German Knighthood, 1050-1300 by Benjamin ArnoldReview by: John B. FreedThe American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Jun., 1986), p. 646Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1869161 .

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646 Reviews of Books

will provide the first scrupulously edited and rela- tively complete set of royal documents from this realm. It represents a crowning achievement to Burns's research into medieval Valencia, and the present volume serves as an authoritative introduc- tion to a massive and important project.

PAUL FREEDMAN

Vanderbilt University

BENJAMIN ARNOLD. German Knighthood, 1050-1300. New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 1985. Pp. xii, 308. $34.50.

This book should be titled The Gerqan Ministerialage, because Benjamin Arnold argues that ministerialis rather than miles was the standard designation ev- erywhere for an unfree knight in twelfth-century Germany. It is, in fact, the first modern general study in any language of the ministerials, an estate unique to that country. Arnold investigates such topics as the origins of the institution; the ministeri- als' legal rights, property holdings, military and administrative service, marriages, and propensity toward violence; the contradiction between their knightly functions and servile legal status; and their employment by the Salians and Hohenstaufen. Based on an extensive reading of primary sources and secondary works, this book is a useful introduc- tion to a topic that has been largely ignored by non-German scholars.

Nevertheless, I have serious reservations about the book. First, Arnold stresses in his introductory chapter the autogenous rights of the nobility. Al- though this has been the dominant theory in post- war German historiography, some scholars, like Michael Mitterauer, have challenged it, and I have my own doubts about a theory that achieved canon- ical status during the Nazi era. Second, while Arnold rightly stresses the difficulties in discerning the ori- gins of the institution, he virtually ignores Gunther Flohrschiitz's work on the origins of the Freising ministerialage and my own study of the emergence of the Salzburg ministerialage out of the familia. Third, any attempt to generalize about so complex a topic runs the risk of misconstruing local evidence. In the case of Salzburg, for example, Arnold calls an archiepiscopal retainer a Styrian ministerial (p. 143), attributes documents from the Abbey of St. Peter's to the cathedral chapter (p. 155), and cites a baseless fifteenth-century forgery to prove that ministerials had been buried in St. Peter's since 1139 (p. 157). More important, although Arnold denies it (p. 33), it is quite clear, as Otto von Zallinger demonstrated in 1878, that miles referred in twelfth-century Salzburg to the servile retainers of free lords and ministerials and to those retainers of a count who did not have their own vassals. It was not until about

1300 that prominent archiepiscopal ministerials were generally styled milites in sources originating within the archdiocese. This shows that ministerials cannot simply be equated with knights everywhere in Germany. As a result, Arnold misinterprets a number of sources from the archdiocese, for in- stance, the successive accounts of Archbishop Gebhard's return in 1086 that show the distinction between the ministerials and the knights (p. 35). 1 suspect that other regional specialists may be able to detect similar mistakes.

Finally, Arnold seems to accept Marc Bloch's argument that there was no such thing, legally, as a nobility before the twelfth century and that nobility was largely a matter of life style (pp. 69-70). For example, he links nobility with knightly descent (p. 136), but the Salzburg charter he cites merely states that the archbishop had granted the rights of archi- episcopal ministerials to the knightly families who belonged to the familia of the counts of Dornberg. Thus, while valuable, this book must be used with caution.

JOHN B. FREED

Illinois State University

JEAN-MARIE MOEGLIN. Les ancetres du prince: Propagand politique et naissance d'une histoire nationale en Bavi-re au Moyen Age 1180-1500). (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, IVe Section, Sciences Histo- riques et Philologiques, fifth series, Hautes Etudes Medievales et Modernes, number 54.) Geneva: Droz. 1985. Pp. xiii, 300.

The study of the idea of history embodied in the writings of premodern historians has long inter- ested historians of thought, but until recently the substantive material of those histories, which seldom could stand up to closer investigation, has tended to be passed over in silence or dismissed with a conde- scending remark. Jean-Marie Moeglin has taken the trouble to unravel the ways in which the interaction of conflicting ideological interests managed by 1500 to produce a range of mythic patterns of the past in one German principality, Bavaria. The materials of a national history were singularly unpromising: al- though Bavaria had (and has) a strong awareness of its continued existence as a distinct "nation," its ruling dynasty, the Wittelsbachs, had only been raised from obscurity in 1180, when Frederick Barbarossa replaced the rebel Henry the Lion with the Palatine Count Otto I of Scheyern-Wittelsbach. What little light clerics of the High Middle Ages could shed on the antecedents of that house was hardly reassuring: the great twelfth-century chron- icler Otto of Freising had gone out of his way to stress the treasonous habits of the pipsqueak counts of Scheyern-Wittelsbach, and in 1208 a Wittelsbach

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