On Tuesday, 14 January, at 8 pm, the joint lecture event of the Historical Institute of Paderborn University, the Association for History and Antiquities of Westphalia, Paderborn Department, and the Museum in the Kaiserpfalz will take place at the LWL Museum in the Kaiserpfalz. Prof Dr Karl Ubl (University of Cologne) will speak on the topic: "Charlemagne and Slavery". Anyone interested can attend the lecture, registration is not necessary.
While in recent years numerous monuments to historical figures have been knocked off their pedestals because they have been exposed as slave owners, Charlemagne has so far remained untouched by this movement. This is not because too little is known about his ownership of unfree persons. The famous decree on the administration of royal estates ("Capitulare de villis") provides detailed information on the various functions that slaves had in the economic provisioning of the royal court and on the strict regime of discipline to which they were subject. The fact that Charles is not present in the public consciousness as a slave owner is rather due to a euphemistic terminology that speaks of "unfree", "bondmen" or "serfs" for the time of the 9th century, but avoids the term "slavery"".
Against this background, Ubl will examine the question of whether the unfree persons in the possession of the emperor were entitled to certain rights that distinguished them from completely lawless slaves and, based on this, make an assessment of whether Charlemagne had endeavoured to improve the fate of enslaved persons. Ubl, who has held the Chair of Medieval History at the University of Cologne since 2011, is not only one of the best experts on the Carolingian period, but also on early medieval legal history, as evidenced not least by the academy project he is leading on the new edition of the Carolingian rulers' decrees. His many research visits to the USA allowed him to address the much-discussed questions of the significance of social and ethnic marginalisation in the Middle Ages at an early stage. He recently published a highly acclaimed essay on racism in the Middle Ages.
This text was translated automatically.
