Today I will tell you about a Frankish scholar born around the year 800, Nithard. It was around this time that Nithard’s grandfather had himself crowned Emperor of the West.
Nithard was indeed the grandson of Charlemagne, the nephew of the Emperor Louis the Pious and the first cousin of his three sons Lothair, Louis II of Germania and Charles II the Bald. Well, that’s already quite a resume.
But Nithard interests me today because he died in an ambush on a disastrous day in June, that’s why I thought of talking about him today. I am also interested in his writings, the story of the sons of Louis the Pious. But no, in the sense of Louis the religious. A book in which he recounts the famous oaths of Strasbourg, the famous Sacramenta Argentariae. To understand these oaths, you need a little context: Lothair I, the eldest of the three brothers, Lothair I therefore, claims the title of Emperor of the West, inherited from their father Louis the Pious and restored by their grandfather , Charlemagne. Charles and Louis refuse to recognize him as suzerain, of what is one emperor if the vassals decide to play it independent?
Lothair gets angry and tries to invade the states of his cadets. They then leagued against him and defeated him at Fontenoy-en-Puisaye in June 841. To strengthen their alliance, Louis the German and Charles the Bald met in February 842, 1180 years ago at the current location of the Plaine des Bouchers in the district of Meinau in Strasbourg and take an oath there against their brother Lothaire before their armies. What is particularly interesting is that Louis the German pronounces his oath in the Romance language to be understood by the soldiers of Charles the Bald who recites his in the tudesque language so that it is understood by the soldiers of his brother.
A nice mirror effect, I hope everyone understood each other on the spot, a translation error, it could have ended in butchery. The tudesque, think of Dittsch, or Deutsch, it means Germanic, even if the language is a form of Rhenish Franconian found in the north of Alsace.
The novel is more or less an ancestor of French. The Roman text of the Oaths constitutes “the birth certificate of the French language”, since it is the oldest text preserved in the so-called vulgar language. And it happened in Strossbori, if that’s not the class! The text of the Oaths was transcribed by Nithard, who witnessed the Oaths. There are only two manuscripts, very precious, very fragile, they are both today in the National Library of France.
Read excerpts from the Oaths of Strasbourg.