Tractoriae and the logistics of Carolingian entourages
Name
Early Medieval Europe - 2025 - Goldberg - Tractoriae and the logistics of Carolingian entourages.pdf
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251.46 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
44a1d84934e4839f826e61d1ce23d3a3
Author(s)
Goldberg, Eric J.
Date Issued
March 19, 2025
Journal
Early Medieval Europe
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Goldberg, E. J. (2025) Tractoriae and the logistics of Carolingian entourages. Early Medieval Europe, 33: 158–182.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Entourages played a central role in Carolingian politics and militaryorganization. Yet historians have neglected the important question of howkings and magnates supplied their retinues. This article investigates thattopic by examining an overlooked genre of evidence: tractoriae or royal lettersof requisition. Louis the Pious revived the use of these late Roman andMerovingian documents to authorize magnates to collect supplies for theirfollowers and horses. The provisions enumerated in tractoriae give us rareinsight into the composition and scale of ninth-century retinues and armies.Their disappearance during the reign of Charles the Bald was bound upwith larger transformations of late Carolingian politics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. History Section
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12761
