Toward an Appraisal of the Wealth of the Ottonian Kings of Germany, 919–1024

Specialists in the political history of the early medieval German kingdom consistently present the royal government as primitive, particularly in comparison with the considerable administrative achievements of their Carolingian predecessors. An important element of this primitivist model is the contention that the kings of the Ottonian dynasty (919-1024) lacked the administrative wherewithal or even desire to manage the royal fisc, that is the panoply of properties and others sources of wealth that they inherited from the Carolingians. Instead, the Ottonian kings are presented as requiring a constant flow of plunder and tribute, derived from war, to reward their political followers and maintain their own dominant position in the realm. This study seeks to test the theory of Ottonian administrative backwardness through an investigation of the size and scope of the fiscal resources, and hence the wealth, of the kings of Germany in the tenth and early eleventh century. It finds that the Ottonian kings did not dissipate their inheritance from the Carolingians, but rather maintained a massive agglomeration of properties throughout the German kingdom. Moreover, the income derived from these fiscal resources dwarfed any potential income from either plunder or tribute acquired in war or from defeated enemies. The necessary conclusion, therefore, is that the Ottonian kings did not rule a primitive polity, as maintained by the current scholarly orthodoxy. Rather, they benefitted from the continuation of a Carolingian-style fiscal administration that assured regular and massive flows of income to the royal government.