Königspfalz Quierzy

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Memorial stele for the Palatinate of the Merovingians and Carolingians in Quierzy

The royal palace Quierzy in Quierzy in what is now the French Département Aisne was one of the important residences of the Carolingian emperors and kings in the 8th and 9th centuries , before it was probably destroyed by the Normans at the end of the 9th century .

During excavations that were carried out during the First World War , traces of a medieval castle were uncovered in a field east of Quierzy parish. It was interpreted by the excavators as the remains of the royal palace. This is controversial in research, but further excavations to clarify this thesis have not yet started.

history

After the Gallic War , Laeten were settled in the area , including on the manor of Charisius . 236 the place is mentioned for the first time as Charisilittae (Laeten des Charisius) .

Quierzy is mentioned in 605 as "Cariciacum" when Protadius, House Meier of King Theodoric II. From the house of Merovingian and favorite of the Queen Mother Brunechildis was killed here in camp by members of the army. A hundred years later it belongs to the Carolingian family . Karl Martell died in the villa standing here on October 22nd, 741. Shortly before, Martell had granted Quierzy the rank of royal palace in a document .

In 756, Pope Stephan II received Pippin's deed of donation from Abbot Fulrad of Saint-Denis .

In 754, Pippin the Younger and Pope Stephen II , who was looking for support against the Lombards , celebrated Easter here. The agreements made during this stay led to Pippin's Longobard campaigns, in 756 to the establishment of the Papal States ( Pippin's donation ) and, in return, to the anointing of Pippin and his sons by the Pope and thus to the official recognition of the Carolingians as the new ruling family by the Church. At the Synod of Quierzy that was taking place in neighboring Brétigny at the time (there were apparently no suitable rooms in Quierzy) it was decided to adopt the Roman liturgy and Gregorian chant in the Frankish Empire . The number of later stays by Pippin and the reasons for this also allow the conclusion that Quierzy was the main residence for him. Some researchers therefore go so far as to suspect the birthplace of Charlemagne here .

After Pippin's death in 768 Quierzy belonged to the domain of his son Karlmann . Charlemagne came here as king only after his death, i.e. from 771, spent Christmas 774 and the first half of 775 there without interruption: During this time, a Reichstag decided to go to war against the Saxons . After his stay in the winter of 781/782, Quierzy's importance for Karl, who was now mainly in Frankfurt , Regensburg , Worms and above all Aachen , declined . Only again on the occasion of the trip of another Pope, Leo III. At the end of 804 in the heart of the Franconian Empire, Quierzy celebrated Christmas with the ruler.

The first half of the 9th century saw the emperors and kings only sporadically in this Palatinate. Ludwig the Pious held an imperial assembly here in 820. In 827 he went hunting in Quierzy, in 833 he came back here after his (temporary) dismissal in 833. In 838 he had Charles the Bald crowned King of Neustria . In addition to numerous stays, secular and ecclesiastical gatherings (see e.g. Gottschalk von Orbais ), Quierzy made two major appearances, 842 when he married Irmentrud here and in 877 when he was on the occasion of his upcoming Italian campaign from to whom he should not return, issued Quierzy's capitular , which is often seen as the beginning of the hereditary character of fiefs and thus of feudalism.

In the year 886, Charlemagne stopped off in Quierzy after his appointment as King of West Franconia . He was the last Carolingian who stayed in the Palatinate. It was probably destroyed in 890/891 by Normans who had settled in the region and besieged the nearby Noyon . The land remained in the possession of the king, Heinrich I issued another document in Quierzy in 1053, and only Philip I gave Quierzy to the bishop of Noyon in 1068 . Details of the determined ground plan suggest that the bishops used the Palatinate until the 15th century, before the Château de Quierzy was built on the banks of the Oise, of which only the remainder of a tower still stands today.

The excavations

The young Tübingen art historian Georg Weise (1888–1978) used the First World War and the course of the front line, through which Quierzy was in the part of France occupied by the German army, for excavations first in Quierzy and a little later in Samoussy . In August 1916 he began his investigation of a flat hill east of the community on the road to Manicamp , but was only able to work superficially under time pressure, as the course of the war could bring him to the end of his work at any time. When the German army began evacuating the region to straighten the front in early 1917, leaving Quierzy to the French, Weise broke off the excavations. The excavation report, which he published in 1923, was heavily criticized, especially in France, for its lack of thoroughness; Weise, who had received a professorship at the University of Tübingen two years earlier , countered the critics "that in France there has been no interest in exploring the Merovingian and Carolingian Palatinate" and that excavations had hardly taken place anywhere. Nothing has changed about that to this day.

Weise very quickly found what he was looking for on the hill, found the ground strewn with rubble and then found a foundation 3.50 meters wide and 1.20 meters high 1.60 meters below the surface, but soon discovered that the only remains were there were. Everything else had already been removed in the past, well into the 19th century, and reused down to the ground. However, since the trenches that were created in the process had been filled up with rubble, Weise was able to at least determine the contour of the facility "as a trail that clearly stands out in the ground" and thus the ground plan. Weise interpreted the find as the remains of the Carolingian royal palace, an attribution that will be adopted in the following for the sake of simplicity.

The royal palace of Georg Weise

The Palatinate took up an oval area stretching from west to east measuring 120 by 80 meters and was surrounded by a wall ring, the only breakthrough of which was in the south-west, where Weise discovered the original remains with a thickness of 3.50 meters. Inside the oval were

  • in the east a rectangular, strongly structured building, 30 by 40 meters in size and with a kind of patio, which is regarded as a residential building,
  • in the north a building in which Weise saw the King's Hall, a 50-meter-long building, also oval on three sides and straight only on the outside, which , when viewed from the river, the Oise , presented an approximately 40-meter-long facade connected to the north side of the house, about the same length, and
  • to the south an inner courtyard with outbuildings following the six meter wide gate, which was flanked by two towers.

Rooms with a sacred character were not found, nor were they to be expected on a large scale, since the larger religious and ecclesiastical events apparently took place in Brétigny.

literature

  • Georg Weise: Two Franconian royal palaces, report on the excavations carried out on the Palaces of Quierzy and Samoussy. Fischer, Tübingen 1923.
  • Abbé Th. Carlet, Abbé N. Caillet: Annales de Quierzy-sur-Oise. published by Comité Archéologique et Historique de Noyon, 1935.
  • Georges Samson: Le Palais de Quierzy et les villas dépendantes de celui-ci du VIe au Xe siècle. Groupe Archéologique du Noyonnais, 1970/79.
  • Georges Samson: Le palatinat carolingien de Quierzy-sur-Oise. Bulletin semestriel de la Société archéologique, historique et scientifique de Noyon, July – December 1993.
  • Josiane Barbier: Quierzy. In: Palais médiévaux (France-Belgique), 25 ans d'archéologie. Publications de l'université du Maine, 1994, pp. 25-27
  • Jean-Pierre Boizette: Histoire du Peuple Franc - Le Palais de Quierzy. 2004.
  • Bernd Remmler: Searching for Traces: The Carolingians - The Disappeared Palaces of Charlemagne. Pro Business, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86805-798-0 .

Footnotes

  1. The quotations are from Weise (1923)