Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages by Michael McCormick (review)

Abstract

Medieval Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Critical edition and translation of the original text by Michael McCormick. [Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Humanities.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Distrib. Harvard University Press. 2011. Pp. xxii, 287. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-88-402363-0.)If Michael McCormick's monumental Origins of the European Economy (New York, 2001) decisively extended the traditionally short-sighted horizons of histori- ans of the early-medieval West to hazy new distances, his new book sharpens our focus with brilliant precision onto the trans-Mediterranean ambition of a single regime-the most important of the period-at the court of Charlemagne. The Basel roll is a parchment rescued from a book-binding and preserving three documents that, as McCormick demonstrates with forensic skill, constitute the greatest addition in decades to our source base for Charlemagne's rule. The Breve text (as McCormick christens it) enumerates the personnel of the religious houses of Jerusalem and its immediate environs; the Memorial document surveys religious houses in the rest of the Holy Land and gives architectural statistics for many of them; and the Expenditures document, of which the roll preserves just the first three lines, lists the annual spending of the patriarch of Jerusalem. In an exemplary piece of historical scholarship, McCormick vindicates these texts from the doubts that have surrounded them until now-doubts that, along with a woefully inadequate standard edition, have led generations of historians to overlook their significance. He shows that the roll is an authentic-although, as it survives, partialcopy of documents resulting from Charlemagne's desire to estimate precisely the funds required to repair the Holy Land's churches and monasteries. It was drawn up in the period 801-10, very possibly in 808 following the return of an embassy to the east and before meetings at Aachen in 809-the council that debated the Filioque controversy-and 810-at which the dispatch of funds for the restoration of churches at Jerusalem was discussed.The first part of the book presents and analyzes the texts' evidence for the condition of the linguistically and ethnically diverse Christian community in the Holy Land at this time. Successive chapters outline the finances and staffing of the churches in the Holy Land. Judicious comparisons then reveal similarities between East and West (for instance, in the proportion of women religious), but more significant differences: a greater emphasis on monasticism in both Palestine and Byzantium, but, conversely, the much greater size of the major monasteries in Francia relative to both other places. …