Palaces, Itineraries and Political Order in the Post-Carolingian Kingdoms

Abstract

Gall's imagining of these encounters therefore serves to illustrate the significance of the "palatium" as a central symbol of Carolingian royal power writ large, for ideological statements about which it provided the essential setting.Notker's unlikely depictions of Greeks and "Persians" represented a somewhat provincial and orientalising strand in the Western imagination, and in view of this it is perhaps ironic that his description of Charlemagne's palace (linked sequences of spaces used to control access to the ruler and emphasise his separateness) recalls less the open spaces of the real Aachen than the more intricate and intimidating layouts of the palace in Constantinople or Abbasid centres like Baghdad or Ukhaydin. 5 But the concept of the palace as a metonym for royal or imperial power was not confined to the West.For example, the Abbasid historian Tabari (an exact contemporary of Notker's) collapsed his explanation of the waning of Sasanian power in the seventh century into an anecdote about the physical disintegration of Khusraw II's royal palace. 6 The ubiquity of the royal palace as a political symbol as well as a physical structure, in the imagination as well as on the ground, is what makes it a useful "clue" for doing comparative history.As a specific category which overlaps different polities, it provides a hinge via which to consider questions of similarity and difference. 7I will attempt to return to such broader comparisons towards the end of this article, but my main aim is to discuss the representation of the palace as a tool for calibrating political change within the Frankish world, by comparing the ninth century with the tenth.The decades after the death of the last legitimate Carolingian emperor Charles III "the Fat" in 888 represented a moment of dramatic structural change in the Frankish world as the imperial landscape of the ninth century disintegrated and re-formed into the post-Carolingian world of the tenth; a shift from a large hegemonic empire ruled 5 On these see e.g.

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