Pactum Lotharii

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The Pactum Lotharii is a treaty that the Republic of Venice and the Franconian Empire concluded on February 23, 840. The contract is for Kaiser I. Lothar named. The formal contractual partner on the Venetian side was the Doge Pietro Tradonico (836–864).

The treaty is considered the final formal step of Venice towards state independence from Byzantium , because it created a legal relationship with one of the neighboring powers for the first time, bypassing Constantinople , which was based on the sovereign initiative of the Maritime Republic. In addition, he created legal certainty, as the Venetian area on the mainland was contractually secured and circumscribed with him. Lothar's successors recognized Venice's possession on imperial territory, so that the pactum was almost always recognized and supplemented. These additions reflect the increasing economic and political preponderance of Venice. Even Henry V. recognized its validity in the year 1111th

In terms of content, the Pactum Lotharii for its part confirmed the privileges that Venice had already been granted in the empire before Lothar. These consisted of legal regulations and concerned the use of the imperial territory by Venetian traders. But the borders of the Ducat of Venice were also described in more detail, as well as a number of settlements. These were Rivo alto , Castro Olivoli , Madamauco , Albiola , Cluia , Brundulo , Fossiones (Porto Fossone south of Chioggia), Lauretum , Torcelo , Amianas , Buriano , Civitate nova (today a district of San Donà di Piave ), Fines (does not exist more), Equilo , Caprulas , Gradus , Caput Argeles , plus the Abbazia di Sant'Ilario and Altinum . Thirteen of the places were in the lagoon, i.e. islands, four were on the mainland, namely Brundulo, Caput Argeles, Lauretum and Fossiones.

In the Pactum the trade in Christian slaves is forbidden and the wood rights of the people of Caorle and Grado in the neighboring Friuli are expressly stated. Venice undertook to stop the pillaging of the Slavs in northern Italy .

The only sources that explicitly name the first Venetian Doge, the controversial Paulicius , but also the second, Marcellus, are the Chronicle of John the Deacon , the Istoria Veneticorum , in addition to the Pactum Lotharii .

reception

Samuele Romanin puts the Pactum Lotharii 1853 in the first volume of his ten-volume opus ' Storia documentata di Venezia ' in the context of the battles with Saracens and Slavs and the decline in trade . According to Romanin, this oldest document of Venetian diplomacy prohibited any entry into Venetian territory that had been defined on the basis of previous agreements, namely contracts between the first Doge and the " Marcello maestro dei militi " with the Longobard king Liutprand , and as Aistulf confirms would have. Venetians were no longer allowed to buy or sell, people who had fled to the Regnum Italicum were to be sent back, and all slaves who were fleeing were to be exchanged. Envoys and messengers ("ambasciatori", "epistolarii", "corrieri") should be protected, the respective enemies not supported, the common enemies, the Slavs, should be fought. The Venetian trade should be limited only to look at horses, provided the Quadragesimum ( "il solito ripatico e la gabella del Quadragesimo") was paid, which corresponded to one-fortieth of the goods. The Venetians were allowed to cut wood in the Franconian forests, provided they did not cut out whole trees; they should also be allowed to pasture their flocks. Franconian traders should also be allowed to trade by sea. The Chioggiotes who probably fled should be allowed to return. In addition, the deposits, the securities, the borrowed capital ("i depositi, le cauzioni, i capitali affidati") should be protected, the administration should be exempt. The churches and monasteries should be mutually respected. The use of “giuratori” and the assessment of fines wanted to follow the provisions of the Lex salica and Lombard law that were in use in Italy. Romanin delimits the Pactum Lotharii, which was exhibited in Pavia, from a document from Thionville that has come down to us from Andrea Dandolo , which Muratori confused in parts with the Pactum. Since there had been other interpretations of the Pactum earlier , Romanin edited the source (on pp. 356–361).

August Friedrich Gfrörer († 1861) took a completely different approach to explain why the emperor had accepted the Pactum. In his history of Venice from its founding to 1084 , which only appeared eleven years after his death, he believed that Lothar, who was in a dispute with his brothers, had agreed to conclude the pactum when Louis the Pious died, but only for five years (p. 181 f.). As a precaution, he had assigned the Istrian bishoprics, probably 845, not to Venice but to Aquileia , because in the meantime he no longer had to keep his back against his brothers, with whom he had agreed in the Treaty of Verdun in 843 .

Later historians disputed this importance for the highest state level. For them it was only the renewal of the pactum on December 2, 967 (and the recognition of the patriarchal title) that were signs of a new relationship between the Doge and the Emperor, as Carlo Guido Mor argued. Earlier historians had seen continuity in privilege renewals. As a result, the Doge Johannes II obtained Particiacus from Emperor Charles III. on May 10, 883 in Mantua the renewal of the privileges already renewed under his father Ursus in 880, which in turn were traced back to the Pactum Lotharii of 840. Incidentally, the renewal of 967 represented a deterioration for Venice compared to these earlier Pacta on the economic-fiscal as well as the procedural level, but also on the territorial level, as Adolf Fanta already stated in 1885. The quadragesimum should be mentioned with regard to the deterioration , and the rights of use, i.e. above all grazing rights and the right to logging, were not improved any further. The summary procedure has been replaced by the more cumbersome formal procedure. Was quite serious territorial question, because south of Chioggia went Brondolo and Fossone lost, and important centers of salt production and the control of Brenta and Adige , which represented as navigable rivers main trade routes. In addition, the border of Cittanova in the zone between Piave and Livenza remained unregulated (995 to 996 this led to a violent dispute with John, the Bishop of Belluno ). It is also important that the periodic census was given the name tributum and was now designed to be permanent. Against the will of the emperor to control the territory to the south and north, the doge thus proved to be weak.

Marco Pozza, on the other hand, argued in his contribution to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani in 2014 that the pactum had established the sovereignty of Venice, because it had set its limits. Above all, however, it was a separate treaty without Constantinople having played a role.

Anna Maria Pazienza, on the other hand, followed a completely different line in 2017. The author of the Chronica de singulis patriarchis Nove Aquileie plays a decisive role, who must have had a number of documents from the patriarchal archives. Among them was a kind of letter that Patriarch Fortunatus II sent to his clerics in Grado, possibly from Byzantine exile, and which resembles a will . Fortunatus lists his services to the Gradensian Church , and he expresses his hope for a speedy return. Since Giordano Brunettin (1991), this source has been viewed more as an excerpt from a court record in which the patriarch tried to emphasize his merits while he was accused of stealing from the Grades church. In view of this access to documents, which are now mostly lost, Pazienza explains how the chronicler describes the election as the first Doge. He puts it namely at the time of the emperor Anastasius and the Longobard king Liutprand (thus around 713), and explains how this Paulicius concluded a treaty and Cittanova had the Longobard king assure him. According to Pazienza, this is reminiscent of the text of the Pactum Lotharii , in which the emperor recognizes the borderline that Liutprand once promised Paulicius and the Magister militum Marcellus . For Pazienza, Liutprand guaranteed a contract between Paulicius and Marcellus, which at the same time moved the border from the Piave Maggiore to the Piave Secca. For the author, this defined the border between the Longobard Empire and the Byzantine province of Venice. Accordingly, for them Paulicius is not the first Doge of Venice, as the Venetian historiographical tradition has maintained for a millennium, but the Dux of Treviso . The Byzantine province, however, was ruled by that Marcellus. "No peace agreement was ever concluded between King Liutprand and Venice, nor was Paulicio ever the duke of the lagoon city, as the chronicler states, misinterpreting - if deliberate or not is difficult to say - the evidence at his disposal: the pactum Lotharii or its following renevals ”(p. 42). A founding myth of Venice, derived from the Pactum Lotharii , would be a mere back projection of one of the oldest chronicles of Venice, derived from the Pactum .

Text output

literature

  • Roberto Cessi : Pacta Veneta 2: Dal "Pactum Lotharii" al "Foedus Octonis" , in: Archivio Veneto ser. 5a, 5 (1929) 1-77.
  • Roberto Cessi: Il "pactum Lotharii" del 840 , in: Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Classe di Scienze Morali e Lettere, ser. 2a, 99 (1939/40) 11-49.
  • Gerhard Rösch : The Pactum Lotharii of 840 and the relationship between Venice and the Franconian Empire in the 9th century , Marburg 1984.

Remarks

  1. ^ Samuele Romanin : Storia documentata di Venezia , 10 vols., Pietro Naratovich, Venice 1853–1861 (2nd edition 1912–1921, reprint Venice 1972), vol. 1, Venice 1853, pp. 174–176 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Again in a footnote (p. 176, note 2) Romanin notes that the document known as Pactum Lotharii , which at the time was in the archives of Vienna and was located in the Liber Blancus , was entitled “Pactum inter Loth. Imp. Rome. et Petrum ducem Venet. pro company pace inter aliquas civitates et loca ducatu venetiarum propinqua. Papiae a. imp. 26 ”, whereas the second document from 842 under“ Privilegium confirmationis Loth. imp. Rome. factum D. Petro duci Venet. de rebus ducatus Venetiae existentibus infra dicionem sui imperii et in iurisdictione quae consistere noscebatur. Act. Teodonis, on. Imp. In Italia 22, in Francia 2. "
  3. ↑ August Friedrich Gfrörer : History of Venice from its foundation to the year 1084. Edited from his estate, supplemented and continued by Dr. JB Weiß , Graz 1872, p. 181 f. ( Digitized version ).
  4. ^ Carlo Guido Mor: Aspetti della vita costituzionale veneziana fino alla fine del X secolo , in: Le origini di Venezia , Florence 1964, p. 132.
  5. ^ Adolf Fanta : The contracts of the emperors with Venice up to the year 983 , in: Mittheilungen des Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Suppl. I, Innsbruck 1885, p. 101 f .; Paul Kehr : Rome and Venice up to the XII. Century , in: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries XIX (1927) 1–180, here: p. 72.
  6. ↑ Marco Pozza:  Particiaco, Orso I. In: Raffaele Romanelli (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 81:  Pansini – Pazienza. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2014.
  7. ↑ Anna Maria Pazienza: Archival Documents as Narrative: The Sources of the Istoria Veneticorum and the Plea of ​​Rižana , in: Sauro Gelichi, Stefano Gasparri (ed.): Venice and Its Neighbors from the 8th to 11th Century. Through Renovation and Continuity , Brill, Leiden and Boston 2018, pp. 27–50.
  8. ↑ Giordano Brunettin: Il cosiddetto testamento del patriarca Fortunato ii di Grado (825) , in: Memorie storiche forogiuliesi 71 (1991) 51–123.