SOURCE: Dutton, Paul Edward. “An Introduction to Einhard.” In Charlemagne's Courtier: The Complete Einhard, pp. xi-xli. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Dutton explores the characteristics of Einhard the man, not limited only to his writing of the Life of Charlemagne, and considers him as courtier, poet, theologian, and the author of Translation and Miracles.]

Einhard and Charlemagne have traveled through history together, at least as we have always imagined them, the little biographer and his towering subject. Their relationship has always struck observers, including Einhard himself, as that of a nurturing father and his adopted son. But it would do no harm for us to scratch a little at the varnish that lies thick and yellowing over this familiar portrait. Beneath it the searcher may come upon another image, the one that too often lies hidden behind the figure of Charlemagne himself, even in the title of this collection of readings. The adventurous reader may wish, in fact, to reverse the process, to consider whether s/he ever sees Charlemagne at all or only Einhard's particular act of remembering him.

But, just as it is imperative for students to assess Charlemagne independently of Einhard's account, it is also important to try to take the measure of Einhard apart from Charlemagne. That is not to say that one can ever be fully understood without the other, but the whole of Einhard's life was not encompassed by Charlemagne. Virtually all his writing was done after Charlemagne died in early 814. His surviving compositions neatly cover the last twenty-five years of his life and his career as a lay abbot and man of property dates from Louis the Pious's time as well.

His noble lineage came from his parents, Einhard and Engilfrit, who held property near the Main River in eastern Francia [see 1.14 and 3.6 …]. Einhard may have been their eldest or only child and was probably born around 770 not long after Charlemagne became king. His parents sent him to be educated at the monastery of Fulda …, perhaps, as has been suggested, because his small size made it unlikely that he could take up a military career. At Fulda he learned Latin and immersed himself in the Bible and the classics. He wrote out six charters while resident at Fulda, three of them dated to the period between 788 and 791 [3.1-6]. Einhard was already in his early 20s when the abbot of Fulda, Baugulf, to whom Charlemagne sent his famous letter on educational reform [see Carolingian Civilization (Paul Edward Dutton, ed.) 13.7], apparently recommended him to Charlemagne's attention as a learned young man who would be useful at court [see 1.14 …]. Given the king's drive to improve official literacy within the kingdom, Charlemagne and his court must have been on the lookout for excellent and energetic officials in order to extend and improve the workings of the palace and the administration of the kingdom. There was also a standing need to replace those court officials and schoolmasters who had already departed.

When Einhard appeared at court around 791-92, Charlemagne's first great collection of scholars was already dissolving. Alcuin had been at court for a decade, but he was to depart for Tours in 796. Paulinus of Aquileia was gone by 787, and had been preceded home by another Italian, Paul the Deacon. Even Peter of Pisa was likely gone for good by the time Einhard arrived. The new court circle of Charlemagne was dominated by Angilbert, Theodulf of Orléans, and Alcuin's own students, men like Fridugis and the poet Modoin.

Charlemagne's court must have been very near the pinnacle of its vigor and accomplishment in the 790s when Einhard arrived. It was an exciting time to be a courtier. The Avars had finally been conquered in 795-96 and the treasure from their Great Ring fueled the new-found prosperity of the Carolingians. Einhard may never have been a warrior, but he slipped easily into the life of a courtier. He was assigned a variety of roles that made him an exceedingly useful and prompt presence at court.

The portrait of Einhard drawn by his contemporaries in these early years is consistent and fond. Both Alcuin and Theodulf characterized him as small and energetic, though the one seems to have done so with more love than the other [1.3 and 1.6]. Theodulf's relationship with Einhard, as with so many others, may have been strained by his sharp wit and aggressive nature [1.7]. He complained that Einhard, on occasion, avoided him, but he effectively sketched Einhard as a man in constant motion, scurrying here and there, books in hand, little legs awhirl.

The early reports of those at court also portray Einhard as a poet and learned man. Alcuin told Charlemagne in 799 that Einhard, their intimate assistant, could easily explain difficult problems of grammar and arithmetic to him in Alcuin's absence, and he wondered why Einhard, fine poet that he was, had not replaced him as the master of the court school [1.1-2]. Modoin, in his list of successful court poets, counted Einhard as one of that charmed circle of poets—Angilbert, Alcuin, and Theodulf—who had achieved great names and fortunes at Charlemagne's court because of their expert command of song [1.5]. This was exalted company, indeed, but where is the poetry on which Einhard's reputation rested? Alcuin spoke of his command of Trojan epic, that is, of Virgilian verse [1.2]. Now it has been suggested that the most famous epic of the ninth century, the incomplete but brilliant Charlemagne and Pope Leo, may have been composed by Einhard, but the matter is far from sure. The attribution of the poetic Passion of the Martyrs of Christ, Marcellinus and Peter to Einhard is easier to dismiss. For one thing, as Marguerite Bondois long ago pointed out, Einhard seems to have known next to nothing about the specific history of his saints, which is the subject treated in detail in the Passion. Moreover, that hagiographic piece cannot have been written before 828 and, therefore, could not have been the basis for Einhard's early reputation as an epic poet. It is that early, epic poetry that one would want to see, if one could. Moreover, if Einhard was one of the chief poets celebrated at Charlemagne's later court, why did he not receive, as the others did, a classical poet's name?

Instead Einhard had two nicknames. Early on he was called the Nard or Nardulus, Little Nard, perhaps because of simple homophony. The nard was a rare and fragrant oil, but unless Einhard smelled especially good, it is difficult not to imagine that his first nickname was a product of its trivial similarity to the ‘-hard’ ending of his name. Even today one hears children in schoolyards making play with the sounds of their classmates' names, sometimes coining less than kind endearments.

The other nickname given to Einhard early on by Alcuin was taken from the Bible, for Bezaleel was the exquisite craftsman assigned to Moses by God [Exodus 31:1-5]; he was expert not only in making things of brass, silver, and gold, but in cutting stones and working in wood. When Alcuin and Theodulf employed this nickname [1.2 and 1.7], they did so without explaining what it meant, but surely theirs was a nominal metaphor to type Einhard as an expert in many of the minor arts. In the 820s, Walahfrid Strabo compromised the metaphor by explaining it, but he leaves us in no doubt as to Einhard's considerable understanding of the visual arts [1.9]. Hrabanus concurred [1.17]. The material case for Einhard as an aesthete and patron of art is suggestive, if not particularly tangible. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 10440 … preserves a lifesize drawing from the seventeenth century of a small, silver triumphal arch that Einhard donated to one of his dependent churches. The donor's inscription …, however, is somewhat ambiguous, since it states that Einhard “set up” (ponere) and dedicated the arch. Ponere could be taken to mean “made” or “fashioned”, but curavit would seem to suggest that he arranged for others to carry out the work. For this reason it seems better to assume Einhard commissioned the piece, perhaps even specifying its dimensions, actual design, and iconography, but asked others to make it. Even in the Translation and Miracles of the Blessed Martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter, we see him ordering a new reliquary, not making it himself [5.1.10]. And he asked members of his household to prepare gifts for Lothar and his wife Ermengard, in this case apparently not even specifying what the objects were to be [6.54]. But Einhard moved in a world of painters [6.45], reliquary-makers [6.30], tile-makers [6.38], royal scribes [7.6], organ builders [5.4.11], and palace workmen [5.4.12], and he knew how to employ them to advantage.

His tastes in art, as in so much else, were classical or, rather, late antique, but these may have been the wider tastes of Charlemagne's court. The lost silver arch had figures that are reminiscent of the forms found on late ancient ivory carvings. Indeed, the ivory that graces the cover of this book, with its gently curved figure of the archangel Michael wrapped in swirling cloth and standing with angelic abstraction upon a tormented little dragon, belonged to the same world. This piece too was probably produced at Aachen during Einhard's time. From his own writings [6.30] we know that Einhard was a reader of Vitruvius, the ancient expert on architecture. In the letter he wrote to his student Vussin, he recalled a reliquary fashioned with classical columns that had been carved in ivory. Fragments of these miniature columns may survive today in the Landschaftsmuseum in Seligenstadt. Lupus of Ferrières also thought that Einhard could lay his hands upon the alphabet of ancient capital letters that the royal scribe Bertcaud had inscribed and, in fact, at the very end of a copy of Victorius of Aquitaine's calculus, a book that Bernhard Bischoff associated with Lupus, one finds just such a scheme of capital letters [7.6 …]. Is this then Lupus's copy of Einhard's book and Bertcaud's letters? Indeed, one has to wonder if Einhard himself composed the inscription and designed the arch that once rose above Charlemagne's tomb [2.31], since some of its vocabulary was favored by him and he remained in 814 the ultimate overseer of royal works.

But whether he was himself the direct fabricator of anything, or at least of anything that survives, may never be known. Part of our problem, of course, is that our view of what an artist was is too modern, too shaped by Italian Renaissance ideas of individual and inspired creativity. Perhaps Einhard's contemporaries thought of artists the way we think of architects today: the credit belongs to the person who conceives and organizes the artifact, not to its mere executor. If so, Einhard was the Bezaleel of his day, for if Charlemagne was the first and material cause of Aachen's splendor, it was Einhard's creative spirit that brought much of it about. When Hrabanus in Einhard's epitaph [1.17] said that it was through Einhard that Charlemagne accomplished so many fine things, he was probably thinking of Einhard as the beautifier of the palace.

The standing assumption that Einhard was centrally involved in the construction of the court chapel of St-Mary at Aachen … may be true, but it is unfortunately supported by little direct evidence. Since Odo of Metz was the architect of the palace chapel, Einhard was probably something more akin to its project manager, one of the facilitators of the building campaign in Aachen. He cannot have been the first such, since the project was probably under way before he had even arrived at court as a young recruit. And he was not the last. Late in his reign, Charlemagne put Ansegisus in charge of the royal works at Aachen, but his direct superior and overseer was Einhard [1.12]. Still, by the mid-790s, Einhard may have been the chief enabler of the rising building. No wonder, then, that the other courtiers who saw him at the time thought of him as constantly busy, always rushing here and there. The wide range and variety of building trades necessary for such an immense building project must have made Einhard's participation essential and may explain why some contemporaries marveled at his knowledge of such a wide range of crafts [1.9 and 1.17]. It is also worth noting that in the Life of Charlemagne [2.26] he himself drew particular attention to the metalwork of the great chapel, but had nothing to say about its impressive architecture. He may have been a Bezaleel, but we need to remember how important the minor arts were to the Carolingians, for theirs was not a world dominated by a taste for the monumental and gigantic, but for things small, precious, and portable; or so it must seem to modern scholars who are forced to sift through the surviving particles of their lost world.

One of Einhard's own churches partially survives today. The hall church at Steinbach, just outside Michelstadt, was consecrated in 827 and was originally intended to be the site of Einhard's burial. The nave of the small church, which rises over a solid Carolingian crypt, has six square piers supporting arches that once opened into side aisles, which have long since been suppressed. The nave ends in a shallow apse. Each side aisle originally possessed its own narthex entranceway and a small chapel in the east end. … The west end of the church may once have possessed as many as five doors. With its varied roof line and complexly articulated outer wall, the church at Steinbach must have seemed a visual wonder to its rural visitors. Einhard was proud of his new building, which he had built at his own expense between 815 and 827 [5.1.1]. It was for this newly completed and consecrated church that Einhard first sought to obtain saints' relics. But the martyrs refused to remain in Michelstadt or, at least, the interpreters of their wishes thought they should travel north to Mulinheim, which later on was renamed Seligenstadt, the site of the blessed martyrs [1.16]. There Einhard had a new and still larger church constructed in the 830s …, into which the martyrs' ashes were eventually translated and Einhard himself was finally entombed. This church was almost twice as large as the one at Michelstadt, but had a more familiar design with two side aisles, a long nave, and a coherent complex of connected chapels in the east end.

Not long after he arrived at Charlemagne's court, Einhard had already assumed an important and respected place there. The poet Theodulf saw him saddled not only with an armful of books, but with the heavy burdens of court business [1.6]. At least twice during Charlemagne's reign, we know of Einhard's involvement in high affairs of state. For it was he who, as a special emissary in 806, carried Charlemagne's partition of the kingdom between his three living sons, the so-called ‘Division of the Kingdom’, to Pope Leo III in Rome [see 1.4 and Carolingian Civilization 22]. In 813 Charlemagne convoked the Diet of Aachen to consider the matter of his succession now that only one of his sons still lived; it was apparently Einhard who, speaking on behalf of certain noble interests, publicly acclaimed Louis the Pious's elevation to co-imperial status [1.11].

Einhard's career is surprisingly obscure in the first decade after Charlemagne's death, though it can be assumed that, for the benefit of Louis the Pious, he carried on many of the functions he had performed for his father. He would, therefore, have been found at certain times of the year at the imperial court assembled in such places as Aachen and Ingelheim to wait on Louis's needs, to write letters and laws. Louis himself spoke of the need to reward Einhard for his service [see 3.7]. Some of the letters Einhard composed for the emperor survive in Einhard's collected letters [see 6.19-21, 39], and he gave Louis and his wives advice on matters of state. As well, Hubert Mordek noted that in a memorandum about the matters to be discussed at an upcoming meeting to be convened under Louis one of the items reads:

17. Concerning the long-term possession of churches that cannot be defended through the years, as, for instance, is the case we have in [the village of] Colonia, which was handed over to [the monastery of] St-Bavo during the time of King Pepin.

It would not surprise us to learn that Einhard, the abbot of St-Bavo and a key member of Louis's court, had a hand in preparing memoranda of this sort. But whatever his involvement was in this case, there can be little doubt that he played an active role in the operations of Louis the Pious's government. One of Einhard's letters [6.34] may even be taken to mean that Louis had at one point appointed him the tutor, or should that be counselor, of his son Lothar. For all his busy work on Louis's behalf and, perhaps, even as a reward for his essential role in Louis's elevation, Einhard received properties from the new emperor.

Had he ever received lands or revenues from Charlemagne? If not, how had he supported himself for twenty years in Aachen, where he may have been resident all year round? Modoin characterized Einhard as one who had become rich along with Charlemagne's other poets [1.5]. Did he merely mean that he had received high offices and royal favor or something more substantial? When Ansegisus took charge of the royal works under Charlemagne, Einhard was already called an abbot [1.12], though that may have been to give him a later office and not one that he actually held under Charlemagne. But what are we to make of Einhard's own comment in the preface to the Life of Charlemagne that he owed Charlemagne “both in life and death” [2.preface]? Is it possible that the old king in his last days had recommended to his son and successor that his faithful courtier Einhard should be rewarded with lands? Again we do not know, but the problem of how Einhard supported himself and his household for twenty years in Aachen still remains to be solved.

Early in 815 the new emperor granted Einhard and his wife Emma the substantial properties of both Michelstadt and Mulinheim or Seligenstadt [3.7]. A few months later he reconfirmed the immunities of the monastery of Blandin in Ghent, which Einhard was to hold as lay abbot [3.8]. Four years later, as the lay abbot of St-Bavo, also in Ghent, Einhard received the reconfirmation of its immunities [3.9]. In the same year, Einhard and Emma stipulated that their holdings in Michelstadt should pass to the monastery of Lorsch on their deaths [3.10]. The reader should notice that the donors did not also give the Seligenstadt properties to Lorsch. One of the most interesting of Einhard's charters is the survey of the Michelstadt properties that Einhard had his notary Luther draw up [3.11]. In reading this document, one bounces from oak tree to stream, along rivers and brooks, to villages and hills, past now long forgotten places, one of which bears Einhard's name. One also sees in these charters a few of Einhard's legal actions as lay abbot, leasing land and facilitating the exchange of peoples. Einhard's principal holdings were located in three areas: in Michelstadt and Seligenstadt …, at his two monasteries at Ghent …, and at St-Servais in Maastricht. … But he also had property interests near Paris [6.2 and 3.13] and at Fritzlar [6.37]. In the Translation and Miracles we also learn that he held the churches of St-Salvius in Valenciennes [5.4.10] and St-John the Baptist (Domnanae) in Pavia [5.1.6] as benefices. The former was a benefice of Louis, the latter “of kings”, presumably meaning Louis the Pious and Lothar I, and was held in 827 as his notary Ratleig passed through Italy. … Between 816 and 823, Einhard also held the monastery of Fontanelle (St-Wandrille) in Normandy [1.12 …].

We should be thankful for Einhard's relative prosperity, for it may have been the landed wealth of the 820s that allowed him, at least partially, to begin extricating himself from court. For it was probably time away from court that fostered his burgeoning writing career. It was a simple fact of Carolingian court life that people at the palace had less need to write to each other, but when away from court needed to write a great deal in order to communicate with the powerful people who could give them lands and shape their destinies. The thousand preoccupations and demands of duty at court must have given even energetic Einhard little free time. But in the late 820s and 830s Einhard's center of intellectual gravity was shifting to his local estates and to his new religious enthusiasms.

Einhard's most famous book was written after Charlemagne's death, but just when has always been unclear. Dates from as early as 817 to as late as 836 have been proposed. The first two contemporary references to the famous book come from Gerward, Louis the Pious's librarian, and the young monk Lupus of Ferrières. Gerward attached a set of dedicatory verses to the copy of the biography he presented to Emperor Louis [see 1.8]. The date of Lupus's first letter to Einhard [7.1], in which he praises the Life of Charlemagne, has been the subject of considerable debate. The letter cannot have been written before 830 and Lupus's first stay at Fulda, but some have argued that it was written as late as 836 during the monk's second visit to Fulda. Given its introductory and rather callow quality, it would seem to belong to Lupus's youthful first visit rather than his more mature second. But whatever the date of Lupus's first letter, Gerward's short dedicatory poem still seems to be the earliest public acknowledgment of the existence of the biography and of Einhard's authorship. The description of Gerward that Einhard himself supplies in the Translation and Miracles [5.4.7] is interesting in this regard. He says of 828 that Gerward was “already at that time” the palace librarian. This might lead one to suspect that Gerward had not long held the office, but had been appointed relatively recently. As Louis's librarian, therefore, he may not have been in a position to present the emperor with a copy of the biography much before 826 or 827. It is also not impossible that both Walahfrid [1.9] and Ermold [1.11] already knew of the existence of the Life of Charlemagne by 829. Walahfrid's titular reference to Einhartus Magnus reminds one of Gerward's Einhardus magnificus [1.8], but the librarian's clever epithet may have been designed for Louis's benefit, since it could be taken to mean ‘one who makes much of a thing’. Walahfrid's magnus may also contain an allusion to Einhard's fame as the biographer of the Great One. Ermold's portrait of Einhard worshipping the very ground on which Charlemagne walked may be an allusion as well. Gerward, Walahfrid, and Ermold all knew, of course, that it was Louis who buttered their bread and they may have been reacting to Einhard's high praise of Charlemagne, who was in little favor at the early court of his son. Gerward seems to have wanted, with his poetic preface to Louis's personal copy of the biography, to balance things, to provide an almost lapidary antidote for the considerable flattery of Charles that was to come by beginning with Louis's own greatness, lifting his name to the stars. This interpretation of the early allusions to Einhard as the great one's biographer would fit with Heinz Löwe's suggestion that the Life of Charlemagne was probably written around 825-826.

Matthew Innes and Rosamond McKitterick recently returned to the older argument that a library catalogue from Reichenau written in the early 820s must push the date of the composition of the biography back to the early years of Louis's reign. They would associate the work with Louis's restructuring of the kingdom in 817. Unfortunately the catalogue entry in question does not specifically cite Einhard or the biography by name, and the date of the catalogue itself remains controversial. Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile a date of composition for the biography as early as 817-18 with the content of the biography itself: in particular, the noble and generous treatment of Bernard of Italy and his five sisters would have been a very daring position to take in 818 [2.19], and for that matter at any point prior to Louis's public penance in 822 for Bernard's death. Moreover, the biography likely was not written before the Abodrites revolted in 817 or the wooden arcade at Aachen collapsed on Louis and his company on Maundy Thursday (9 April) 817, for both events seem to be alluded to by Einhard [2.12 and 2.32], though neither of those references is beyond variant interpretation. Was Einhard's memory confused because much time had passed before he wrote about the latter incident, or was he willfully confusing chronology?

Another indication that the biography may have been written closer to the mid-820s is its description of Charlemagne as a family man, since this emphasis may have been Einhard's rebuttal of the famous dream of Wetti from November 824 in which the emperor was envisaged standing on an illumined plain while an animal gnawed at his genitals. Wetti's angel proclaimed that Charles deserved to suffer such torment because of his lecherous life. The vision quickly began to circulate in written form, saying publicly what many churchmen knew to be true: that Charles could not escape in death the punishment he deserved for the sins he had committed in life. In 827 Walahfrid Strabo himself set the vision to verse. Einhard's portrait of Charlemagne as a family man may appear almost apolegetic in this light, part of an attempt to answer Charlemagne's critics with a pointed defense of his domestic life. In the second decade of the ninth century, Charlemagne's reputation stood at virtually its lowest point in all of western history. His son and even the royal Frankish annalist were quick to recognize Charlemagne's injustices, the filth of his palace, his own lust, and the failure of his last military campaign. Ermold and Louis's advisers seem, moreover, to have thought that Charlemagne had been too concerned with war; he was the great belliger, the bringer of war. Einhard's rather dry account of Charlemagne's wars is almost an anti-epic [see 2.6], perhaps in order to de-emphasize a side of Charlemagne that was no longer fashionable. And so the reader passes straight from war to peace, from the Charlemagne Einhard hardly knew to the one he knew very well, all of which may reflect Einhard's sensitivity to the images of Charlemagne that were circulating in the 820s.

Why all the fuss about dating the Life of Charlemagne? It is an important issue, because if we knew when Einhard composed the biography we might be able to understand somewhat better the author's intentions and the relative emphases buried in his work. If it was written as early as 818, it might well have had a tone imparted by Louis the Pious's reform of the palace and kingdom early in his reign; if written as late as 829-830, it might refer to the troubles of the rebellion of Louis's sons that were then looming. But the author may not have wanted the biography, with its classical tenor and scrambling and confusion of Carolingian references, to be pinned down too closely. Within the last few years distinguished scholars have with great conviction read the biography as either pro-Louis or anti-Louis. That very indeterminacy may actually help us to place the Life of Charlemagne down in the mid-820s when Louis the Pious's reign seemed to begin to drift and others were writing symbolically allusive compositions of their own. Walahfrid Strabo's poem on the statue of Theoderic, in which Einhard was called The Great [1.9], is equally suggestive and indeterminate. Both works are tantalizingly allusive and may have been designed to supply Louis and his world with mirrors in which to search for veiled truths. There is evidence, after all, that the biographer was politically astute or, at least, aware of where the troubled waters lay. There is, for instance, no mention made of Charlemagne's ‘Division of the Kingdom’ of 806, which Einhard himself had carried to Rome. Was it excluded from the biography because he considered it a document that had no force after 813 or because it was one that, despite its importance to understanding Charlemagne's view of succession, ran counter to Louis's view (prior to 830) of an indivisible empire, the one enshrined in the Ordinatio imperii of 817 [see Carolingian Civilization 27], to which he had been the sole heir and which Lothar would in turn inherit? Whatever his reason, Einhard made a deliberate choice not to mention the arrangement, and its omission should alert readers to the careful nature of Einhard's selection of materials, both what he includes and what he excludes. His high and historically vague praise, for instance, of Charlemagne's farsighted preparations for dealing with raids by the Northmen and Moors [2.17] has always seemed to reflect the hindsight of someone situated in Louis the Pious's Francia [see 6.22] rather than Charlemagne's.

The Life of Charlemagne is without doubt the jewel of early medieval biographies, and in a recent paper David Ganz noted that it has survived in over 100 manuscripts, thus also making it one of the Middle Ages' most popular secular works. But it has also been dismissed by some as a derivative work, since Einhard drew upon Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, a work that he had probably first seen as a student at Fulda, for the structure and some of the language of his portrait. The biography of Augustus, in particular, influenced Einhard's design. But it would not do to exaggerate Einhard's dependence on Suetonius or to cast Charlemagne as a thirteenth Caesar, for the purposes and conclusions of the two authors were strikingly different. Suetonius may have striven to balance his portraits of imperial vices and accomplishments, but in the end he exposed and effectively condemned the many vices of even Augustus. Einhard, on the other hand, has hardly a negative word to say about his king, and when he does his comments are enclosed in careful qualifications. In this way he explained and accounted for Charlemagne's harsh and arbitrary actions as unusual lapses. In fact, both Einhard [2.20] and the reviser of the Royal Frankish Annals (for 792) blamed Fastrada for Charlemagne's troubles with noble conspirators. But Einhard was also selective in his critical comments. He did not mention, for instance, the execution of thousands of Saxons at Verden at all, but was prepared to issue his own quiet complaint over the shallowness of Charlemagne's legal reforms [2.29].

But as Siegmund Hellmann in an old and important study and Matthew Kempsall in a new and insightful one have both argued, the Life of Charlemagne is a work informed by sophisticated literary strategies and influences. Einhard's models may be less Suetonian than Ciceronian and classical, for the Carolingian biographer may actually have set out to treat his famous subject according to non-Suetonian categories. Some of these were supplied by Ciceronian ideals of eloquence and classical notions about how one was to measure and present the magnanimitas or greatness of a ruler. Although Walahfrid supplied formal chapter titles and breaks for the short biography, Einhard himself imagined his work as a continuous sketch. Why, after all, would one further categorize what was already so manifestly categorical in treatment?

Part of the enduring appeal of the Life of Charlemagne is that it has resisted being precisely pinned down. It has stubbornly refused for over a thousand years the most persistent efforts to assign it and its author to a particular cause or event. Can one doubt that this was a deliberate authorial strategy adopted by “prudent Einhard” in order to protect and hide himself by removing his personal voice from the biography, as best he could? It has surely, if only accidentally, added to the allure of a piece that cannot be too easily known or personalized. In its structural simplicity the biography charms its readers, leading them ever closer to Charlemagne himself, to the great man as he was at home.

Why, in fact, does the Life of Charlemagne bend so many of the facts we know about events? Was this a product of poor memory, distant memory, a lack of handy archival materials, an overdependence on a model—as for example in his contrived and false construction of portents—or a purposive and deliberate strategy for shaping material to convey indirect messages to king and court?

Einhard certainly thought of himself as a member of that court, as a courtier of both Charlemagne and then his son. The audience for his two books was the circle of people he knew at court. His letters bounce the reader back and forth between the concerns of his various households or familiae and those of the court. The rhythms of his annual life also swung between these two poles, since when he was at Michelstadt in the 820s or Seligenstadt in the 830s, he was always aware that the court was out there waiting to engage and threaten him. There was no escaping it. And when at court, he needed via letters and messengers to handle the distant affairs of his properties and to collect the provisions he needed for his residence in Aachen [6.23].

Einhard was, by all accounts, an extremely careful courtier. Some of his contemporaries did not hesitate to call him the most prudent of all the men at court [1.13]. This carefulness extended to his writing. One of the distinct peculiarities of the Life of Charlemagne, after all, is that Einhard did not attach his name to the work. This was not, I suspect, an accident of manuscript transmission, for both Gerward [1.8] and Walahfrid [1.14] went to some trouble to identify Einhard as the biographer. Apparently the book circulated as early as the late 820s and as late as the 840s in copies without the author's name attached. Why did Einhard wish to hide even his name? Was it an example of his modesty or an attempt to preserve some small measure of anonymity? With anonymity went humility, of course, and the diminutives of the preface—his little training and small reputation—were meant to conjure up images of humble, little Einhard. But those in the know certainly knew who had written the biography, and Gerward simply assumed that Louis either knew or could figure out who had written the biography of his father.

But Walahfrid felt a particular need [1.14] to explain who Einhard was. Did he do this without a deeper purpose? When he edited Thegan's Life of Louis, Walahfrid added a brief introduction in which he briefly commented on the author's noble anger at Louis's lowborn enemies, but in Einhard's case he went much further and supplied readers with a detailed sketch of Einhard and the times through which he had lived. His was a contextual interpretation of the Life of Charlemagne, for he was keen to see Einhard as a survivor of the enveloping turbulence of Louis the Pious's reign. But this praise may have been backhanded, for Walahfrid seems to have wondered after Einhard's death how Charlemagne's courtier, The Great Einhard, had survived all the troubles that had so swiftly brought Louis and his loyal courtiers down. Walahfrid himself had been one of those overthrown by the politics of rebellion in the 830s. His short sketch, so simple in its measured praise of Einhard, may contain a certain criticism of Einhard's guarded and careful nature—too prudent a courtier, after all, Walahfrid may have thought. Still, his piece was the first in a long series of attempts to restore a historical context to Einhard's naked composition, to dress it in some of the contextual clothes it seems to want.

There is another matter about the biography that has received even less attention than its date and authorship: the question of the biography's specific audience. It is not impossible that Einhard wrote the biography or, at least, its preface for a specific individual, as David Ganz has suggested, since in that preface Einhard submitted the book to some unnamed person (tibi). But, even if Einhard sent the biography and preface to an acquaintance or fellow courtier, he may still have had several readers in mind, the greatest congregation of which was certainly the collection of his fellow courtiers at the palace. Gerward's little verses prove that the book was there [1.8]. But if the Life of Charlemagne was written originally for a specific person, its message might be read in a different light, as the memoirs of one courtier for the education and training of another. Seen in that light, the biography of Charlemagne would stand like Hincmar of Rheims's On the Governance of the Palace [see Carolingian Civilization 72] as a briefing manual, as one courtier's reflections on what the court had once been like and should be like again. Neither Lupus nor Walahfrid read it in that vein, but rather, as one would have expected learned courtiers and would-be courtiers to read it, as a reflection of the flowering of civilization in an earlier and more enlightened age. Whatever its date of composition, audience, or meaning, the Life of Charlemagne quickly became a classic in such circles. Lupus of Ferrières could not restrain his admiration for its elegant style and high purpose [7.1]. But in the early 830s Lupus was a young monk on the make, not yet a courtier, and he was seeking Einhard's favor. What he wanted, in part, was to lay his hands on Einhard's library, for Lupus seems to have loved rare books almost more than the people who owned them.

The Life of Charlemagne is a great work of medieval historiography for many reasons, not the least of which is its powerful simplicity. It seems, on the surface, a straightforward book, but its brevity conceals and intrigues, leading us deeper into material that hides as much as it reveals. Almost as important as what Einhard tells us, after all, is what he does not. He has relatively little to say about the meaning of empire to Charles's court and next to nothing about the doctrinal controversies that raged inside and outside the court and kingdom: nothing on adoptionism, the procession question, or the iconodule issue. Alcuin and Peter of Pisa receive their due in the book, but Paul the Deacon and Paulinus of Aquileia, who had departed from Aachen before Einhard arrived, are not mentioned. Theodulf surfaces only impersonally as a witness to the last testament. Louis the Pious himself is not a prominent figure in the biography. Nor does Einhard address the problem of partible inheritance which had so concerned Charlemagne and continued to worry his son Louis.

But if the Life of Charlemagne seems simple, straightforward, and short, the Translation and Miracles has struck some modern readers as fantastic and bizarre. Indeed, nothing could have prepared the readers of Einhard's imperial biography for the Translation and Miracles, some portion of which may have surfaced as early as late 830 or early 831. The translation of the relics themselves had occurred in October 827 and was reported by the royal Frankish annalist as if it were a matter of importance to all Francia. Once again Einhard was at the leading edge of the intellectual currents of his day, now not the world of sublime poetry in the intimate circle of a great king and his playful bards, but the world of popular religion being tested by Carolingians in the countryside of northern Europe. Though curmudgeons like Claudius of Turin and even Agobard of Lyons may have been unsympathetic toward expressions of popular religion, Einhard embraced the cult of the saints with exhilarating enthusiasm in the late 820s. In 826 the archchaplain Hilduin had enshrined the relics of Saint Sebastian in St-Médard of Soissons. They were said to have immediately brought about a great number of miraculous cures—evidence, thought Hilduin, of Christ's powerful presence and local immediacy in Soissons. Einhard, who was just then founding his own church at Michelstadt, sought relics for its dedication. It is the history of the translation, of the aquisition and adventus of the saints, of the intrigues and deceptions that he and the saints suffered, and of their many marvelous and manifest works, that fill his book. The translation of the relics also marked a new phase in Einhard's life, as he slowly disengaged himself from court and active royal service, or rather sought to transfer his service to the care of his saintly patrons.

The reasons why Einhard wrote this book were far from simple, and not completely unconnected to the Life of Charlemagne, which may have been composed not very many years before. The opening lines of the Translation and Miracles may even contain an apologia not just for Einhard the hagiographer, but also for the biographer. Why else would one write about just and holy men, he asks, except to provide examples whereby the living might emend their lives? But if he began by nodding in the direction of Charlemagne and his earlier work, he quickly turned toward those Carolingian skeptics who doubted the power and efficacy of the saints. He needed to answer the rumors then circulating that his relics had been divided and their integrity compromised by the theft committed by Hilduin's agent. This theft should give pause to those readers tempted to think that Hilduin and Einhard were insincere hucksters anxious to dupe a superstitious age, for both were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to acquire and keep relics, even if it meant risking high political animosities. Nor were they religiously naive, for they understood that there was trickery about in the relics trade. Einhard asked Deusdona to supply him with “genuine relics” [5.1.1], which seems to suppose the existence of false relics. And, indeed, Einhard knew Deusdona to be a dealer in false goods and half-truths. His man, Ratleig, would finally find the true relics on his own.

Einhard was ill, apparently with a disease like dysentery, in the spring and early summer of 830 [6.41], and, perhaps, all the more aware of his need for saintly help. But it may have been that illness, which conveniently coincided with the rebellion of 830, that provided him with the opportunity to hole up at Seligenstadt and begin or continue writing the Translation and Miracles. His book thus had both personal and political agendas; at points it even recommends political and social reforms [5.3.13-14].

Einhard was, in both his formal compositions, engaged in hoarding reputation for personal advantage. In the first, he styled himself the keeper of Charlemagne's memory; and in the second, he secured and promoted his personal connection to the saints. He presented himself, in fact, as the driving force behind the translation of the martyrs. His desire to acquire relics was the motivating factor, he cut the deal with Deusdona, sent Ratleig, received the relics, recovered the relics from Hilduin, sent portions of them to other churches, and kept careful reportorial watch on the miracles performed.

But in the Translation and Miracles Einhard also remained a royal courtier. One needs to examine closely just when Einhard finally circulated his account of the translation. The last dated miracle occurred on 28 August 830 [5.4.18]. That year had been a difficult one for Einhard and his king. Louis's sons had revolted in the spring and had captured the emperor and his wife. By October in an assembly held at Nijmegen, however, Louis had reasserted his authority. He made a special point, according to his biographer, the man popularly known as the Astronomer, of accusing Abbot Hilduin of hostility and resistance to the imperial will. Another biographer, Thegan, lumped Hilduin in with the other rebels of the spring. Hilduin fell far and fast, ending up spending the winter of 830-31 in a tent outside Paderborn. Given Einhard's careful nature it is unlikely that he would have circulated or, perhaps, even written the second book of the Translation and Miracles, with its damning portrait of Hilduin, while the abbot was still a great power at court. In many ways Hilduin is the chief villain of the whole work. He is not just one of those figures such as Deusdona and the scurrilous Hunus, who represent forces that would frustrate the rightful progress of the martyrs to Einhard; he is the last and greatest obstructionist. Although one particle of the relics was generally thought to possess the power of the whole, Hilduin had colluded in the unnatural and unkind separation of two saintly companions. Einhard presents the abbot's final hesitation in handing over the separated relics in strikingly unfavorable terms. Indeed, Hilduin had earlier let it be known that he would accept the judgment of no one—which must have included the emperor himself—who said that he should part with the relics [5.2.1]. Einhard was quick to pass on this hearsay as evidence of Hilduin's overweening pride. Contemporary readers at court would have nodded in assent and recognized Hilduin's pride as the underlying cause of his contumacy. Moreover, Hilduin kept Louis himself away from Einhard's relics for a time [5.2.6], an act that must have seemed to Einhard to have denied the salvific grace of the saints to an emperor much in need of it at the time. In Einhard's view, Hilduin had done everything he possibly could to delay the transfer of the saints and to put Einhard, their rightful servant, in a humiliating and subordinate place.

In fact, St-Médard would still claim in the early 840s to possess the remains of Marcellinus and Peter [see Carolingian Civilization 44.3.2]. One should note that the Royal Frankish Annals entry for 827 in which the translation of Marcellinus and Peter was reported made no mention of Einhard at all. Was that because Hilduin prior to Easter 828 still claimed a portion of the relics for St-Médard and was not yet willing to place them completely in Einhard's hands? Did Hilduin, in fact, cheat Einhard one last time? He made him wait for the relics and charged him the enormous sum of 100 gold pieces for their return, but did he in the end still pass along bogus bones? It is a classic con-artist's technique, after all, to make the victim of deception stew in anticipation, making him all the readier to accept fraudulent goods as genuine. Einhard may never have detected that final deception, if it occurred, but he took timely revenge for his earlier frustration. In the late summer and early fall of 830, with Hilduin in public disgrace, Einhard wrote some portions of the Translation and Miracles and publicly unmasked Hilduin's dishonesty, pride, and greed. Moreover, late in the Translation and Miracles [5.4.14] Einhard's relics bested those of Hilduin, carrying out a miracle that Hilduin's Saint Sebastian had been unable to bring about. Einhard also cast doubt on the relics of Saint Tiburtius, suggesting that not even Hunus had believed in their authenticity [5.1.5]. Thus the rivalries of the Carolingian court spilled over into the invisible realm of the saints where powerful courtiers were still looking for their own holy patrons and protectors, for the means to gain saintly advantage over their enemies.

At one level, then, Einhard's translation history is a self-serving whodunit intended to restore the reputation of Einhard's relics before a public that had heard stories questioning their legitimacy and integrity. The first book of the Translation and Miracles is also a gripping specimen of Carolingian travel writing, but the reader should notice that it works as a pilgrimage in reverse. In most pilgrimage accounts, all the hindrances and adversities of the road are encountered on the way to the goal, be it Rome, St-James of Compostella, or Jerusalem. The trip back was generally a mere afternote, often adorned with few details. Einhard's account of the Translation and Miracles works in the opposite direction, for little information about the journey to Rome is supplied, but a great deal about the trip to Michelstadt with its incidents of intrigue, treachery, and triumphal advent. … What the reader needs to appreciate is that the true pilgrimage or home-coming was that of the martyrs themselves and that their voyage was not a return trip, but one that only began in Rome with the discovery of the holy bones. It was the saints' journey north to Einhard that was religiously remarkable.

One also needs to appreciate that the prevailing theory was that the saints were fully present and powerful in their bones and that they would not, indeed could not be made to go where they did not wish to go. They refused, for instance, to stay in Michelstadt, where Einhard had all along thought they belonged, but rather wanted to travel to a place which at the time must have had a less than fully suitable church to hold them and their petitioners. Throughout his book, it is clear that Einhard thought of the martyrs as active and living presences and that he was merely and sincerely collecting the evidence of their agency and intervention in the world. Now the fact that the saints were believed to inhabit their bones, to be truly and powerfully present in them, meant that it was technically impossible to steal them, since they would go only where and when it suited them. Einhard may have reasoned along these lines as he indirectly solicited and then unashamedly broadcast Ratleig's violation of Roman tombs and his theft of relics. In 826 Hilduin had been anxious to have the Royal Frankish Annals report that the pope himself had granted his request for the relics of Saint Sebastian, and the Astronomer would wrongly grant Einhard the same privilege posthumously [1.13]. But, at some level, Einhard was aware that he was planning a major theft. He and Deusdona might try to excuse their larceny on the pretext that the tombs of the martyrs in Rome were neglected and the saints uncared for [5.1.1], but the excuse-making suggests they knew that their trade in bones was not absolutely licit.

Einhard, however, needed to see Hunus's theft of relics from Ratleig in a different light, as the unnatural and unholy separation of martyrs who belonged together, bound by their boonship [5.1.5]. Still, the logic was weak and Einhard did not wish to dwell for too long on the problem. For despite the good reasons for stealing a saint's bones, the thieves still knew it was robbery. Ratleig and his companions may have surrounded their theft with holy acts by fasting for three days and praying at the doors of the churches they robbed, but they knew they were engaged in grand larceny. Ratleig hid out in Rome, stole into the crypts at night, listened for signs of detection, had his gang of grave-robbers split up as they left town, and was wary of a papal party he feared might be on their trail. Nor were they the best of crooks; they couldn't even figure out how Deusdona had learned that they were operating without him, though they must have stood out like sore thumbs in Rome. Only when they finally crossed the Alps and no longer feared being caught did Ratleig openly display the saints. Now, in a striking elevation of their public role, the martyrs were escorted north as though they were the highest church dignitaries. Theirs was now a triumphal procession ending at each village in an elaborate adventus or arrival celebration. Einhard's literary genius is evident once again as he filled his pages with dramatic tension expressing his own profound sense of wonder.

Einhard's theology of the relics was relatively simple, though encumbered by a somewhat opaque vocabulary. He knew and stressed at several points that the saints, as powerfully present in their bones, merely interceded with Christ on behalf of their petitioners [5.3.preface, 5.3.2, 7.4]. Thus, the sick prayed to the saints, who in turn prayed to Christ. But it was Christ's divine power that produced miraculous cures, in part because the saints were in favor with him and stood close to his side. For the most part, Einhard spoke of these cures and miracles as being achieved per merita sanctorum. Though I have for the sake of convenience and consistency translated this phrase as “through the merits of the saints”, merita is a particularly slippery word that Einhard never clearly explained. At some points, it seems that one could substitute per intercessionem martyrum for his formula, as he himself does, but that would be to confuse the process with the cause. In fact, at 5.3.15, he speaks of per merita et intercessionem sanctorum and thus separates out two aspects of the saints' role. What Einhard seems to have meant by merita, therefore, is something closer to the “virtuous credits” that Marcellinus and Peter had accrued in heaven because of their holy lives and precious martyrdoms. Christ was prepared to listen to their petitions on behalf of Christians who were specially deserving because the saints, by their very lives and deaths, had earned his special attention. Not being a theologian, for whom consistency is everything, Einhard occasionally lost tight control of his formula. On several occasions he spoke of miracles occurring per virtutem sanctorum [5.3.5 and 5.3.12] and per potestatem sanctorum [5.3.15], which could lead an uncareful reader to assign direct agency to the saints. The sick people who prostrated themselves before the relics must have rarely made the careful distinctions that Einhard knew needed making. They imagined instead that the two saints took a hands-on approach to curing even the deformed, as with one at each end they pulled twisted limbs straight [5.3.9].

But to return to stylistic matters, how does one account for the change of prose styles between the Life of Charlemagne and the Translation and Miracles? Was it simply the case that in the former Einhard had relied on his ancient models to achieve a classical, imperial biography with longer sentences and classical vocabulary? Or were the effective audiences different, since the translation story sought to spread popular word of the efficacy of the relics? Einhard's different voices in the two works were deliberately chosen. He began the biography by denying that he could ever achieve a true Ciceronian style, but that was his goal, the one Lupus so warmed to. He ended the Translation and Miracles by consciously defending the vulgarity of the prose style he had employed, prepared to stare down his detractors. He only hoped that his critics wouldn't curse as they impugned him and his popular book.

The fourth book of the Translation and Miracles does contain some fairly crude accounts of the saints' various cures as they moved through the countryside like some traveling medicine show, but these were accounts produced at other churches and inserted into the work by Einhard [5.4.9-14]. The three little registers or calendars of miracles included in the fourth book are more interesting than students sometimes suppose. They remind one, in their almost totemic structure, of the ancient stelae found at the temples of Asclepius, which recount the incubation cures of those who had visited and slept with the pagan god. Einhard himself was anxious to demonstrate the potency of the martyrs' relics, but to do so he needed to isolate them from other forces and other saints. The three external registers proved, he may have thought, that everywhere the saints went, miracles, like Mary's little lambs, were sure to go. It should be noticed that Einhard had not allowed his relics to wander too far afield, for St-Bavo in Ghent, St-Salvius in Valenciennes, and St-Servais in Maastricht were all churches under his direct control. Indeed, the dates of the three calendars are worth noting, for it is almost as if one could follow the relics from place to place over four months in 828. But the dates overlap at points and George, the Venetian organ builder, had arranged for the relics to be picked up in Aachen and Einhard himself may have carried the relics to Maastricht [5.4.14]. One could conclude that in 828 Einhard divided up and permanently alienated portions of the relics from Seligenstadt, since he said in the 830s that the relics continued to bring about cures in those other places [5.4.8].

Each of the little books is also different in language and emphasis. George, for instance, fairly consistently associated miracles at St-Salvius with the celebration of the Mass [5.4.10], a connection not specifically drawn by the others. Moreover, did Einhard himself write the last of those accounts, the one from St-Servais? At several points in 5.4.14 (on 4 and 10 June) he relates, in the first person, events in which he directly participated. If Einhard did compose that work, or a portion of it, why did he feel the need to present it as the work of the monks of St-Servais?

Einhard and his various churches certainly benefited from the publicity stirred up by the relics. He used his particular devotion to the martyrs as a means of persuading the emperor and empress to give him special relief from his public commitments, and he received financial advantages for his churches. But the cult of the saints as promoted by Hilduin and Einhard should not be reduced to crass commercialism, since everything suggests their deep belief and sincerity. One only needs to study the depths of Einhard's despair and utter disappointment when the saints failed to save his wife Emma from her final illness in order to gauge the sincerity of the hope he had placed in the power of his saints [7.3].

It might almost be argued that the Translation and Miracles was as influential, at least in terms of spawning a genre, as the Life of Charlemagne. For while the latter had few direct imitators, so inimitable was its subject and style, the translation story would effectively shape and guide the creation of a subgenre of hagiography, the translation histories, that would achieve great prominence and importance in the central Middle Ages.

It would probably be inaccurate to think that Einhard's own religious beliefs changed radically in the 820s, though with his rise to lay abbacy and with the onset of old age and illness, the features of his personal life may have begun to sharpen his particular religious needs. Once again, however, in his dealings with Deusdona, the relics salesman, one sees Einhard as energetic as ever and prepared to invest a great deal in an unusual and somewhat risky enterprise. The results in the short run, at least, were extremely rewarding, for his possession of the saints allowed Einhard to achieve new preeminence and prominence. Even archbishops now asked him to supply them with relics [6.10], for Einhard's saints had returned him once again to the very center of things, where he had not been since the dissolution of Charlemagne's court and the various disruptions of the late 820s. In this light, the Translation and Miracles is the natural successor to the remembered world of the Life of Charlemagne, but it was now a world inhabited by a different circle of powerful people, by new and invisible friends and by true believers, a spiritual court of Einhard's own making.

Einhard's correspondence is one of the fullest collections of Carolingian letters, but it is also one filled with intriguing problems. The collection has survived in only one damaged manuscript, which was once in Laon (Paris, B.N. lat. 11379). Gaps in the letters are indicated by ellipses […] in the translations below. Virtually all the letters come from the last fifteen years of his life, many from the last decade. It has long been thought that the collection was copied out at St-Bavo, which may be true, but that need not mean that the letters are particularly concerned with that monastery. In fact, though St-Bavo, Blandin, Maastricht, St-Cloud, and Fritzlar are all mentioned in the letters, the great majority concern Seligenstadt. Was the collection then one that began as Einhard's own letter book or register of letters that happened to pass through and be preserved by scribes at St-Bavo? The collection is representative of a certain portion of Einhard's correspondence, but it is far from complete. The spottiness and disorganization of the collection is all too apparent. In his letter to Gerward [6.14], Einhard talks about an important earlier letter that seems at first to be missing. But a later letter in the collection [6.41] could well be that missing letter. The letter to Lupus [7.3], however, is not preserved in the collected letters, but only in Lupus's own collection. Was this an accident of transmission or the result of the letter writer's own notion of what was worth preserving or, rather, what he chose not to preserve? Letters he received from elsewhere rarely survived. …

Although Hampe and others carefully reordered the letters into a reasonable chronological sequence, in the translation below I have restored the letters to their original order in the unique manuscript and have provided Hampe's letter numbers in parentheses. It can be argued that, as in some archaeological dig, the original context and placement of a piece in the strata of this collection have informative and meaningful values of their own. Despite some chronological anomalies such as the Bernharius letters [6.31-32], the manuscript does preserve some revealing chronological and thematic patterns of its own. Thus, the letters to Lothar fall fairly early in the collection, the letters to Louis the German fairly late. The letters during the first rebellion hang together [6.40-44] as do those of the second [6.46-48, 53-54], while the letter on the appearance of Halley's Comet in 837 is late in the collection [6.61]. There also seems to be some rough thematic groupings of material in the collection. Those letters, for instance, that concern people seeking refuge at Seligenstadt, a subject not taken up in the Translation and Miracles for some reason, occur early in the collection.

Two of the most political of Einhard's letters actually survive in their best copies outside the original collection, or, rather, they were added to the manuscript of the collection on a separate folio written by another scribe. Folio 20 of Paris, B.N. lat. 11379 contains a partial copy of letter 34, which is perhaps the most forthright and so extraordinary of Einhard's letters, his rebuke of the recently rebellious Lothar; it also contains a complete copy of an important letter to Louis the Pious in which Einhard pleaded early in the 830s for the emperor's special patronage and protection of the saints and their new church [6.appendix.A]. Where did these letters come from and do they suggest that there once existed another collection of Einhard's important letters?

The collection of letters contains a particular body of Einhard's letters that may have had some utility at a place such as St-Bavo, not just as the great Einhard's letters, but as an example book for writing business correspondence. In fact, letters written by others follow Einhard's. In the manuscript the collection was given the title, “A Little Book of Letters”. In that light, it might be viewed less as Einhard's book of letters than as a book of specimen letters with all the historical confusions and anomalies that arise from that other ahistorical purpose. This may help us to account for why so many names have been dropped from the manuscript, generally being replaced with a single initial or N. The latter stood in some cases, if not in all, for Nomen or Name, that is to say, a blank. Letter 31, for instance, lists the recipient as N. in the salutation, even though we know from the body of the letter that it was addressed to Bernharius. Perhaps these names and their historical significance held little importance for the scribe of the manuscript or for monastic readers.

The letters show us Einhard acting as an agent of the emperor, as a local patron, as a lay abbot, as the holder of properties, as an influential referee, as a marriage broker, and as an intellectual and friend. Along with the Translation and Miracles, they take us into the daily life of the Carolingian world, where the price of roof tiles, the eruption of blood feuds, and the arrangement of marriages daily preoccupied lords like Einhard. Once again, Einhard's witness to the Carolingian world is rich and precious.

But the collection of Einhard's letters is more complex than students might at first assume. There are few letters from others to Einhard in the collection, so that we almost exclusively encounter a one-sided correspondence and cannot easily judge Einhard's role in the thrust and parry of correspondence. A particular problem for both the translator and the reader are the formal salutations and valedictions in the collection, in which Einhard frequently demeans and humbles himself. We should, perhaps, give these no more thought than we do when we write “Dear Mr. Jones” to someone we may neither know nor like. But they do belong to a particular and characteristic voice that Einhard assumes in many of his letters, as does the epistolary exaggeration and panegyrical tone taken in the letters to his superiors. We should not allow the shifting tones of Einhard's voice in these letters to people placed at different levels of society to escape our attention entirely, for they reveal something of the intricate hierarchical character of Carolingian society and Einhard's reinforcement of it.

Nor can we afford to assume that Einhard was always completely honest or forthright in his letters. He was, for instance, careful to guard his secrets and not to put things in letters that might compromise him should the letter fall into the wrong hands [6.56]. The letters written during the two rebellions of 830 and 833 are among the most guarded in all his correspondence. Indeed, it is difficult to know where he fixed his loyalties during these years. But readers of the letters are, at least, allowed to suspect that this was a function of his guarded epistolary voice, and even then, to qualify further, of the voice we meet in the surviving letters. Einhard himself was probably responsible for removing his more direct and politically sensitive correspondence from the record. The several letters he wrote in early 830 as revolt broke out and he was unable to comply with changing imperial commands provide a study in the difficulties of a courtier's life in times of crisis and how Einhard used letters to try to protect himself and his reputation. There are few letters in the collection, in fact, that might be called personal; one needs to turn to the Lupus correspondence to appreciate that there were other epistolary worlds Einhard once occupied that are now entirely lost to us. Perhaps the compiler of the collection or Einhard himself simply thought that his monks did not require access to private correspondence of the sort he shared with Lupus.

Those who read the fascinating exchange with Lupus of Ferrières quickly realize that letters are missing from their exchange and that even the specific dating of the letters is somewhat uncertain. Still it does seem possible to see an approximate order and meaningful patterns in the letters that survive. Lupus's first letter to Einhard [7.1] was written around 830 during his first visit to Fulda. In it he expressed the hope that he might borrow Einhard's copy of Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights. Six years later in 836, in the last surviving letter [7.6], he informed Einhard that he hoped that he would soon be able to return that very book. Theirs was, to some degree, a tightly circumscribed and formal epistolary exchange; they didn't talk of politics or people, but of books and personal problems, philology and travel plans. But the correspondence is also one-sided, since Lupus in shaping his own letter collection kept or copied out only one of Einhard's letters [7.3], and this one was doubtless preserved because it set up Lupus's own long letter of consolation on Emma's death [7.5]. By placing the Einhard materials at the start of his collection, Lupus may also have wanted his readers to appreciate how intimately he had known the great old man, formerly of Charlemagne's court. But the real treasure in their correspondence is Einhard's letter, the one on Emma's death in 836, for it is one of the most touching and human of all the Einhard documents. Lupus's long letter of reply can strike the modern reader as strangely ineffective and cold, since it fails to meet Einhard in the depths of his emotional heart, but seeks to guide him intellectually out of his state of profound despair. But it belonged to a much older and richer genre of consolation, one to which Einhard himself had had recourse in his letter to the dying Bernharius [6.32]. But the formulaic and commonplace nature of Lupus's letter makes it seem at points a rhetorical exercise rather than a response on some deeper emotional level. The poignancy of Einhard's letter comes precisely from the fact that his grief was grounded in a personal and particular loss, and no universal consolation of Lupus's sort could ever salve a wound as individual as Einhard's was.

Einhard's last work, his ‘On the Adoration of the Cross’, is either a long letter or a short theological treatise. It has been placed in the correspondence with Lupus, because it properly belongs to their exchange of letters. At the start of the work, Einhard informs Lupus that he had worked on his question about the adoration of the cross when he was troubled by recent events, meaning, we must suppose, the sickness and death of Emma. Among his question-filled letters to Einhard, Lupus had apparently asked about the adoration of the cross. Did this lost letter precede or follow Einhard's letter [7.3]? In his letter of consolation on the death of Emma [7.5], Lupus thanked Einhard for dedicating the little book to him, which he may have received while working on his own lengthy letter. Letter 7.5 is so obviously an answer to 7.3 that it is difficult to know where exactly the ‘On the Adoration of the Cross’ fitted into this exchange. Lupus had clearly already received 7.3 and was hard at work on 7.5 when the treatise hit his writing desk.

But if its place in their exchange of letters is not entirely clear, its context and circumstances are. Though Lupus may have asked a brief question about the adoration of the cross, Einhard subordinated that issue, as well he should, and took up a problem that concerned him more profoundly: the nature of prayer and why it sometimes fails. In 7.3 he had confessed to Lupus that his deepest disappointment during Emma's illness had been that his prayers to the saints had accomplished nothing. After all that he had done in his devotion to them, Einhard may have felt almost cheated in early 836 when the saints ignored his prayers and Emma died. Thus, he turned his reply toward a consideration of proper prayer. His short treatise may propound rather unremarkable theology, but it is in its own way a remarkably human document, since it was a theology fashioned out of the crucible of his own suffering. His reflections may even have had a certain therapeutic value, as he tried to work out his relationship with the saints and with God in the light of his own recent crisis of faith.

There had, of course, been a good deal of Carolingian reflection on the cross. Hrabanus Maurus had already produced his famous, illustrated On the Praises of the Holy Cross …, but there were doubters. Claudius of Turin thought that the adoration of the cross was a dangerous practice, because there was almost nothing that could not then be adored, since everything connected with Christ's earthly presence—wood, mules, boats, mangers, old rags—would have to be adored [see Carolingian Civilization 35]. Einhard's own interest in the meaning of the cross apparently was of longstanding. He had probably thought of the cross in his role as the lay abbot of monasteries and their churches, all of which needed crosses. The silver arch he had had made served as the base for one such cross … he apparently gave to St-Servais in Maastricht. What one needs to imagine, in order to complete the effect, is the cross that surmounted that sumptuous silver pediment.

But in 836 Einhard's preoccupation was more with prayer than with the cross. The last word on the matter was, however, granted to Lupus and he chose not to comment on or even engage Einhard's treatise or the reasons he wrote it. Instead, he asked the old man still more questions about rare books and rare words. One has to wonder how much Lupus lost in this exchange of letters through his own various inattentions and preoccupations. Louis the Pious's own visit to Seligenstadt in 836, as reported by the Annals of Fulda, seems to have been a more touching gesture of respect toward a valued servant on the death of his wife, if we are allowed to surmise that that was why Louis visited his old courtier.

Einhard's relationship with Emma is a fascinating one to ponder, but there is too little material upon which to examine it in any depth. Had she gone from being his wife and companion to his spiritual sister and help-mate in his work as lay abbot? She surfaces only in the Michelstadt charters [3.7 and 3.10], three letters [6.15, 6.32, and 6.57], and in the Lupus correspondence. When had they married and where? Einhard along with Nithard and Dhuoda was one of only a handful of prominent lay people who were important writers in the ninth century, and Emma herself may be another example of a Carolingian woman writer. Einhard and Emma seem not to have had children, or at least none that survived the first two decades of the ninth century, since in the charter from 819 [3.10] they held out the chance, which may have been just a standard legal clause, that they might still have offspring. Their marriage seems to have been a long one, lasting from at least 815, and probably much earlier, until Emma's death early in 836. Ironically the couple later had their names mistakenly substituted at Lorsch for those of a pair of legendary lovers, the courtier Angilbert and Charlemagne's daughter Bertha, who were caught in a compromising tryst at the winter palace by the emperor himself. But it would be wrong to read too much into Einhard's relationship with Emma, since we see too little of their life together in any of Einhard's writing. What cannot be mistaken is Einhard's profound distress at her death, though the reasons he gives for his despair may irk some modern readers. But we must be careful not to project modern values onto past emotions, for they were as filled with and defined by convention as are our own.

As dangerous as it is to try to assess the character of an individual who lived over a thousand years ago, one can at least identify some of the basic characteristics of Einhard's personality. He was not, it would seem, a particularly candid, audacious, or fearless fellow, but then his role at court and in the wider Carolingian world may not have allowed him the luxuries of willfullness and daring. Let invective belong to Theodulf, moral disapproval to Alcuin, outspokenness to Agobard, and authority to Charlemagne; Einhard would take usefulness as his chief asset. What seems to have particularly shaped Einhard's career was a gift for making himself useful and accommodating to his superiors and patrons. At virtually every stage of his long career he found ways of pleasing his many superiors: Baugulf, Alcuin, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Judith, Lothar, and the counts who sought out his letter-writing skills late in his life [6.63]. He seems to have impressed each of these people in turn with his utility and they soon found themselves depending upon him for his loyalty, prudence, and learning, all good courtly virtues. Each of them, to varying degrees, came to rely on him for his special skills in the art of accommodation and the prompt performance of duty.

The subtle patience revealed in his dealings with scoundrels like Deusdona and Hilduin was an indication of his defining virtue, that of extraordinary prudence. He could on occasion show his irritation with the likes of Hilduin, but even then he was careful not to offend directly until it was safe to do so. Indeed, his political letters are generally studies in restraint. The corrective letter to Lothar [6.34] may reveal real courage, but it was the censorious courage expected of a pedagogue for a fallen student and strikes a tone not unlike the one he took in the letter to another of his charges [6.30]. And the transmission of the archangel Gabriel's message of reform to the emperor [5.3.13] was a bold gesture, but it was also one he was careful to keep private. Nor was Einhard ever embroiled centrally in any controversy or scandal, as even the aged Alcuin had once been.

Perhaps, as Walahfrid seemed to imply, his small size had done a great deal to form his character, forcing him away from the battlefield and toward a career as a consummately wise and careful courtier. Though Walahfrid thought that Einhard had suffered a great deal from his tininess, we can see that the little man himself played upon the theme and used his size to epistolary advantage. Thus, when writing to the mighty of the world, he played off his Smallness against his correspondents' Greatness in a complex game of flattery and self-abasement. He may have been one of many individuals in Carolingian society who profited from being non-threatening. The abstract characterizations with which he spoke of himself as Parvitas, Pvsilitas, Imbecillitas, Pvsillanimitas, and Tenvis Persona certainly belong to the medieval topos of humility, and Lupus employed a limited version of the same. But in Einhard's case these epithets had a real referent in his small size and his correspondents were doubtless aware of that dimension to their word play. Walahfrid went one step further, for in his Theoderic poem, written while Einhard was still an important figure at court, he turned Einhard's size into a theological lesson, for God could choose anyone to succeed, he wrote, no matter how weak or impaired he might seem [1.9].

Einhard's own preferred epithet was Peccator or sinner. He applied this word to himself in at least sixteen letters, the dedicatory inscription on his silver arch, two charters, and the preface to the Translation and Miracles. This characterization served, as it were, as his individualized sign, but it may not have had its roots in some deep sense of guilt. The charter in which Einhard and Emma donated Michelstadt to Lorsch [3.10] begins with some general reflections on the fallen state of humankind, but these should not be personalized. In fact, Einhard seems to have thought of the Carolingian people in general, and not just its rulers, as sinful [5.3.14 and 6.61]. The conception of himself as a sinner certainly belonged to the image of smallness and humility Einhard was drawing for himself. But was it an epithet he took in mid-career at Louis the Pious's court with its changing religious tastes, which were now more monastic and less Pelagian? Was even the taking of this epithet then another indication of Einhard's adaptibilty and conformity, or did it belong to the same inner drive that led him to embrace the saints so passionately in the 820s? One of his first uses of the epithet, after all, may have been on the charter from September 819 when he and Emma granted Michelstadt to Lorsch [3.10, and see 3.8.3].

In a world full of bitter rivalries and embattled palatines, Einhard succeeded in winning the favor of even his rivals. One of his great gifts, as his letters suggest, may have been that he threatened few other courtiers and no counts or kings. Theodulf, Walahfrid, and Ermold all seem to have had a grudging respect for him, though none could be called a friend. Einhard did have friends, but friendship at the heights of Carolingian society was always difficult, complicated as it was by the competitive nature of court life and the jockeying for royal favor by suitors. Gerward may have been, as Josef Fleckenstein suggested, one of Einhard's better friends, but in Einhard's one letter to him [6.14] the tension between the two of them is thick. For Gerward was, by this point, fully the emperor's man and he and, perhaps, his boss had grown weary of Einhard's excuses and his trading on the saints. The disaster of 830, when Louis and his men were overthrown, hit Einhard hard. He had been away from court when the rebellion broke out, but was reluctant to return and expose himself to a turbulent, remade court with its new power structures and shifting allegiances. His health, he claimed, had taken a turn for the worse. Whether his illness was real, feigned, or merely exaggerated, it was convenient and bought him the time he needed to retreat by boat to St-Bavo and ultimately, he thought, to his saints at Seligenstadt. He sent out three letters—to the emperor, empress, and some high member of court such as Gerward—to explain his absence, and to protect his reputation for loyalty and obedience [6.40-42]. Arthur Kleinclausz went to considerable trouble to try to prove that Einhard was truly ill in 830, and he may have been, but it is striking that he fell sick again in 833-834 when political crisis again struck and the sons of Louis the Pious again overthrew their father [6.53]. Had Einhard hit upon a useful strategy late in life for avoiding committing himself too early in these dynastic disputes? If so, he was certainly not the first to plead illness as a way of avoiding life-threatening conflict. Nine hundred years earlier Cicero had booked off sick on the day of the battle of Pharsalus.

Was Einhard a good and fair adminstrator of the properties he held? He was certainly a pluralist, but that was not particularly frowned upon in the ninth century. Moreover, it can't have been easy in the ninth century to manage far-flung properties, but Einhard seems to have worked hard at running the three main groupings of his properties and visited them when he could. Emma, if we may judge by his letter of lament [7.3], was an invaluable supervisor of some of his households. Her own two letters [6.15 and 6.57] suggest that she too received missi, petitions for help, and inquiries, and acted upon them. At Blandin in particular one can see the extent to which Einhard's organizational skills came to bear on what may have been a previously disorganized monastic operation [see 3.8], but once again Einhard was careful to insure that the record of his activity was preserved as he would have wished it preserved. Was he a demanding overlord? It is noteworthy that his greatest frustration as a property holder was with distant properties such as Fritzlar over which he can have had but minimal control [see 6.37 …]. A great deal depended upon the quality of the ecclesiastical officials he appointed. The only one of these we are in a real position to judge is Ratleig, who had been a priest and his notary at Michelstadt [5.1.8]. His intelligence, determination, and loyalty to Einhard emerge clearly from the pages of the Translation and Miracles. Ratleig would, in fact, succeed Einhard as abbot of Seligenstadt [1.15], doubtless as Einhard's own choice. He continued Einhard's active promotion of the cult of the martyrs and commissioned Hrabanus Maurus to write a poem in their honor [1.15]. Did he also commission the composition of the Passion of the Martyrs of Christ, Marcellinus and Peter, after he became the abbot of Seligenstadt?

Monastic deputies or vicedomini were also crucial to the administration of Einhard's properties; we know the names of at least four and can see unnamed deputies at work at still other places. Einhard managed to build—and it was a considerable achievement in and of itself—at least two churches. The first of these, at Michelstadt, was paid for out of his own resources [5.1.1], while he seems to have built the church at Seligenstadt with the help of Louis the Pious and his sons [6.38, 46, 51, appendix.A]. His foundation of that church would be remembered with great reverence nine hundred years later in an engraving that shows him steering the ship of Seligenstadt, filled with the abbots who succeeded him. …

Was Einhard a good lay abbot? He was certainly conscientious, and it cannot have been easy for a layman to run several monasteries. He was excluded from full monastic life and must have suffered, if his experience was like that of other lay abbots, from the doubts and disapprovals of the monks placed under him. One has to wonder if his promotion and cultivation of the saints served as a bridging mechanism, as a way for Einhard to orchestrate the activities of his monks around his goals, rather than theirs. We shall never know, nor shall we ever know what deliberative role some monks may have played in shifting the relics from Michelstadt to Seligenstadt. Almost the last letter in Einhard's collection [6.64] is an impassioned command for the monks of Seligenstadt to attend to the saints, to pray for him, and to regulate their lives. The cult of the saints also allowed Einhard to give his several properties, the monasteries at Seligenstadt, St-Bavo, St-Servais, and, even, his benefice at St-Salvius, a common and uniting hagiographic purpose.

It is extremely difficult to know a man who was as adept as Einhard was at hiding himself in busy work and in service to others. We come closest to him, I suspect, in the religious enthusiasm of the Translation and Miracles, which must be counted, aside from the letter about Emma's death, as the most heartfelt of Einhard's writings. No one who reads only the Life of Charlemagne should pretend to know Einhard. But dare we pit the pronounced classicism of his tastes in literature and art against the religious fervor of his later life? Certainly not, for both belonged to the same life; and we can imagine in the shallow line drawing of the lost triumphal arch and in something as precious as the ivory of the archangel Michael how these seemingly divergent tastes could fuse in the Carolingian mind.

Einhard was also fascinated by fantastic things, by the portents that had prefigured, he thought, the death of the emperor [2.32], by the startling appearance of Halley's Comet in 837 [6.61], and by the red liquid that dripped steadily from the saints' reliquary for seven days in 827 [5.1.10]. Classicism and a deep sense of wonder were but two of Einhard's varied responses to the world around him. My suspicion is that if more of Einhard's writings survived, these tendencies would become even more apparent, for they seem to have stood along with his guardedness, prudence, and usefulness as consistent features of his personality and personal interests. But it is also my sneaking suspicion that if more of Einhard's writings survived we might actually like him less, for just as Petrarch came to disapprove of the fuller Cicero he finally met in the Letters to Atticus, we too might find little Einhard a less tantalizing figure the more we learned of him. Life on the inside is, after all, filled with compromises, petty foibles, and incapacitating doubts that we on the outside scarcely have the right to judge.

Still, Einhard led a most interesting life, one filled with remarkable accomplishments, for he had not just stood in the presence of Charlemagne, but had actually assisted him in making the new administrative world of Aachen; and had not just watched, but had participated in the adornment of the great palace chapel, had seen its arches rise, and had heard the sound of hammers and the din of its workmen barking orders. He sealed his vision of that fleeting world in the crystalline amber of the Life of Charlemagne, which in its classical simplicity and careful symmetry is a work of enduring and unforgettable genius, as much Einhard's as Charlemagne's. But I would almost trade it, if I were forced, for the Translation and Miracles, which is a book whose psychology we have hardly begun to plumb. Even here in his various literary accomplishments, Einhard revealed once more his ability to meet, match, and shape the tastes of the times through which he passed. From epic poet to classical biographer, and from courtier to cultivator of the saints, Einhard was an adaptable creature of his times. The suppleness of his mind, his quickness as a courtier, and his intuitive grasp of his own talent and its limits allowed him not just to survive in the kingdoms and courts created by Charlemagne and his son, but to thrive.