Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700
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Kings and kingship 583
earth after Muhammad’s departure, albeit his revelation was less privileged.
66
Hence, if Byzantine emperors were political leaders who had acquired quasi-
religious authority, a caliph was the reverse: a religious authority who by that
token wielded political power. When ‘Abd al-Malik got a khalifal currency
going, it was adjusted to Arabic standards, and it was not his (or of course any)
image that was on it, but texts from the Qu’ran.
67
In the qu’sur on the Umayyad
empire’s desert fringe, enthusiasm for Romano-Persian models was not entirely
untrammelled.
68
The walls of Qusayr ‘Arnra were decorated with a fresco of
kings of the earth (among them the captive Roderic of the Visigoths) come
to do homage to their lord, in an unmistakable echo of the scene envisaged
in the one-time throne-room of Ctesiphon.
69
ButatKhirbat al-Mafjar, the
ceremonial of the Sasanian court seems to have been deliberately ‘sent up’.
70
The conquerors were not so smitten with the new world at their feet that they
could not laugh at it.
The Balkans
The political culture of Byzantium’s northern enemies has left no memorials of
its own. But there is a good chance that the down-to-earth prose of the so-called
‘Strategicon of the emperor Maurice’ lacks ancient ethnography’s obsession with
barbarian eccentricity. ‘Scythians’, it says (meaning Avars and Turks), ‘have a
monarchical form of government.’
71
It was surely right. Just as the Avars fade
from the pages of history, Frankish sources deck them out with a bewildering
array of titles (largely again mistaken as personal names). Every one is part of
the governmental vocabulary of other Steppe empires.
72
No matter what their
functions under the Avars, they are incontrovertible evidence that the khanate
was conceived like a steppe power. The same goes mutatis mutandis for the
Bulgars. Khans certainly led armies in person.
73
They were in some sense law-
givers.
74
Above all, they had the ideology that enabled steppe hegemonies to
66
Crone and Hinds (1986), p. 105 and passim.
67
Grierson (1960), but note that ‘Abd al-Malik’s very first issue in his series was iconic: his own image,
or even the Prophet’s?
68
For instructive debate on these, see Hillenbrand (1982); MacAdam (1986); Helms (1990); I owe
guidance on the matter to Dr Jeremy Johns.
69
Grabar (1954): Almagro et al.(1975).
70
Hamilton (1959): but I owe this insight to Dr Julian Raby.
71
Maurice, Strategicon xi.2 (pp. 360–1); trans. Dennis (1984), p. 116.
72
Pohl (1988), pp. 292–306: see above, p. 572 and note 5.
73
Pohl (1988), p. 177; though cf. Menander, Fragment 12 (5) (pp. 136–7). Miracles de Saint D
´
em
´
etrius
i.13 (ii,p.46), and Fredegar, Chronicle iv.48, for the khagan’s preference to be served by those ‘whose
destruction will cause me no pain’.
74
Browning (1975), pp. 124–5.
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584 patrick wormald
deal with Romans on terms of equality, as few other barbarians could. When
the Avar khan claimed in true steppe style that ‘there existed no one, even as far
as the sun extended its gaze, who would be able to confront him’, a diplomat
treated him to the story of the Egyptian tyrant Sesostris, just as another had
done for the Shahanshah’s ambassador a few decades before.
75
Nomads faced
Rome for the first time with polities that needed handling as Persia always had
been: like a partner in an armoured diplomatic minuet. They acquired their
style not from Rome itself nor only from Persia, but in all probability also from
China.
The Strategicon’s Slavs are in strong contrast. ‘They absolutely refuse to be
enslaved or governed...There are many kings (rhegon) among them, always at
odds with one another.’
76
Slavs have rulers, but so many and disparate that they
defy treatment as an organised polity. This assessment too can be confirmed.
Slav chieftains played mostly bit-parts in the drama of Thessalonica’s many
sieges.
77
Some are called rhex, but Byzantines were habituated to this term by
knowledge of Latino-Germanic monarchy.
78
The Slavs’ own word may have
been ‘knez’, their basic noun for ‘(local) lord’.
79
They could form warbands,
but seemingly without the potential to snowball into kingdoms like those of
Germans.
80
The Strategicon ascribes this plausibly if predictably to backward
military technique. At any rate, Slav culture was somehow antipathetic to polit-
ical coagulation. The Wends made Samo, a trader from a Frankish background,
their ‘king’ after he helped their revolt against Avar taskmasters; he ruled for
thirty-five years, but set up no dynasty (for all his twelve wives and twenty-two
sons), nor any other apparatus of a monarchical system.
81
Aversion to state-
formation is no longer so unfashionable as Slav nationalists once found it. Slav
society may have looked acephalous because their settlements, as in parts of
pre-colonial Africa, were governed by their own headmen. Kingship as under-
stood by the other cultures covered in this chapter was something Slavs were
by and large able to do without.
75
Theophylact, History vi.xi.8–15; Menander vi.1,pp.64–7 (cf. v.1, xv.3,pp.48–9, 150–1).
76
Strategicon xi.4 (pp. 370–3, 380–1), trans. Dennis (1984), pp. 120, 123.
77
Menander, Fragment 21,pp.194–5; Miracles de Saint D
´
em
´
etrius i.13, ii.1, 2, 4 (ii,pp.46–7, 87, 95,
112, 122–4). The exception, ‘Kouber’, ii.5, was almost certainly a Bulgar in charge of ex-Romans (ii,
pp. 38–50); and the relatively active Mauros had been in Roman service, ii.5 (ii,pp.151–8).
78
Theophylact, History i.vii.5, vi.vii.1–5, and especially vi.ix.1;cf. Procopius, Wars v.i.26, and M.
Whitby (1982), pp. 426–7.
79
Kahl (1960), pp. 178–9: certainly it cannot have been kr
´
ol (etc.), a word derived, doubtless along
with loftier kingly conceptions, from Charlemagne: cf. Wolfram (1970), p. 7.
80
Pohl (1988), pp. 97–8, 126–7.
81
Fredegar, Chronicle iv.48, 68 and for comment, Pohl (1988), pp. 256–61.Cf.,however, Gesta Archiepis-
coporum Salisburgensium,pp.7–15, where Samo heads the list of Carinthian rulers. See also Fouracre,
chapter 14 above and Kobyli
´
nski, chapter 19 above.
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Kings and kingship 585
barbarian kingship: celts
The rest of this chapter will show that sub-Roman monarchy in the West derives
substantially from the Roman imperial model. The question is whether it does
so exclusively. Did anything in their own traditions anticipate the experience
of kingship among Europe’s post-Roman masters? The best place to begin
answering this question is with the Celtic-speaking peoples of the far north-
west. Rome had not overrun Ireland or Scotland, so there is a chance that their
kingships were essentially native organisms. Celtic evidence has often been
read as a reflection of ancient indigenous arrangements.
82
The first thing to be said is that ‘Celtic’ for present purposes must mean
‘Irish’. There is a rich body of material from seventh- and eighth-century
Ireland. The comparable Welsh evidence is very largely high medieval in date
and relates only problematically to an earlier period. There is almost nothing
comparable from Scotland.
83
Incidental references occasionally serve to align
(or contrast) the Irish world with that of Briton or Pict. Only for Ireland itself
can any coherent picture be drawn. A second and seminal point is that the chief
determinant of the texts on Irish secular culture is that they were produced and
preserved by men who made a fetish of the past. The filid were in recognisable
line of descent from the druids of pre-Roman Gaul and Britain. The label
‘druid’ had been dropped along with the priestly functions of paganism. But
filid was the same sort of privileged class, membership of which came partly by
birth and partly from exhaustive training in its own schools. Their speciality
too was recording of all varieties of tradition, from genealogy and saga, through
praise of rulers (and their rebuke in satire or curses which filid prestige had
a way of bringing to fruition), to the preserving and expounding of law, the
province of the distinct ‘brehon’ branch of the learned orders.
84
Much that
we know about the theory of early Irish kingship, and quite a lot about the
practice, was transmitted by men with a professional archaising bias.
It is no longer fashionable to stress pre-Christian strands in this tradition
as much as ‘nativist’ scholars used to. The new view is that, whatever its
position in prehistoric society, the filid class was in effect coterminous with
the monastic clergy when it began to put its traditions into historical form.
As soon as such traditions appeared in writing, they were deeply marked by
82
What follows draws on Wormald (1986a), but reconsideration has been prompted by important work
since this was written (in 1983). Lack of space precludes discussion of succession and inauguration.
For which cf. O’Corr
´
ain (1971), with Dumville (1977), pp. 85–8,Wormald (1986a), pp. 158–60, and
(for Scotland) Wormald (1996), pp. 134–7 with n. 5.
83
For what can be said about the development of the ‘Celtic Countries’ in this period, see Davies,
chapter 9 above and Stancliffe, chapters 15 and 16 above.
84
See, for example, Dillon (1946), pp. 259–63;Kenney (1968), pp. 19–26, 34–46;Byrne (1973),
pp. 13–16, and (1974): Mac Cana (1979).
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586 patrick wormald
Romano-Christian influences.
85
The fact remains that what we have is a blend,
and one that derived more of its flavour from unquestionably pre-Christian
ingredients than did other ‘barbarian’ political cultures. But the extent to which
this put a brake on historical development in fact as well as image can be ascer-
tained only by testing the filid model against the known performance of Irish
potentates.
Ri, the Irish word for king, is cognate with its Latin and Sanskrit equivalents
rex and raj.Aseries of echoes suggests that the office designated by this word
may itself have taken a similarly quasi-religious form in each of these three
cultures. It is thus that early Irish kingship can be described as ‘sacral’.
86
Yet
the Irish tradition had been thoroughly Christianised by the seventh century,
as appears from the tract On the Twelve Abuses of the World. The misfortunes
attendant on the ‘abuse’of an ‘unjust king’ mirror the blessings of ‘true’ kingship
promised in the supposedly pre-Christian Testament of Morann:‘the fruits . .
.ofthe earth are diminished . . . hurricanes and stormy winters forbid the
earth’s fertility and the sea’s good gifts’, and so on.
87
Had this tract seemed in
any way ‘pagan’ to contemporaries, it would hardly have become the formative
text it was for early medieval authorities on kingship. Its definition of justice
entails defence of strangers, wards and widows, punishment of thieves and
adulterers, protection of the church, sustenance of the poor. As for the unjust
king, ‘as many as are the sinners that he hath had beneath him in the present,
he shall have over him by way of torment in future’. It was the Old Testament
that taught the Irish, as it did the Byzantines and would the Carolingians,
their standards of what kings should and should not do. Special consideration
was to be visited on the indigent, and fierce reprisals on offenders against
God and His churchmen. An Irish canon, ascribed to Jerome but certainly a
native composition, says that ‘the word of a king is a sword for beheading, a
rope for hanging, it casts into prison, it condemns to exile’. Those who shed
the blood of a bishop, abbot or scribe were to be ‘crucified’ (with the alternative
of paying seven ‘slave-girls’ in the native currency). Men are in fact on record
as being executed in 746 for ‘violation of St Patrick’s sanctuary’.
88
If the past had an enduring effect on post-conversion kingship, it may
have lain not in voluntary pagan impulses but in the way that traditional filid
defiance of kings was given new legitimacy by Old Testament prophets like
Elijah. Irishmen were not the only saints to follow St Martin in this mode of
behaviour, but they were perhaps particularly susceptible to it. Columbanus’
notorious abuse of Frankish kings was not an isolated phenomenon: Columba
85
Above all, McCone (1990), pp. 22–7.
86
Binchy (1970), pp. 1–12.
87
De Duodecim Abusivis, ed. Hellmann, pp. 52–3, trans. Laistner (1957), p. 145.
88
O’Corr
´
ain, Breatnach and Breen (1984), pp. 390–1.
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Kings and kingship 587
correctly forecast the death of kings.
89
Tw o other details may be pertinent. Irish
kings were more prone than their Germanic colleagues to resign the throne
altogether and take up life as a monk.
90
Second, Irish church councils never
had royal chairmen. There were many kings at the 697 Synod of Birr, but
its president was Abbot Admon
´
an. Conceivably, enough of a pre-baptismal
aura lingered over Irish royalty to foster reserve about outright ecclesiastical
leadership by kings.
For all its image of priestly inaction, Irish kingship yielded a richer crop of
rulers killed in battle than anywhere else in the West. From when they become
contemporary (which for these purposes is c.600) until 707, the Annals of
Ulster list at least fifty kings as casualties.
91
It seems that armed conflict could
be expected to result in deaths at the highest level.
92
In accounting for so
much kingly fatality, can we go beyond the expectation that kings would lead
their peoples in war, as in many of the world’s chieftaincy systems? The first
explanation is simply that, as the gazetteer of European monarchs in 700
showed, there were so many Irish kings. The number of kingdoms (tuatha,
literally ‘tribes’) has been variously reckoned between 80 and 185.
93
The reason
why they were so many and so small was that the force of Irish tradition,
whether or not bolstered by a lingering sense of royal blood’s mystique, did
not allow the elimination of subordinate kingships. Dignitaries hung on to
the title of king when elsewhere in Europe they would have become subreguli
or praefecti (if surviving at all).
94
The numerous obscure kings from midland
dynasties recorded as falling in U
´
ıN
´
eill battles might therefore have gone down
in most European chronicles as victims of aristocratic feud. A further point is
that this multitude of royalty was marshalled in an elaborate hierarchy whereby
any ri was subject to a riuri (‘great king’) and he to a ri riuirech (‘king of great
89
Adomn
´
an, Life of Columba i.36:inthis instance the prophecy was of something remarkably like the
‘threefold death’ of Irish saga (see below). For the overall problem, Wood (1989).
90
Stancliffe (1983): for Anglo-Saxon cases, see below, pp. 596, 604.
91
Calculations are confined to The Annals of Ulster as the only set of annals to give a generally
contemporary picture for the seventh century; on the date from which they can be considered
contemporary, compare Hughes (1972), pp. 115–19, with Smyth (1972): a debate best resolved by
accepting that entries were made from the late sixth century, but go into detail only from the
mid-seventh.
92
The figure of fifty omits all those identifiable as members of royal families who are not known to
have reached the throne.
93
O’Corr
´
ain (1978), pp. 10–11.
94
Charles-Edwards (1989), pp. 34–8, though cf. O’Corr
´
ain (1978), pp. 9–10.Wormald (1986a), p. 165,
needs qualification to this extent. Davies (1993), pp. 105–10, sketches a contrast in number and size
of kingdoms between Ireland and other ‘Celtic’ areas, notably Scotland; but it may not be sound
to base conclusions about the extent of Pictish royal power on the survival of a single king-list:
Adomn
´
an, Life of Columba xi.42, describes a ‘regulus’ofthe Orkneys at King Bridei’s court, such as
to imply a relationship of Irish hierarchical type.
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588 patrick wormald
kings’) who might also be a ri c
´
oicod (‘king of a fifth’, meaning one of the five
provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Meath). As elsewhere, an
overlord’s prerogatives included command of a subordinate’s military service.
95
The roll-calls of royal dead in U
´
ıN
´
eill battles show that this right was more
than a legalistic abstraction.
Another royal entitlement was to tribute, which, as so often in early medieval
Europe, was in food-renders. Kings could travel around their own people
consuming its renders as hospitality, but it was safer to take the tribute of
the subjugated in the form of herds on the hoof.
96
The distinction between
tribute-levies in live cattle and cattle-raiding may not have been too clear.
97
Furthermore, one reason why legends have so many kings meeting their fate
in a house rather than on the field may be that dependence was marked by the
ritual of entering a lord’s home or entertaining him at table. The risk of erupted
tension on such occasions was real enough. Thus, while the preponderant
evidence from early Christian Ireland breathes the spirit not of warrior culture
but of traditional learning, there was ample scope for royal aggression. What
set the pattern were the multiplicity of kings and the mechanisms of regnal
hierarchy – each themselves functions of Irish tradition.
The key texts for the domestic context where Irish kings so often appear
are law-tracts and quasi-legal statements of royal dues and duties. The fullest
of these date to the twelfth century and may reflect later intensification of
royal power.
98
The outlines of such a schema are, however, visible in Cr
´
ıth
Gablach,atract of probably the early eighth century that draws on earlier
material.
99
Basically a disquisition on status, from the lowest ranks of the
peasantry up to the afore-mentioned kingly pyramid, it defines ranks in terms
of their accoutrements. For a king as for peasants, this involves an account of
household organisation. Listed rights and obligations include not just food-
supply and military service but summons of the assembly (oenach)that was
the main point of contact between king and people. Attendants range from
those hostages to which overlordship entitled him, to musicians and jugglers.
Prescribed royal activities, each assigned its weekday, are drinking, judgement,
95
Binchy (1970), p. 31.Cf. Charles-Edwards (1989), p. 38, for the military obligations of the Airgialla
to the U
´
ıN
´
eill, and Byrne (1973), pp. 196–9, for those of Munster kings to Cashel: the comparison
is worked out by P. Irvin in an unpublished paper that he kindly showed me.
96
Charles-Edwards (1989), pp. 28–33, gives a pellucid account of the logic of this process.
97
In saga form, the struggle of the U
´
ıN
´
eill to enforce their lordship over Leinster is represented as a
series of attempts to collect vast herds of livestock allegedly owed for a Leinster king’s dishonouring
of a king of Tara’s daughters: Dillon (1946), pp. 103–14.
98
Lebor na Cert. The Book of Rights, ed. Dillon; Byrne (1973), pp. 43–7;cf. also O’Corr
´
ain (1978),
pp. 26–30.
99
Cr
´
ıth Gablach, ed. Binchy; Mac Neill (1923); Charles-Edwards (1986).
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Kings and kingship 589
the board-game fidchell, hunting, sexual relations, horse-racing and judgement
again. The point is to fit the pattern of kingly existence into the frame of the
seven-day Romano-Christian week: sex is on Thursday because an Irish synod
had prohibited it on Sundays and the fast-days of Wednesday and Friday.
100
What emerges through these stylised obscurities is that the military and legal
activity common to mainline European kingship accompanies the same social
priorities of drinking and hunting.
A similar programme of royal deportment can be glimpsed between the lines
of sources whose main concern is with other matters. One of his late-seventh-
century Lives sets St Patrick in confrontation with a whole court full of ‘kings,
satraps, dukes, princes and magnates’ around the malignant King Laogaire at
Tara, which is called a palatium with a cenaculum (‘dining-room’). It would
be a fair deduction that royal residences of the historical period, like nearby
Lagore or Knowth, could be described in similar terms.
101
Like many another
early medieval king, Laogaire felt constrained to consult an assembly of ‘elders
and all his senate’ before committing himself to the new faith.
102
Much the
same impression of the Pictish court is given by Adomn
´
an.
103
However strange
the things that foreign visitors to an Irish royal court might have been told
about the way kings behaved, the evidence before their eyes would have been
reassuringly familiar, its minuscule scale excepted.
A law-tract, The false judgements of Caratnia, tells how cases submitted to a
legendary king would be referred by him to his judge, Caratnia. In all fifty-one
suits, the king declares that Caratnia’s judgement is false. Each time Caratnia
can show that it is correct. An Irish king could apparently come under the
same sort of petitioner pressure as a Roman emperor, but it is brehons that
are credited with reliable response.
104
There is no extant legal statement by
an early Irish king. Irish – and Welsh – law consists overwhelmingly of tracts
transmitted by the professional elite who produced them. Yet ‘good judgement’
was clearly a prime requisite of ideal kings. Apart from allotting two weekdays to
judgement, Cr
´
ıth Gablach envisages (usually emergency) conditions in which
kings might issue decrees. It also avers that ‘he is not a king...towhom no fines
for breach of promulgated law are paid’.
105
A text laying out the arrangement of
100
The Irish Penitentials, ed. Bieler, pp. 116, 265; Charles-Edwards (forthcoming).
101
Muirchu, Life of Patrick cc.15, 19.Cf. Eogan and Byrne (1968); and, on the realities of historical
Tara and other alleged royal centres, Wailes (1982).
102
Muirchu, Life of Patrick c.21.
103
Adomn
´
an, Life of Columba ii.32–5;cf.Annals of Ulster 729, and Alcock (1988).
104
Kelly (1988), Appendix 1,no.5: this appendix is an invaluable ‘layman’s guide’ to the range of extant
Irish legal materials. Cf. ibid.p.24, and Kelly (1986), p. 80.
105
Kelly (1988), pp. 19–24; Charles-Edwards (forthcoming). Cf. Binchy (1971); O’Corr
´
ain et al.(1984),
pp. 386–7 and notes; Gerriets (1988); McCone (1990), pp. 9, 24.
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590 patrick wormald
law-courts puts a king in what looks like a presiding, if not directive, position.
106
The ‘Instructions’ of Cormac mac Airt, a legendary Irish king, expect much
of royal justice.
107
He has been compared with Numa Pompilius, second king
of Rome; the parallel shows how jurist law might find ideal royal prototypes.
An Irish king could no more pronounce law without attendant experts than
Justinian, Edward I or Napoleon. He might lack the resources or the special
duty to implement law that these rulers had. He still stands for the law, as they
did.
There is no reason to doubt that Irish kings had less dominant roles in the
societies they ruled than their counterparts. Nor can it be doubted that this
relative reticence was linked with the ascendancy of learned orders. Kings in
Ireland had less power than elsewhere; lawyers, poets and prophets had more.
Butitwas not that the strength of the professions caused the weakness of
kings. Rather, the degree to which Irish kingship remained small-scale gave
the professions their scope.
108
Whether their tradition could have retained its
hold had kings commanded the sort of resources they did in the rest of the
West is a quite different question. By the High Middle Ages, Irish, Welsh
and Scots had constructed quite elaborate structures of ruler power. There is
no longer any question about a hierarchy of officials, nor of the taxation and
services they could enforce. The moral here is important. Traditional Celtic
learning was no more proof against escalating royal power than against the
appeal of Christianity. The problem that remains is how far such developments
were already under way in the period when law-tracts and sagas were first
committed to writing. The likelihood is that, if they were in train by 700, the
evidence would have hidden this from us. In any event, Irish society was not
necessarily stuck in the time-warp that has distorted the vision of contemporary
commentators, and of some of their latter-day avatars.
barbarian kingship: germans
For the purposes of this chapter, ‘Germanic’ kings are defined as those whose
ownnames and/or that of the people they professed to rule derived from
languages philologists call Germanic. This section thus covers the kings who
governed the one-time dioceses of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Britannia in the post-
Romanera. The definition is somewhat hesitant because many modern scholars
are far from sure that either societies or their rulers are helpfully described as
‘Germanic’.
109
106
Kelly (1986) and (1988), Appendix 1,no.71.
107
The Instructions of King Cormac mac Airt, ed. Meyer; cf. O’Cathasaigh (1977), pp. 10–11, 59–65, 105.
108
Davies (1993), especially pp. 122–3.
109
Cf. Halsall, chapter 2 above.
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Kings and kingship 591
The conundrum has a twofold root. In the first place, a cardinal fact of
early German history is that we never meet persons or classes whose position
approaches that of Celtic filid. The Germanic past had no guarantors. Almost
all we know of the Germans’ history before, during and after the era of the
invasions comes from pens which, whether or not wielded by those of Roman
origin, were steeped in Roman values.
110
Secondly, the Germans were affected
by Rome long before the invasions, in ways and to extents which those Celts
who withstood Roman conquest were not.
111
Well-known ‘barbarian’ royal
mannerisms such as the giving of gold rings or military gear to followers, or
fixing an enemy’s head on a stake, were anticipated by victorious emperors.
112
Yettosay that is clearly not to say enough. Those mannerisms became firmly
embedded in a barbarian idiom. The Roman legacy was so thoroughly medi-
atised that scholars have barely recognised it, and contemporaries could never
have done. Germanic rex and Byzantine basileus may have a common ancestry,
but they are no more the same animal than gorilla and chimpanzee. So it is still
necessary to explore the accessible past of ‘Germanic’ kingship: and, whether
or not this is meaningfully called ‘Germanic’, it remains convenient to do
so – without inverted commas.
Proto-kings
Tw o considerations suggest that Germanic kingship was already ancient before
the barbarian invasions, but each also implies that its powersand responsibilities
were then very different from what they became. In the first place, the earliest
monument of a Germanic vernacular, Ulfila’s fourth-century translation of the
Bible into Gothic, exploits quite a rich vocabulary of rule. Especially striking
is reiks, meaning a ruler of the synagogue like Nicodemus, but also the chief
Pharisees, and indeed the ‘Prince of Devils’.
113
Though confined as a noun to
Gothic, other derivatives recur widely: we need look no further than Reich. The
first of two important things here is that its near-universal stem strongly sug-
gests that the word was borrowed from Celtic, and so dates back to the distant
110
The central contention and principal foundation of the important recent studies by Goffart (1980),
ch. 1, and (1988).
111
Thompson (1965), especially chs. 2–3;Hedeager (1988); Todd (1992), especially chs. 3, 5–6:Heather
(1994c).
112
For example Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae no. 2313 for a legionary receiving gold collars and armlets
at the behest of Hadrian; L’Ann
´
ee Epigraphique (1956), p. 124 for a soldier being given a horse and
weapons by Marcus Aurelius; cf. generally Campbell (1984), pp. 198–203.For heads on stakes, see
McCormick (1986), pp. 18, 36, 40–1, etc., and fig. 6.One might ponder in the same spirit the
obsequies of Beowulf (lines 3169–82); for Augustus, Dio, Histories, lvi.42, and Attila, Jordanes,
Getica xlix.256–8.
113
Wolfram (1970), pp. 3–6;Heather and Matthews (1991), pp. 190–5.
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592 patrick wormald
time when Celts and Germans were in close contact. Secondly, Procopius says
that rhex was the title used of no less formidable a suzerain than Theoderic
the Ostrogoth, and ‘was what barbarians were wont to call their leaders’; the
appearance of rix on Ostrogothic coinage is supporting evidence.
114
Oneimpli-
cation is that the reiks of Ulfila’s day had grown very substantially in power by
Theoderic’s. Another is that the terminology of early Germanic kingship was
not only diverse but also fluid. The same point is made by the word, which had
the greatest future in this respect, though conspicuously absent from Ulfila’s
‘wordhoard’, kuningaz.Itwas well enough established in West Germanic to
be borrowed by Finnish and Slavonic; the distinctly underpowered chieftaincy
represented by Slavonic knez may be the clue to the term’s lack of resonance
for Ulfila.
115
There is no reason why a word meaning merely ‘member of a kin’
should come to designate anything special, unless the ‘kin’ represented were
the ‘tribe’ or people: that is, a ruler so described was a focus and symbol of
ethnic identity.
116
If that were its basic meaning, we might very well expect it
to acquire new significance in an age of new ethnic formations.
The other evidence on early Germanic kingship is of course that of Roman
writers, and their lessons are ultimately the same as that of vocabulary. That
Tacitus should have thought that Germans had kings when Caesar did not is
best explained if they were generally too marginal to attract Caesar’s notice.
Tacitus’ famous formula, ‘reges ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute sumunt’ (literally
translated ‘they take kings for their high-birth, war-leaders for their courage’),
appears to mean that kings were not war-leaders, nor, apparently, did they have
much influence in the judicial or religious spheres.
117
Yet Caesar and Tacitus
both knew of figures altogether more formidable than such royal wraiths.
118
Moreover both writers say enough about early Germanic society to suggest
what worked the transformation. Each implies that a chieftain might attract
followings of warriors in return for hospitality, and a share of the loot in treasure
and particularly weapons that their service had secured. Hence, whatever the
notional position of kings, the initiative in the conditions of more widespread
warfare from the late second century onwards lay with anyone offering the
prospect of the glory and plunder that was war’s reward. A dux ex virtute
appointed in an emergency might thus acquire the permanence of a rex for
himself and his family; a rex might indeed achieve the role of a dux.Warband
114
Procopius, Wars v.i.26:DeVries (1956), pp. 303–5;Wolfram (1967), pp. 41–2.
115
De Vries (1956), pp. 291–2; Kahl (1960), pp. 178–84, 238–9 (n. 212); above, p. 572.Onthe problem
of the North Germanic forms of the word, see Kahl (1960), pp. 198–204; also Green (1965), p. 347.
116
Green (1965), p. 317,n.4;Wallace-Hadrill (1971), p. 13.
117
Caesar, Gallic War vi.21–3;Tacitus, Germania x–xii.
118
Caesar, Gallic War i.31–53:Tacitus, Annals i.55–68, ii.9–17, 26, 44–6, 62–3, 88.Onall this, see
Schlesinger (1956), pp. 116–21;Wallace-Hadrill (1971), pp. 5–7.