Matthias Becher – författare

An authoritative new life of one of the most important figures of historyCharlemagne—ruler of the vast Frankish kingdom from 768 to his death in 814 and Holy Roman emperor from the year 800—is considered the father of Europe. He founded the first empire in western Europe after the fall of Rome, and his court at Aix-la-Chapelle was a center of classical learning and a focus of the Carolingian Renaissance. This book is a splendid introduction to Charlemagne’s life and legend.Matthias Becher describes Charlemagne’s rise to emperor and traces his political and military maneuvering against the Saxons, the Lombards, and others, as Charlemagne incorporated these lands into his own realm. Becher points out that under Charlemagne, jury courts were introduced, the laws of the Franks revised and written down, new coinage introduced, weights and measures reformed, and a Frankish grammar begun. Charlemagne tried to give his kingdom a spiritual basis by referring to antique traditions, says Becher, and he explores the tensions that existed in Charlemagne’s court between modern ideas and traditional thinking. He concludes by discussing Charlemagne’s kinship network, the evolving arrangements for his succession, the effects of his reign, and his posthumous fame.Concise, insightful, and eminently readable, this biography of Charlemagne provides a wealth of information about a remarkable man and his times.

Late antique and early medieval normative sources frequently employ Roman legal terminology to denote a person’s legal inferiority, and thus suggest the continued relevance of the concepts associated with these terms. However, it is far from clear to what extent the use of identical terminology actually indicates the similarity of social phenomena. There is ample evidence of important changes regarding the rights and duties of enslaved persons and the development or emergence of other, new, forms of asymmetrical dependency. This raises the question to what extent consistency in terminology and legal practice is actually an indicator of the stability of social structures. Against this background, a group of scholars of legal, ecclesiastical, and social history were invited to a conference at the BCDSS in March 2022 to scrutinise different law codes and legal sources for their evidence of dependency. The result are these ten papers that truly enhance our understanding of slavery and other dependency relations in late antique and early medieval societies from c. 100 to c. 900 CE.

Imperium Romanum 700 Jahre gemeinsame Geschichte von Römern und Germanen. Wie haben sich die Kulturen gegenseitig beeinflusst? Gab es Konflikte? Die Betrachtungen beginnen mit dem ersten Auftauchen der Germanen in römischem Gebiet im 2. Jh. v. Chr. bis zum 6. Jh. n. Chr., als die Franken das Imperium Romanum ablösten. Die Artikel behandeln Begriffe wie Kleidung, Christianisierung, Schriftlichkeit und Fürstengrab; Völker und Kulturen wie die Teutonen, Goten, Vandalen und Alamanen; Orte wie Kalkriese, Rhein und Trier.