Simon MacLean. The chronicle of Regino of Prum and Adalbert of Magdeburg

[sovice_snezni]

Simon MacLean. History and politics in late Carolingian and Ottonian Europe. The chronicle of Regino of Prum and Adalbert of Magdeburg. 2009

Another striking theme in Book II is warfare (especially 860, 871, 873, 874, 876, 890, 891). Early medieval historical works are notoriously reticent about the mechanics of battle, preferring to dwell instead on its causes and outcomes and the moral lessons to be drawn there­ from. Regino’s relatively detailed accounts of battles are therefore as unexpected as they are valuable. Naturally, he did not refrain from explaining their outcomes in moral terms, so his descriptions of warfare were congruent with contemporary historians’ broader purpose of interpreting divine judgements on the deeds of powerful men. We could nonetheless also see them as having a more practical instruc­tional purpose. As far as Regino’s intended audience at the court of Louis the Child would have been concerned, there was an elephant in the room: the Battle of Bratislava (or Pressburg) which had been fought in 907. This engagement between the Bavarians and Hungarians ended in unequivocal defeat for the former, claimed the lives of several leading aristocrats and led to a fundamental reconfiguration of the high nobil­ity. In 908, another Hungarian raid laid the eastern kingdom low, and the casualties included some of the nobles praised by Regino in the latter stages of his text. One wonders if the desire to avoid mentioning these disastrous events was one reason that Regino tactfully ended his work in 906. It may also be more than coincidence that the one extended piece of explicit source-criticism undertaken by Regino in Book II concerns the Hungarians. In the 889 entry he digresses into an analysis of their origins and way of life, concluding that they must be the same people as the Scythians he had read about in the works of Justin and Paul the Deacon. Although he quoted the relevant passages directly, he silently edited them in a way that suggests an attempt to make them fit what he knew of the present-day Hungarians. The endpoint of his discussion turns to Hungarian modes of warfare. After stating that ‘their way of fighting is all the more dangerous in that other peoples are not used to it’, Regino offers an explicit comparison with Breton tactics, which were similar in most key respects and which had been described in detail in earlier parts of the Chronicle. The Hungarians/Scythians - nomadic shaven-headed cannibalistic blood-drinkers - might be culturally alien, but they were militarily familiar and, like the Bretons, beatable. The generals of Louis the Child and his successors gradually started to get on top of the Hungarians thereafter, and it is hardly likely that their success was attributable to intense strategy sessions spent poring over Regino’s accounts of the Battle of Jengland (860) or the Siege of Angers (873). We might nevertheless see in his attempt to educate the young king in the finer points of warfare the response of a scholarly armchair general to a new threat whose raids were getting slightly too close for comfort.