STRASBOURG, OATHS OF
. The earliest written evidence of French or of any Romance language, as recorded by the
chronicler Nithard, the Oaths were sworn at Strasbourg in 842 by Charles II the Bald and
Louis the German in alliance against their brother Lothair, who sought sole control of
their grandfather Charlemagne’s empire. Each swore in his brother’s language, Louis in
romana lingua, Charles in teudisca lingua.
The linguistic interest of the Oaths is considerable, although it has been difficult to
localize their dialect. Old French elements include the new future tense, diphthongs
formed from palatalization, the monophthongization of the Latin diphthong AU, as well
as evidence for the so-called mute -e. Nevertheless, certain uncharacteristic features have
suggested either that the Oaths may have been written in a southwestern dialect or that
they were composed in a chancery Latin, then translated into French. The Oaths have
cultural and literary interest as well. Of particular note is the pair of words podir ‘might’
and savir ‘wisdom,’ which figures importantly in later descriptions of the knightly ideal.
The texts exist today in a single manuscript (B.N. lat. 9768) of the second half of the
10th century.
Thelma S.Fenster
[See also: CAROLINGIAN DYNASTY; FRENCH LANGUAGE; NITHARD]
Paris, Gaston, ed. Les plus anciens monuments de la langue française (IXe, Xe siècles). Album.
Paris: Didot, 1875.
SUBTRACTION OF OBEDIENCE
. The Great Schism of the papacy entered a new phase in 1394 with the election of
Benedict XIII, the second pope of the Avignon obedience. The French government
adopted a policy that it would follow, with minor interruptions, for fifteen years—
advocating the via cessionis as the means to end the Schism. Under this policy, France
would no longer support the use of force to impose the Avignon pope on Rome or any
judicial proceeding to determine which contender was the sole true pope. Instead, both
popes were to abdicate and a single successor elected in their place.
Neither pope was willing to consider this approach to union, and the French developed
sanctions aimed at forcing compliance on Benedict XIII. The principal sanction was
called “subtraction of obedience,” a term that meant cutting off the revenues of a pope
recognized in France as the legitimate one. One could subtract obedience without casting
any aspersion on the papacy as an institution or on the legitimacy of the pope in question.
In French ecclesiastical politics, however, subtraction could have at least two meanings.
Partial subtraction, which denied the papal government certain powers over the French
church, was the policy favored by proponents of “Gallican liberties,” whose stronghold
was the University of Paris. They sought to make the policy permanent, thus presumably
returning to an earlier time, before the popes had supposedly appropriated powers that
The Encyclopedia 1695