From edachows@EAGLE.LHUP.EDU Fri Sep 19 07:52:09 1997
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 09:47:08 -0400
From: Elizabeth Dachowski 
Reply-To: Medieval History 
To: Multiple recipients of list MEDIEV-L 
Subject: Royal blood

I would agree that Carolingian descent did not play a role in HC's coronation--but clearly not because it wasn't important to some people. As one listmember correctly pointed out, the Capetians seemed very much interested in acquiring Carolingian blood through marriage.

Hugh Capet

After HC, of course, succession of sons was possible without too much fuss, partly because the Capetians had the luck to produce sons (although I have heard someone, can't remember who, argue that this was not entirely luck, since they were so quick to change wives after a period of barrenness or a string of girl babies--although one could today argue that the husband was responsible for coming up with the needed Y chromosome), but also because of the habit of designating and crowning the heir during the king's lifetime (often when the heir was fairly young). This did not rule out quarrels over succession within the king's lifetime, of course.

Beth Dachowski                              Dept. of History
edachows@eagle.lhup.edu                     Lock Haven University

From jparsons@chass.utoronto.ca Sun Sep 21 08:35:18 1997
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 16:19:26 -0400
From: John Carmi Parsons 
To: Multiple recipients of list MEDIEV-L 
Subject: Henry the Fowler's ancestry

I tried to send this a few minutes ago by "reply" but as is happening so often these days it got bounced back, so here goes again.

According to the vast and authoritative table of Charlemagne's descendants in the fourth volume of Karl der Grosse, the German King Arnulf had no daughter Hedwig. Henry the Fowler's son Henry, duke of Bavaria, indeed married the daughter of a Duke Arnulf of Bavaria, but this is not the same man as the German King Arnulf--the Bavarian dukes were a different family altogether, although (as the Karl der Grosse table suggests) they MAY have been descended from Charlemagne in some way that cannot now be documented. In any event, since Duke Arnulf's daughter married Henry the Fowler's son and not Henry himself, the marriage had no effect on Otto the Great's ancestry.

The closest we can come to connecting the Fowler with the Carolingians at all involves his great-grandmother Oda, wife of a Saxon count Egbert and mother of Duke Liudolf of Saxony. Oda was regarded as a saint by the late 10th century and we possess a *vita* of her in which she is described as a kinswoman of Charlemagne. No particulars are given and it may well be that since this *vita* was written long after the fact, its author may only have been trying to glorify Oda (or her descendants) by hinting that her family connections were more important than they really had been. At any rate, in the 1920s the French local historian and prosopographer, Abbe' Maurice Chaume, theorized that Oda was a daughter of one Isembard, count in the Thurgau (fl. 806), who married Theodrade, whom Chaume thought was (or might have been) a daughter of Adalhard, count of Chalon; in turn, Chaume suggested this Adalhard was a son of Carloman, brother of Charles Martel. That's very iffy, but IF true, it would at least relate the Fowler to Charlemagne though not as a descendant.

Henry the Fowler

Henry the Fowler's father married Hedwig (d. 903) daughter of Henry, margrav of the Saxon East Mark, sometimes identified as a *dux* in East Frankia. This Henry is commonly tagged "Henry of Buchonia"; he fl. from 866 and died in battle in 886. Several historians have tried to connect him in one way or another with the Carolingians, usually by marriage, but the great variety of descents suggested for his wife indicates that there is really no solid evidence one way or another. K. A. Eckhardt in 1963 had Henry of Buchonia marrying Ingeltrude, daughter of Unruoch margrav of Friuli (d. 866) by Gisela, daughter of Louis the Pious. On the other hand, in 1940 Heinrich Banniza von Bazan thought Henry married Baba of Spoleto, daughter of Duke Berengar of Spoleto by Heletrude, an otherwise unknown daughter of Louis the Pious. And so forth and so on *ad nauseam*. Fact is, we really don't know who Henry of Buchonia married. (For the record though, he was almost certainly the son of a Count Poppo who fl. in Buchonia 819-839--whose wife's name and family are unknown.)

From habsburg@ttacs6.ttu.edu Mon Sep 22 11:35:16 1997
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 22:20:32 -0500
From: "James P. Niessen" 
Reply-To: "HABSBURG, an H-Net list ed. by C.Ingrao, H.Lane, N.Miller,      
            & J.Niessen" 
To: Multiple recipients of list HABSBURG 
Subject: Re: Todorova, Imagining the Balkans

Please welcome Professor Maria Todorova as our newest HABSBURGer. Readers are referred to our gopher for the archival copies of Gale Stokes' review of her book (September 10) and subsequent comments.--JPN

Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 18:48:31 -0400 From: Maria Todorova, U of Florida

In the preface to Imagining the Balkans I had written that my principle task was to construe an acceptable framework and suggest possible lines of debate about a phenomenon I called "Balkanism": "Even if it merely triggers argument, this book will have fulfilled its purpose." (p. vii) I could not have been more delighted with the appearance of Gale Stokes's review in HABSBURG, and the immediate temperamental response by several scholars. Although reading is in a way rewriting, and no author cam impose rules on how to be understood, with his thoughtful, thorough and generous review Gale Stokes comes very close to Adorno's thought that I had chosen as the motto to my book: "The hope of an intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somehow, somewhere, someone will read what he wrote exactly as he wrote it."

There are, in my view, three main questions raised by the review and the comments:

1. The relationship between Balkanism and Orientalism. That both are power discourses employing similar rhetoric (as are discourses around notions like race, civilization, development, etc.) seems to be the reason for trivializing the differences between them. I couldn't agree more with the spirited remarks of Lohr Miller and his final conclusion that both constructs are based on psychological projection, on a need to find places both inferior and more alluring than one's own culture." As a historian, however, I have the incurable fallacy to be interested in the "hows," not only the "whys" of phenomena, and while I recognize the structural affinity of the two notions and in a different system of analysis would classify them under the same rubric, within a historical approach it seems to me the differences are worth emphasizing. Arbitrariness of adding to or "saving" from the Balkans notwithstanding, the notion still has a concrete geographical meaning and a historical span from the Ottoman conquest on. The Orient, on the other hand, has assumed different geographical hypostases and has been used in a dichotomical fashion since antiquity. True, a deconstruction of Said's "Orientalism" clearly demonstrates that he was actually interested in the Arabic Islamic Near East in the 18th-19th cc. primarily as affected by expanding French and British imperialism, but the universalist articulation of his textual analysis made it widely appealing and applicable to as disparate regions as South Asia, India, China, Japanese, the Arab world, etc.

I am aiming at a slightly lower theoretical scale of abstraction which would allow me to accommodate more consistently the historical concreteness which continues to fascinate me. And this points to another difference between Orientalism and Balkanism: not merely the distinction between the Balkans and the Orient but between two approaches. One is a predominantly textual analysis; the other is a predominantly historical one. It was this approach which also kept me from offering an analysis of Balkanist academic works, in line with Said's analysis of orientalist scholarship. While at times I was tempted to demonstrate how individual works partake actively in shaping and perpetuating "balkanism," I still believe that there is a distinction between the discourse of scholarly knowledge and the discourse of ideology and propaganda. This should not be read as a naive endorsement in a putative "neutrality" or "objectivity" of scholarship. As I put it in the book, a great many scholars share privately a staggering number of prejudices vis a vis the Balkans, but the rules of scholarly discourse restrict the open articulation of these prejudices, and cultural domination is asserted in much subtler ways requiring a somewhat different analysis.

2. The juxtaposition of Eastern and Western Christianity. I have never maintained that the difference between the two "are not longstanding or theological but a recent construct of political science"; nor have I ever attributed this invention to Toynbee and Huntington. To the list of fundamental differences nicely outlined by John-Paul Himka, I could add a number of others: the much greater gap between popular and elite culture in Byzantium, the different nature of their missionary activities, the issue of ceasaropapism, etc. Neither have I maintained that the real divide between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is not between cultures but between rich and poor (particularly not in the 11th century). What I did maintain was that Huntington's model was using a cultural argument to mask the real divide between rich and poor today, and legitimize an exclusivist rhetoric and political practice. I also argued that the discourse is not really about differences between religions but between what are considered to be the "cultural legacies" of these religions. In this context, "culture" has been (yes!) essentialized and reified, as if during the millennium of divergent development of Orthodox Christianity, and despite its professed and practiced fidelity to tradition, it had managed to crystallize societies and distort them so that they are alien today to the package of "Western values." The whole employment of the "Orthodox card" merits a learned article or even book on "Byzantinism." I have been reading around this theme but I am convinced it needs to be undertaken by someone with different qualifications than mine. I was trying to expose the use of the rhetoric at the present moment when we are dealing with completely secular, and to a large extent atheist or agnostic societies not only in Eastern Europe, but in Europe as a whole.

3. How do we write about difference? This, of course, emerges as the most difficult and contentious problem. I have to agree with Maria Bucur in her defense of the linguistic turn. Not only does it not have to be pursued to "its final conclusion," a relativistic solipsism of sorts, but it has shown how fruitful it can be in analyzing competing views, highlighting motivations and "making explicit the historian's own stake" without necessarily resorting to uninteresting and narcissistic autobiographical preambles that have lately stricken some of the writing in anthropology. My own analysis has been not about creating a single moderate and convincing narrative (I hold such a project at least as dangerous as the linguistic turn pushed to its extreme), but laying side by side, comparing and recognizing the validity of seemingly incompatible views in their specific historical context. This was the sense in which I argued that two diametrically opposed interpretations, such as the view about the inherent alienness of the Ottoman legacy versus its indigenous or organicist treatment, "can be articulated in a moderate and convincing fashion."(p. 165) Gale Stokes seems puzzled at my assertion that it is not the existence of difference and its depiction that is objectionable "but how it is interpreted and harnessed in ideological models," and asks whether it is possible to avoid ideological models, i.e. have a point of view. But I have never harbored such illusions. I did not object to the fact "THAT" difference is interpreted from a given point of view but to "HOW" that is done. My book is ample testimony to taking openly strong points of view, sometimes risking overstatements. But this is precisely because I come with an openly stated agenda, with transparent motives and clearly outlined intellectual and political preferences.

In fact, Gale Stokes's review is itself a beautiful example as to how differences can be handled. We will probably continue to disagree on the region-building potentials of the Central European idea, or in our appraisal of Huntington, or more generally on the dubious use of the notion of "culture," or in our assessment of the relative share of agency of the Balkan states in a great power climate, and this is only natural given differences in our points of view. But what remains as an unbreakable common ground is a professional ethic of reading, trying to understand and articulate difference "in a moderate and convincing fashion."

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