How the East Became the East: Triumphal Rulership, and the Failure of Integration in Carolingian Central Europe

In 795 CE, the Carolingian ruler, Charlemagne, conquered the Central European territories that had been ruled by the Avar steppe people for about two centuries. Carolingian propaganda presented the conquest as a triumph over the ultimate enemies of Christendom and as a triumph that paved the way to Charlemagne's coronation as the first medieval Western Roman emperor. However, the same ideology made it more difficult to incorporate the newly conquered territories into the new Frankish-Roman empire along the more pragmatic inclusion strategies that Frankish politics had developed over several centuries prior to Charlemagne's reign for incorporating culturally, legally, and ethnically diverse territories. The conquered Avars, for instance, disappeared as they were unable to maintain their political identity under a Christian Frankish emperor. With the "loss of the Avars,"Carolingian politics lost orientation in the diverse and complex middle grounds of Central Europe, and it became a significant challenge for Charlemagne's successors to rule the Central European middle grounds throughout the ninth century. The article discusses the complex history of various regime collisions in the ninth century that came to shape the social and political topography of the region along the middle Danube for many centuries to come, even until today.