Places of Love and Honour: Cities and Almost-Cities in the Carolingian World

The Carolingians have long been characterised as uninterested in cities, ruling over their empire while travelling between rural palaces. The limits of this perspective have been observed by others, but many of the centres of Carolingian power, such as Charlemagne’s Aachen or Charles the Bald’s Compiègne, were debatably urban; spaces that were seemingly both cities and not cities at the same time. This chapter examines this ambiguity through the lens of ancient ideas of the city as civitas, a community of people bound together by shared ideals. This concept was well-known in the Frankish world and frequently applied to cities. The concept of a civitas could also be used for non-urban institutions, such as monasteries. Investigation of contemporary descriptions of palaces such as Aachen and Compiègne reveal that they too were understood in terms similar or identical to the civitas. In this way, even if such foundations were questionably urban, ancient ideas of the city were adapted to be used by those who lived in them.