In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages by Michael McCormick
  • Marios Costambeys
Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Critical edition and translation of the original text by Michael McCormick. [Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Humanities.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Distrib. Harvard University Press. 2011. Pp. xxii, 287. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-88-402363-0.)

If Michael McCormick’s monumental Origins of the European Economy (New York, 2001) decisively extended the traditionally short-sighted horizons of historians [End Page 325] of the early-medieval West to hazy new distances, his new book sharpens our focus with brilliant precision onto the trans-Mediterranean ambition of a single regime—the most important of the period—at the court of Charlemagne. The Basel roll is a parchment rescued from a book-binding and preserving three documents that, as McCormick demonstrates with forensic skill, constitute the greatest addition in decades to our source base for Charlemagne’s rule. The Breve text (as McCormick christens it) enumerates the personnel of the religious houses of Jerusalem and its immediate environs; the “Memorial” document surveys religious houses in the rest of the Holy Land and gives architectural statistics for many of them; and the “Expenditures” document, of which the roll preserves just the first three lines, lists the annual spending of the patriarch of Jerusalem. In an exemplary piece of historical scholarship, McCormick vindicates these texts from the doubts that have surrounded them until now—doubts that, along with a woefully inadequate standard edition, have led generations of historians to overlook their significance. He shows that the roll is an authentic—although, as it survives, partial— copy of documents resulting from Charlemagne’s desire to estimate precisely the funds required to repair the Holy Land’s churches and monasteries. It was drawn up in the period 801–10, very possibly in 808 following the return of an embassy to the east and before meetings at Aachen in 809—the council that debated the Filioque controversy—and 810—at which the dispatch of funds for the restoration of churches at Jerusalem was discussed.

The first part of the book presents and analyzes the texts’ evidence for the condition of the linguistically and ethnically diverse Christian community in the Holy Land at this time. Successive chapters outline the finances and staffing of the churches in the Holy Land. Judicious comparisons then reveal similarities between East and West (for instance, in the proportion of women religious), but more significant differences: a greater emphasis on monasticism in both Palestine and Byzantium, but, conversely, the much greater size of the major monasteries in Francia relative to both other places. The “demographic and cultural élan” (p. 75) of the Frankish world that is thus revealed found expression in the presence of western monks and nuns in the Holy Land, expertly studied in the fourth chapter. Despite these, the Church in Palestine had evidently declined in size and wealth from its late-antique peak, perhaps prompting an appeal for funds from the West and certainly giving rise to the careful survey by Frankish envoys (preserved in the “Memorial” document) of the dimensions of major Holy Land churches. McCormick’s ingenious identification of a quirk in their measurements reveals their accuracy and validates the text as a source for some of the now-vanished Christian monuments of Jerusalem, including Justinian’s massive Nea church.

The second part of the book examines the Basel roll itself and the documents it transmits. The roll was probably produced in the second quarter of the ninth century in an Upper Rhine atelier. It is therefore a slightly later copy of the three texts, which on internal criteria must have been drawn up at, or in association with, the royal court. These therefore belong to the spate of capitularies and inventories produced in Charlemagne’s last years, which attest undimmed enthusiasm on the part [End Page 326] of the emperor and his close advisers for the business of government. The book’s third part—along with a...

pdf

Share