Preface

Summary

This book offers us the history of one family as a microcosm of huge changes in Western European society between the ninth and twelfth centuries. This was a period in which the broadly post-Roman world of Late Antiquity gave way to a distinctively medieval landscape dominated by lords, castles, an ever-more tightly controlled peasantry and the growing power of aristocratic families and other elites. Historians have long debated the nature and chronology of these changes: did they happen slowly? suddenly? violently? Some even doubt that they happened at all in the ways traditionally understood. Italian historians have made vital contributions to the debates surrounding the centuries separating Charlemagne from Frederick Barbarossa, the Carolingian Empire from the communes, but the works of scholars such as Cinzio Violante and Giovanni Tabacco were rarely translated into English. For a variety of reasons (and of course with some notable exceptions), anglophone historiography of the period has traditionally been conducted within paradigms constructed from French (rather than German or Italian) building blocks. While Italian history and its modern historiography are hardly unknown, they are not nearly as familiar to anglophone students of the period as they ought to be. This is particularly the case in light of the rich collections of documentary evidence that survive from south of the Alps in greater numbers than most other parts of Europe in the same period, and which have the potential to cast light on all manner of issues in social, economic and political history. Meticulous analysis of these documents forms the bedrock of the arguments presented in this book, along with careful dissection of the fascinating narrative sources. The book builds on and responds to the work of Violante, Tabacco and other prolific and influential twentieth-century historians; but it also represents a burgeoning renewal of interest in early and central medieval Italy in the hands of a new generation of Italian scholars over the last few decades. The so-called ‘Hucpoldings’ are unusual in several ways – not least the extensive traces members of the family left in the surviving sources across several regions and several centuries, as they sought to accommodate their status to the often bewildering succession of Frankish, German and Italian rulers who fought to control the kingdom of Italy.