East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective ed. by Stefan Esders et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective ed. by Stefan Esders et al. Scott G. Bruce East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 360. ISBN: 978-1107187153 This volume comprises twenty-one essays originally presented in 2014 as part of a joint German-Israeli project examining the Merovingian kingdoms in the context of the Mediterranean world. Like many conference proceedings, the contents of this collection range in quality and relevance to the volume's theme, but the arc and aggregate of the book suggests that the Merovingians had "complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate" (3). Far from isolated in their western European territories, the Merovingians benefitted from commerce of all kinds—material, personal, intellectual, and spiritual—that left its mark on the archaeological and literary record. The book has five parts. Part One ("Expanding Political Horizons") features three contributions. Jörg Drauschke surveys the archaeological evidence for material imports from the eastern Mediterranean in Merovingian graves from the sixth and seventh centuries, including textiles, jewelry, and silver items, which "points to patterns of continuous exchange and trade" (31), even when the historical record is otherwise mute about contact this period. Eastern connections are tangential in Yaniv Fox's article, which treats Burgundian foreign policy in the early sixth century, but they return in Helmut Reimitz's study of Frankish strategies of political legitimization, a process informed by interaction with other Mediterranean polities, especially Byzantium. Part Two ("Patterns of Intensification: The 580s") presents a potpourri of studies tethered to the notion that the late sixth century witnessed an intensification of contact between the Merovingian kingdoms and foreign polities. Phillip Wynn explores evidence for the importation to the west of a specific feature of the Christianized culture of war adopted by the Byzantines: the practice of carrying saints' relics into battle. Wolfram Drews and Benjamin Fourlas examine textual and archaological evidence for Merovingian military activity in Visigothic Spain and Greater Syria, respectively, while Andreas Fischer argues that the distribution [End Page 247] of Byzantine gold in the western kingdoms in the late sixth century was part of a strategy of political destabilization that "split the upper strata of Merovingian society in a rivalry between kings and magnates" (126). Part Three ("The Pope as a Mediterranean Player") features four papers on the bishop of Rome as a broker between east and west in this period. Papal letters are particularly revealing. Sebastian Scholz mines the Epistolae Arelatenses to uncover the networks of communication connecting the pope, the bishop of Arles, the Frankish king, and the Byzantine emperor during the Three Chapters Controversy, while a letter from Pope Martin to the missionary bishop Amandus allows Charles Mériaux to speculate about the channels through which the pontiff obtained information about eastern affairs on the eve of the Lateran Synod of 649. Hagiography also gives up its secrets in this section, as Laury Sarti examines a digression in the late seventh-century Life of Eligius of Noyon that preserves oral testimony from a traveller from the east concerning Pope Martin's detention in Constantinople and death in exile. Lastly, Rosamond McKitterick argues that the so-called Cononian epitome of the Liber pontificalis (up to Pope Conon, who died in 685) preserved in Paris BnF lat. 2123 synergized with conciliar texts in this manuscript to provide a framework "within which the statements of Eastern church councils as well as definitions of the bishops' diverse responsibilities … are to be understood" (183). Part Four ("Religious and Cultural Exchange") presents four articles, the standout of which is Yitzak Hen's recuperation of Defensor of Ligugé's often overlooked Liber scintillorum as a conduit for the transmission of snippets of Greek patristics to western Europe. Provocative but not conclusive are Galit Noga-Banai's article on the influence of eastern architecture on Radegund's chapel of the Holy Cross at Poitiers and Jamie Kreiner...