15 - West Francia: the kingdom

Summary

the tenth century was crucial in the evolution of the west Frankish kingdom. Whereas in 898 its future was uncertain, with either reabsorption into a larger empire or disintegration into smaller units clearly possible, by 1031 it was firmly on the map, albeit with ill-defined frontiers and a debatable political character. From the northernmost tip of Flanders to the Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the eastern frontier of the duchy of Burgundy, only one king, Robert II, was recognised. And time had weakened the potential alternative configurations. With hindsight, therefore, we can detect in the course of the tenth century the increasing cohesion of a unit that was later to emerge on the European stage as one of the great national monarchies.

But to contemporaries this shadowy entity was a largely irrelevant abstraction, evident chiefly in the use of regnal years for dating charters. In the real world they conceived of kings as personal rulers, their authority co-extensive with their presence, while regnum, the term which in other contexts is translated ‘kingdom’, they applied to the act of ruling, and thus to a wide variety of political and semi-political authorities. They had no vocabulary for describing the area in which Robert II was recognised as king; nor would they have thought of it as a unit – ‘west Francia’ is a historian’s abstraction. Worse, they had no word for the lands over which the last Carolingians and the early Capetians exercised political authority: Francia in tenth- or early eleventh-century sources was defined by the past, not the present. It meant either the area north of the Loire in which Franks were thought to have settled in the early middle ages, or the area between the Seine and the Lotharingian border that had once been part of the Austrasian kingdom. It did not describe a political hegemony.