Ein Reich ohne König? Akzeptanz, Deutung und Repräsentation königlicher Herrschaft im <i>regnum Italicum</i> zwischen dem 11. und 12. Jahrhundert. By ÉtienneDoublier. Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Schriften84. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. 2024. L

The volume under review is the published version of the author’s habilitation thesis (Habiliationsschrift), submitted to the University of Cologne in the summer semester of 2023. For those unacquainted with the genre, the habilitation is a second thesis, traditionally required in order to be eligible for a professorial chair in Germany (as in much of mainland Europe). It is typically longer and more ambitious than the doctoral thesis; it also normally needs to be in a second subfield, in order to demonstrate breadth and depth of expertise. Weighing in – a verb I used advisedly – at some 740 pages, with individual chapters of almost monographic length, Doublier’s book certainly betrays its origins within the vaunted German habilitation process (Habilitationsverfahren). But while this has an unfortunate tendency to produce bloated works of questionable scholarly value, Doublier’s is a testament to the system firing on all cylinders. For it is a truly superb piece of scholarship, which will have a lasting impact on the field. Doublier has chosen as his subject politics within the kingdom of Italy (the ‘realm without a king’ of his main title) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As he notes, this is a sorely neglected subject. For though the politics of the Italian realm in the ninth and tenth centuries have attracted much interest in recent years, from the likes of François Bougard, Wolfgang Huschner and Stefano Mangarano (on whose works Doublier gratefully draws), this dops off precipitously as we move into the eleventh century. By this point, Italian scholarship starts to lose interest in high-level politics within the peninsula, focusing instead on the local power structures which would dominate the region in years to come (above all, the pre-history of the later communes). German historians, meanwhile, tend only to treat the Italian kingdom insofar as it promises a better understanding of ideals and practices of rule north of the Alps (one thinks here of the work of Tilman Struve and Stefan Weinfurter). The general impression is that the Italian realm was something of an empty shell – a shadow of its former self, doomed to obsolescence. To his credit, Doublier shows it to have been anything but this. For while the Italian kingdom underwent fundamental shifts in these years, the result of which was a significant diminution and reconfiguration of royal power and influence, this was neither a simple nor an inevitable process. Doublier approaches his subject through four main themes, each of which is treated by a dedicated chapter. He opens with the role of the royal/imperial court in integrating and interacting with the leading Italian magnates. Of central importance here were bishops, who since the tenth century had established a firm hold on the urban political landscape which dominated the peninsula. Many bishops were appointed by the imperial court; and those who were not, still tended to see interaction with court as one of their central functions. This system, discernible from at least the 960s, started to fall apart over the course of the 1080s and was eclipsed entirely by the mid-1090s. The root causes lie less in the fraught politics of the Investiture Contest (though this certainly played its part), than in fundamental shifts within the Italian scene, occasioned by – or perhaps better: embodied in – the rise of urban associations (the communes) and other local power constellations. These threated episcopal control of the kingdom’s urban heartlands, fundamentally rewiring networks of power and association. This forced Henry IV and Henry V to improvise at a time when they were already sorely taxed elsewhere. Only gradually under Lothar of Supplinburg and Conrad III would a new approach emerge, one which sought to build new bases of royal authority where possible (as in the Tuscan March), while establishing a modus vivendi with urban associations and other new players elsewhere. These broad contours offer the essential background to Doublier’s second chapter, on the role of Italian notaries in the production of royal diplomas. Here again, bishops had a special part to play. Traditionally, the role of ‘chancellor’ for Italy was held by a leading prelate from the region, who enjoyed close ties to the royal/imperial court. He was, in turn, supported by an array of local notaries. Here, the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries also saw decisive change: while chancellors remained central figures into the 1090s, this tradition ends abruptly following the accession of Henry V in 1105. A major consequence is that Italian notaries cease producing diplomas almost overnight – and an important channel of communication between the Italian and German realms is lost. A similar story is told by ‘private’ charters and judicial notices, the subject of Doublier’s third chapter. Until the later eleventh century, royal/imperial diplomas were an essential point of reference for the former, which often frame themselves in terms of the matrix of the sovereign diploma, seeking to evoke its majestic forms. Thereafter, however, the diploma seems to have lost its lustre and local episcopal, margravial and communal charters start to go their own way, creating their own distinctive matrices of authority. The same holds for the judicial notices written in the names of rulers: until the later eleventh century these constituted an essential element of royal/imperial authority on the peninsula; thereafter, they start to disappear, merging into other emerging documentary traditions. The fourth and final chapter then traces the role of the kingdom within historical writing of the period. Here, major differences can be discerned between different authors and regions, with a particularly significant cluster of texts available for Milan in the later eleventh century. In general, however, similar tendencies are visible, with a growing emphasis on urban autonomy and lower power constellations, even when authors are happy to accord the emperor a nominal place atop the wider socio-political order. It would be impossible to do justice to the sheer range and depth of a work such as this in the space of a short review. Within each of his chapters, Doublier constructs a fundamentally new picture of how and why politics in Italy changed so substantially in the century or so between 1050 and 1150. In doing so, he offers a string of exciting findings on points of detail, some of which will interest individual readers more than others (the present reviewer was, perhaps predictably, struck by the identification of Bishop Oger of Ivrea with the distinctive draftsman-scribe Oger A). Anyone interested in politics and royal charters of the early and central Middle Ages will want to read this book, which will long be the first point of reference for the eleventh- and twelfth-century regnum Italiae. We are all immensely in Doublier’s debt.