Monarchy could take the form of empire. Only in Italy perhaps, among western lands, was there still a sense of Constantinople as the imperial centre of the Roman world. Tenth-century historians, namely Widukind, Liudprand, Flodoard and Richer, produced powerful images of royalty. In this respect, Italy in the tenth century was different from other post-Carolingian lands. And even in Italy, but still more clearly elsewhere in Frankish Europe, an ideal-type of Carolingian government was transmitted to the learned through the written residue of capitularies, conciliar decrees and documents. In the course of the tenth century, the patrilinear dynastic link with the Carolingians was broken in both west and east Frankish kingdoms. In 888, the old Carolingian realms had created kings out of their own guts. The west Frankish kingdom has been treated in much recent historiography as a tenth-century paradigm. The caliph's response to the tenth-century Ottonian kingdom prefigured that of many modern historians.