Recently I read (on wikipedia, which cites Gibbon) that the House of Este (whose older branch is the famous House of Welf) has its origins in the Roman Attii family. Obviously the recorded history of this era is pretty poor. But I'm wondering what proportion of the nobility came from traditionally powerful Roman families. Were there some regions where the existing power structure was much less disrupted than others? Was it more common for Roman leaders to try to integrate with the new power structure once there was effectively no political power centralized in Rome, or flee? When the Germanic leaders (of say, the Franks) Christianized, did they look for Roman marriages to add legitimacy to their rule or did they look down upon them as newly-conquered oppressors? I know the answers will differ from place to place but I'm interested in that too.
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The genealogy I have of the House of Este comes from the house of the Obertenghi of Luni, the stem of which is Oberto/Otbert/Ogbert, decidedly Germanic. Unclear whether he was an original Lombard or a Frankish immigrant, said to have been originally planted in Tortona, and later given the vast "Obertenghi march" (centered at Luni) in the mid-10th C. It was the break-up of the Obertenghi march in the 11th C. among his descendants that gave rise to the three great marquis houses of Malaspina, Pelavicini and Este.
Like I said, the Oberto's roots are unclear. It is often claimed he was an original Lombard, but his name is actually Frankish. If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on him being among the wave of fortune-seeking Frankish knights and lords that emigrated to Italy to look for positions during Carolingian times and the post-Carolingian upheaval. I can trace the immigrant origins of the other great families of the time - Tuscany, Ivrea, Friuli, Spoleto, etc. - back to their original homelands in Francia. But Otbert is a bit more elusive.
Obscurity naturally lends to fabrication and sprucing up of family legends. There is a rather dubious story that claims Otbert was a grandson of Wido of Tuscany (a definite 100% Frank - his mother was a Carolingian princess) and Marozia, Senatrix of Rome. Now Marozia was descended from a Roman patrician family of the Optimates faction. But this was a very opportunistic political marriage between the two big central Italian states of the time - Tuscany and the Papal States - directed against a common enemy (Hugh of Italy), so I'd consider that an exception. (Besides I don't believe this origin story of Otbert).
As to marriages, well, needless to say, nobody married for love but for tribal allegiance and big tracts of land. As the old Roman nobles were essentially killed or dispossessed of lands in all but the Byzantine-ruled areas (ergo the definite continuation of Roman patrician families in the Papal States and other enclaves), that meant that Germans married Germans, and had German babies who marry other Germans. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little degree of overlap in cross-border areas (e.g. the Hunbaldi of Bologna prob. married across to Romagnan families) but this wasn't common. On a few rare occasions there would be a high-profile political marriage with a Byzantine princess or a Roman pornocrat, but otherwise, as far as I can tell, all Germanic queens were of Germanic stock.
I am pretty certain lesser-ranking Germans, particularly those who lost land and fell in social status out of landed elite, had fewer qualms about Romano-X brides, and merged in there. But this was a step down, not a step up.
Like I said, the Oberto's roots are unclear. It is often claimed he was an original Lombard, but his name is actually Frankish. If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on him being among the wave of fortune-seeking Frankish knights and lords that emigrated to Italy to look for positions during Carolingian times and the post-Carolingian upheaval. I can trace the immigrant origins of the other great families of the time - Tuscany, Ivrea, Friuli, Spoleto, etc. - back to their original homelands in Francia. But Otbert is a bit more elusive.
Obscurity naturally lends to fabrication and sprucing up of family legends. There is a rather dubious story that claims Otbert was a grandson of Wido of Tuscany (a definite 100% Frank - his mother was a Carolingian princess) and Marozia, Senatrix of Rome. Now Marozia was descended from a Roman patrician family of the Optimates faction. But this was a very opportunistic political marriage between the two big central Italian states of the time - Tuscany and the Papal States - directed against a common enemy (Hugh of Italy), so I'd consider that an exception. (Besides I don't believe this origin story of Otbert).
As to marriages, well, needless to say, nobody married for love but for tribal allegiance and big tracts of land. As the old Roman nobles were essentially killed or dispossessed of lands in all but the Byzantine-ruled areas (ergo the definite continuation of Roman patrician families in the Papal States and other enclaves), that meant that Germans married Germans, and had German babies who marry other Germans. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a little degree of overlap in cross-border areas (e.g. the Hunbaldi of Bologna prob. married across to Romagnan families) but this wasn't common. On a few rare occasions there would be a high-profile political marriage with a Byzantine princess or a Roman pornocrat, but otherwise, as far as I can tell, all Germanic queens were of Germanic stock.
I am pretty certain lesser-ranking Germans, particularly those who lost land and fell in social status out of landed elite, had fewer qualms about Romano-X brides, and merged in there. But this was a step down, not a step up.
What? That's more ridiculous than Augustus claiming descent from Aeneas and Venus.
Cant find anymore where I got this piece of info but people just love to fake their family tree. Wasnt some famous viking in ck2 claimed to be son of Odin?
edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
Yeah like how every King/Dictator in the Middle East traces their line to Muhammed, even the secular Saddam Hussein did that later in his rule.
OK, so the Roman nobility mostly failed to maintain any of their power or position after the fall of Rome, that was mostly what I was asking. Thanks for the responses. I was thinking that it was at least possible that the new Germanic rulers would have found it easier to rule certain areas with centuries of Roman rule and Roman culture had they integrated with the Roman power structure and not killed, dispossessed, and banished the Roman nobility. After all, they did adopt the Roman religion and the local vernaculars of the Roman language, e.g. French.
I was skeptical of Gibbons/Wikipedia claim about the Roman origin of the House of Este: someone should edit. Their source is "The miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Vol 3 page 172." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Este
I was skeptical of Gibbons/Wikipedia claim about the Roman origin of the House of Este: someone should edit. Their source is "The miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Vol 3 page 172." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Este
This is not true.
Most if not all the church positions during and after the barbarian invasions were taken by old roman aristocrats. It took decades to get the first frankish bishops.
I'd say it's correct to say that part of the roman aristocracy recycled itself in a clerical role.
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Good point greendevil, I guess I was not properly considering the political power of the Church at this time.
Also I found an interesting discussion on this very same topic on another forum with some good responses. http://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/3699-roman-families-where-they-went/page-2
Also I found an interesting discussion on this very same topic on another forum with some good responses. http://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/3699-roman-families-where-they-went/page-2
Just checked. It seems to be misplaced. Here's p.172 of Vol. 3. Might be a different edition.
Gibbon does go through the a history of the House of Este later ("Antiquities of the House of Brunswick", p.399 ff ). And he agrees with me. He also says that the hypothesis that Otbert is a grandson from the marriage of Wido & Marozia "will not endure the test of critical inquiry" (p.417). Although he does embrace the hypothesis that that Otbert could have been derived from a junior branch from the Bonifaci House of Tuscany - that is, that Otbert's father was a cousin of Wido. I am not quite convinced of this, and Gibbon himself admits it is a speculative connection. Still, by linking the Obertenghi of Luni to the Bonifaci of Tuscany allows Gibbon to push the antecendent line back another century to its root in Boniface of Lucca, a Frankish governor installed in Carolingian times. (Gibbon calls him a "Bavarian", p.404, 406)
(Although Gibbon does not clarify "Bavarian", my own records indicate Boniface was likelier a Frankish lord who governed in Bavaria (rather than native Bavari). He was in Bavaria until 812, when Charlemagne transferred him to Italy to organize an govern the "March of Tuscany" (centered at Lucca, and initially including Luni). I can track the descendants of the Bonifaci pretty closely, and there seems to be no Roman marriages; they married into Frankish families all the way through, until Wido of Tuscany had his brief marriage to Marozia of Rome in the 930s. The hypothesized junior line that goes through Otbert and then Este would have broken off a generation before this marriage. That is, if we accept Gibbon's speculative hypothesis that the Obertenghi were derivative of the Bonifaci at all - which is far from clear. Either case, Gibbon certainly does not accept that the Este were descended from Marozia, and can't find any mention of any other Roman family, so Wiki is mistating it).
And the Wiki quote is completely weird. Says the "Attii migrated to Este to defend against the Goths". The Goths? What century is this? Este is in the Padua region (east). The Obertenghi were marquises in the Lunigiana (west) The "migration" did not happen, as the article itself acknowledges, until the mid-11th C., when the Obertenghi marquis Albert Azzo II built the castle in Este. Very weird.
True, but it isn't quite part of the elite but an interface between the masses and the elite. (Catholic) bishops were leaders of the local Romano-X communities, and thus naturally drawn from old local Roman gentry. They served as the representatives and defenders of the interests the Romano-X pops to the German warlord elite. And, of course, didn't marry into it.
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Descents and relatives of Muhammed are well known and Arabs never had an dark age so it is quite likely Saddam was somehow related into Muhammed.
So? The Habsburgs were far from unique in that regard, many Western European dynasties claimed similar things.
What's up with everyone claiming descent from the Trojans? The Romans did it, the Norse (in the Prose Edda) did it, and now the Habsburgs?
For instance the dukes of Brabant claimed to be descended from Merovingians, Carolingians (matrilinear that was true), but also Roman senators (from the time of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire) and even king Priam (Priamos) of Troy.
In the case of the Visigoths, the matter is quite confusing. We know the terms of the settlement pact that they got from emperor Honorius in 418 Ad to settle in the Aquitanian provinces, and in that pact the Goths were to receive two thirds of the land in said provinces. That land would be taken first from the Roman state and then from local landowners. Of course, as the Goths were in a position of force they got to choose which landowners were to be expropiated, and most likely the richest Roman senatorial families were the ones who suffered the most, as they would have owned the best tracts of land.
But we don't know if similar agreements were ever attained in the Hispanic provinces that they incorporated from the second half of the V century onwards, and we get confusing data from then onwards. We know that there were marriages between Roman and Gothic aristocratic families, which almost always included a Roman heiress marrying a Gothic lord with the subsequent offspring being considered "Goths" and bearing Gothic names. Some of said marriages could be very important politically. For example, in the early VI century king Theudis seized the throne thanks to the enormous patrimony of his Hispano-Roman wife, which allowed him to recruit a private army of 2,000 lancers. Also, up until the end of the kingdom we get (increasingly rare) instances of Latin names among the aristocracy, for example dux Claudius of Lusitania during Leovigild's reign or the dux Paulus who revolted against king Wamba in the 670s. But in the Acts of the numerous councils of the Hispanic church that have survived, almost all the secular dignataries that signed them bore Germanic names, especially among the palatine nobility. Among the high church hierarchy, Latin names are predominant until the kingdom's demise, but there is a clear tendency towards an increase in Germanic names.
Today scholars tend to consider that by the late VII century the aristocracy of the Visigothic kingdom was "biologically" mixed, with both Germanic and Hispano-Roman blood, but culturally it became "Gothicized": the aristocracy adopted Gothic names and customs and on the other way largely lost its Gothic language in favour of Latin and also adopted Roman Law with minor Germanic touches (as recorded in the Forum Iudicum).
That aristocracy then adopted different paths after the Umayyad conquest: in the areas settled by the new incomers, they adopted the same patrons of marriage and cultural assimilation into the new ruling culture that the old senatorial families had undergone and were largely absorbed into the new Arab upper class, while in the northern areas of the kingdom, they kept positions of power and were at the origins of some of the medieval dinasties of Iberia. The founder of the House of Barcelona count Wifred belonged to a Gothic lineage of the Septimanian city of Carcassonne, and the Asturian kings also descended from the Gothic nobility.
But we don't know if similar agreements were ever attained in the Hispanic provinces that they incorporated from the second half of the V century onwards, and we get confusing data from then onwards. We know that there were marriages between Roman and Gothic aristocratic families, which almost always included a Roman heiress marrying a Gothic lord with the subsequent offspring being considered "Goths" and bearing Gothic names. Some of said marriages could be very important politically. For example, in the early VI century king Theudis seized the throne thanks to the enormous patrimony of his Hispano-Roman wife, which allowed him to recruit a private army of 2,000 lancers. Also, up until the end of the kingdom we get (increasingly rare) instances of Latin names among the aristocracy, for example dux Claudius of Lusitania during Leovigild's reign or the dux Paulus who revolted against king Wamba in the 670s. But in the Acts of the numerous councils of the Hispanic church that have survived, almost all the secular dignataries that signed them bore Germanic names, especially among the palatine nobility. Among the high church hierarchy, Latin names are predominant until the kingdom's demise, but there is a clear tendency towards an increase in Germanic names.
Today scholars tend to consider that by the late VII century the aristocracy of the Visigothic kingdom was "biologically" mixed, with both Germanic and Hispano-Roman blood, but culturally it became "Gothicized": the aristocracy adopted Gothic names and customs and on the other way largely lost its Gothic language in favour of Latin and also adopted Roman Law with minor Germanic touches (as recorded in the Forum Iudicum).
That aristocracy then adopted different paths after the Umayyad conquest: in the areas settled by the new incomers, they adopted the same patrons of marriage and cultural assimilation into the new ruling culture that the old senatorial families had undergone and were largely absorbed into the new Arab upper class, while in the northern areas of the kingdom, they kept positions of power and were at the origins of some of the medieval dinasties of Iberia. The founder of the House of Barcelona count Wifred belonged to a Gothic lineage of the Septimanian city of Carcassonne, and the Asturian kings also descended from the Gothic nobility.
Theudis was a remarkable example.* But not sure how common it would be. You can't overlook that Roman-Gothic inter-marriage was forbidden in the Visigothic law codes. It was a capital offense. Not sure how enforced that was, but they went through trouble of revoking the ban in 580s under Leovigild, and making it possible to inter-marry, upon receiving permission of the count. (and by this time, Byzantine Spania was already in place, where cross-border marriages would again be useful).
As for Romans taking Gothic names, well, I come more often across the other way around (esp. among clerics), so I'm not sure how convinced I am by that.
(* - Worth noting that the same passage (Procopius Lib. 5, Ch. 12) referring to Theudis & this Roman woman seems to describe it as an exception, and places it in the context of his men (Ostrogoths) taking up Visigothic wives and "merging" of those two races. But no such analogous passage or insinuation about Romans.)
As for Romans taking Gothic names, well, I come more often across the other way around (esp. among clerics), so I'm not sure how convinced I am by that.
(* - Worth noting that the same passage (Procopius Lib. 5, Ch. 12) referring to Theudis & this Roman woman seems to describe it as an exception, and places it in the context of his men (Ostrogoths) taking up Visigothic wives and "merging" of those two races. But no such analogous passage or insinuation about Romans.)
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Siege is Troy is one of earliest event known and there were many godlike and half-godlike characteristic persons. Legend says some people survived from Troy and they travelled first into Carthage where they met Queen Dido. After that they travelled north and founded city on seven hills... Rome. This is the reason why pretty much everybody claimed some ancient family history because it connected them into classic legends. Classic Gods -> Troy -> Rome -> their kingdom.
Wouldn't it be better to at least claim descent from the winning, rather than losing, side though?
I got the view that the Romans liked the idea that the Trojans lost their city only because the gods manipulated their minds, and a supposed Greek traitor reassured them the giant horse was safe and should not be destroyed. So the Trojans lost due to Greek trickery and the gods so it lets them of the hook I guess.