But it was in Germany that Landfrieden, detailed codes of peace-
regulations applied to whole regions of the country, became a lasting
instrument of royal government in the ordering of the state. Communal
peace-agreements appeared among the west Franks as a non-
Carolingian dynasty was struggling to establish itself under Hugh
Capet, chosen king in 987.^43 Among the East Franks a Saxon dynasty
had replaced the Carolingians seventy years earlier, and in 962, after his
defeat of the Magyar invaders, Otto I had assumed the title of emperor,
and with it a more commanding sense of responsibility for a single
Christian commonwealth. A generation before Bishop Gerard of
Cambrai resisted the communal peace in the name of imperial authority,
the ideal of a stable and peaceful society under the crown was expressed
by Gerbert of Aurillac, a great scholar-politician who came to Otto I’s
notice when he was in the service of the archbishop of Rheims.
For Gerbert the highest of the arts was rhetoric, the art of persuasion,
and in Sir Richard Southern’s words ‘a healing art, an art of govern-
ment’.^44 In 984 Gerbert wrote in agitation to Abbot Gerald of Aurillac
that the premature death of Otto II had destroyed ‘the state of God’s
churches... the commonwealth has perished’. ‘The state and peace of
the churches and kingdoms’ is a constant theme of his letters to arch-
bishops and princes and also of the letters between other great men of
France and Germany which are preserved with his own. For Gerbert,
peace and concord between kings and princes was identical with the
peace of the catholic church. He had a large part in getting Hugh Capet
made king of France. Under King Hugh’s patronage, Gerbert obtained
the archbishopric of Rheims; under the Emperor Otto III’s, he moved to
be archbishop of Ravenna, and was almost immediately made pope,
taking the name of Sylvester II after the predecessor who had served
Constantine the Great. An imperial grant of eight Italian counties to the
papacy ‘for the love of our teacher Lord Pope Sylvester’ acknowledged
Rome as head of the world, not on account of a mythical donation of
power by Constantine to popes (who had often been negligent and
stupid), but because it was the seat of Otto’s empire.^45
More abstract political concepts tended to emerge at the level of
empire or kingdom, but the peace which was important to the emperor’s
subjects was still the protection granted in answer to the petitions of
82 The Spread of the Organized Peace
(^43) Richer, Histoire de France, 2 vols., ed. and tr. R. Latouche (Paris, 1930–7), ii. 162.
(^44) R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages(London, 1953), 176.
(^45) Die Briefsammlung Gerberts von Rheims, ed. F. Weigle, MGH Briefe der Deutschen
Kaiserzeit 2 (Berlin, 1966), 38, 62, 63, 66, 101, 109, 136, 143, 165, 171; Richer, Histoire, ii.
314–25; Ottonis II et Ottonis III Diplomata, ed. T. Sickel, MGH Diplomata Regum et
Imperatorum Germaniae [RIG] 2 (Hanover 1888–1893), 818–20; English tr. in Boyd H. Hill
Jr., Medieval Monarchy in Action: The German Empire from Henry I to Henry IV(London,
1972), 177–9.