turned on the same set of questions for more than a century: over whom did the count exercise jurisdiction, what was the basis of count's jurisdiction, and what was the source of the material assets that allowed counts to perform their duties? Left out of these discussions, however, has been the related problem of the control exercised by the king over the assets attached to the comital office, denoted variously as the res de comitatu, the count's ministerium, or simply the comitatus. The following study examines this question from the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (814–840) through the death of Emperor Henry II (1002–1024), and concludes that the Carolingian and Ottonian rulers maintained tight control over the fiscal assets assigned to counts, and were able to recover them and reassign them as the royal government saw fit. This conclusion is at odds with much of the scholarship on the comital office in East Francia and Ottonian Germany that presents counts holding erstwhile fiscal assets in allodial tenure and the de facto transformation of the comital office into a hereditary possession.