The Costs of Fortress Construction in Tenth-Century Germany: The Case of Hildagsburg

Abstract

It is generally recognized that the Ottonian kings of Germany (919-1024) were powerful. However, there is a great deal of controversy among specialists in the history of the early medieval German kingdom regarding the basis of this power. One school of thought holds that rulers such as Otto I (936-973) ruled rather than governed, and were able to use their sacral authority to mobilize the secular and particularly ecclesiastical magnates of the German kingdom to do their bidding. Another school of thought raises the possibility that the Ottonian kings utilized the administrative inheritance from their Carolingian predecessors to govern Germany in manner consistent with earlier states, which made extensive use of the written word among other administrative technologies. This study is intended to demonstrate the enormous resources that were deployed by the Ottonian kings to construct hundreds of fortifications, principally along the eastern frontiers of the German kingdom. The concomitant necessity of mobilizing vast numbers of workers as well as food and supplies point to the advanced administrative capacities of the royal government under the Ottonians and consequently the maintenance of a Carolingian-style administration during the long tenth century.