Arts & Sciences Research Paper #11: Jewish Carolingian Fighters: The Jewish Fighting Freeholders of Carolingian Southern France
Our eleventh A&S Research Paper comes to us from Lord Gideon ha-Khazar, until very recently of the Barony of Dragonship Haven and now of the Barony of the Middle Marches, and who did most of this research while he was a citizen of our fair kingdom. He examines the history of a group of people many of us know very little about – European Jewish freeholders who fought in battles alongside their non-Jewish counterparts – and provides fascinating historical support for medieval Jewish fighting personae. (Prospective future contributors, please check out our original Call for Papers.)
Jewish Carolingian Fighters: The Jewish Fighting Freeholders of Carolingian Southern France
“Quapropter sumus dolore tacti, usque ad mortem anxiati, cum cognovissemus per teipsum, quod plebs Judaica … infra fines at territoria Christianorum allodia haereditatum in villis et suburbanis, quasi incolae Christianorum, possideant per quaedam regum Francorum praecepta.” (Migne vol. 129 p.857 and Jaffe 288)
“Therefore we are struck with sorrow, anxious to death, since we have learned through you that the Jews … possess allodial lands within Christendom in towns and outside them, like Christians, through certain grants of the kings of the Franks” (Chazan 188)
— Pope Stephen III to the Archbishop of Narbonne and “all magnates of Septimania and Hispania”, 768 CE
In 768 Pepin, Carolingian King of the Franks, recognized Jews’ rights to own land in what is now southern France. Since the lands were held in allod (owned outright instead of feudally) and in Frankish law all allodial landholders had to fight when called, Jewish fighters took part in Carolingian wars (including Charlemagne’s Roncesvalles campaign) and helped garrison lands taken from the Muslims.
Thus SCAdians have documented historical bases for having openly Jewish fighting freeholder personae from Carolingian (8th-9th century) southern France and its Spanish March. Furthermore, the region was on Radanite Jewish trade routes extending all the way to China and Narbonne was a center for scholarship, so one could historically justify having fighter-traveler or fighter-scholar personae from those periods as well.
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