What Did <i>Comitatus</i> Mean in the Ottonian-Salian Kingdom?

Abstract Hartmut Hoffmann’s seminal essay ‘Grafschaften in Bischofshand’ made clear that the grants of comitatus to episcopal authorities by Ottonian and Salian rulers from the later tenth to the early twelfth century did not provide the basis for the emergence of ecclesiastical polities during the later twelfth and thirteenth century. However, in discussing the transfer of these comitatus Hoffmann assumed that each grant consisted of the royal judicial bannum , previously held by a count. On the basis of this assumption, Hoffmann revived the model of a scattered county ( German Streugrafschaft ) first developed by Walter Schlesinger in the context of the New Constitutional History, which denied the existence of public or governmental authority in early medieval Germany. Hoffmann, by contrast, accepted that the Ottonian and Salian kings did exercise public/governmental authority but saw the comitatus in this period as divorced from the territoriality of the earlier Carolingian period in which a count’s judicial bannum was exercised over a circumscribed area, usually coterminous with one or more pagi . However, when one examines the grants of comitatus discussed by Hoffmann, it is clear that this term was polyvalent in meaning. In some cases, it is evident that rulers transferred to bishops the royal judicial bannum , as Hoffmann argued. In other cases, the grant of a comitatus did not entail the transfer of the bannum but rather of royal fiscal assets. As a consequence, it is possible to reject Hoffmann’s assumption that the identification in the sources of a comitatus spread across several pagi necessarily entailed the existence of a Streugrafschaft whose holder exercised the judicial bannum and, in turn, Hoffmann’s views regarding the deterritorialization of a count’s administrative and judicial authority over a pagus or pagi with specific boundaries. Ultimately, these findings permit a reopening of the question regarding the fate of the Carolingian-style comital office that was based on the specific and circumscribed territory of a pagus or pagi , and whether this type of office actually disappeared under the later Ottonians or even under the Salians.