Around 775, a man about whom almost nothing is known writes a letter to Charlemagne. He presents himself as his servant, calls him rex mi, my king, and sets out in a few pages what makes a sovereign just. The text has crossed twelve centuries. We have engraved its essence onto eight blocks, in our workshop.
Here is who wrote it, what it says, and why it concerns us.
A man from the islands
Of its author we know only his name, Cathwulf, and what his letter allows us to guess. The vocabulary and the language point to training in the British Isles. He was probably a cleric, perhaps a monk, perhaps close to the court; some scholars have even suggested he might have been the young king's tutor, though nothing firmly proves it.
The dating, however, is fairly precise. The text mentions Charlemagne's capture of Pavia in June 774, and mentions no later event. It was therefore written shortly after that victory, in the months following the conquest of the Lombard kingdom. It is this date, around 775, that explains why the letter opens with a long list of the young king's successes: it celebrates a triumph still fresh.
Eight victories, then eight pillars
Cathwulf begins by listing what he presents as eight blessings God granted Charlemagne since his accession: becoming sole king on his brother's death, defeating the Lombards, entering Rome, and so on up to the capture of Pavia. The number eight structures the whole text, and it is no accident: it returns at the letter's end, in a different form.
Having reminded the king that he holds the place of God on earth, and that the bishop holds the second place, that of Christ, Cathwulf comes to the heart of his argument. He describes what upholds the throne of a just king as pillars hold up a building. There are eight:
Truth in the affairs of the kingdom. Patience in all things. Generosity in giving. Persuasiveness in speech. The repression of evil. The exaltation of good. Lightness of the tax burden on the people. Fairness in judging between rich and poor.
Cathwulf does not stop at the list. He draws from it a direct and blunt consequence: the whole fate of the kingdom depends on these eight pillars. If they hold, the reign is blessed, land and sea grow fertile, enemies collapse. If the king neglects them, discord strikes his own family, famine, plague, barren land, defeat follow. He cites sovereigns struck by misfortune as examples, and kings of Israel who failed to follow divine precepts.
The message is unambiguous: a kingdom's prosperity is not a matter of military fortune. It follows directly from the moral character of the one who governs.
A thought that came from elsewhere
What strikes one in this letter is how little it owes to Rome or to Roman imperial tradition. Scholarly work devoted to the question has shown that this conception of kingship, judged by the fertility of the kingdom and the virtue of the sovereign, comes from a quite distinct current: Irish social thought, transmitted through collections of Insular canon law then circulating on the continent.
This idea, that a direct link exists between the king's conduct and the prosperity of nature itself, was foreign both to Augustinian thought and to the imperial idea inherited from Rome. It comes from the islands. Cathwulf is, as current research stands, the earliest known witness to it at Charlemagne's court. Other texts from the same current would circulate in the following decades, carrying the same conviction: a just king makes the land bloom; an unjust one leaves it barren.
A letter that foreshadows a capitulary
Here is what first drew us to this text. Four years after this letter, in March 779, Charlemagne promulgated at Herstal the first great capitulary of his reign: twenty-three articles reorganising the religious and public life of the kingdom.
The parallel between the two texts is striking. Of the twenty-three themes addressed by the Capitulary of Herstal, fourteen already appear, in one form or another, in Cathwulf's letter: the jurisdiction of bishops, the repression of homicide and perjury, the protection of widows and travellers, the refusal to sell Christians outside the kingdom, attention to tithes. This is probably not a coincidence. While no certain causal link can be established, the proximity of themes suggests that the ideas carried by Cathwulf, or the current of thought he echoed, weighed on the agenda of the assembly gathered at Herstal.
The political context reinforces this hypothesis. The year 778 had been bad for Charlemagne: the disaster of an expedition into Spain, Saxon revolts, a severe famine. The Capitulary of Herstal responds in part to this crisis. And that is exactly the mechanism Cathwulf had described a few years earlier: a kingdom's misfortunes as a sign that a return to justice is needed.
What we keep from this
We chose to engrave these eight pillars rather than summarise them in a sentence, because no sentence does justice to their demand. These are not decorative virtues. They are standards of judgement, applied to a king by a man who had no reason to flatter him.
Lightness of the tax on the people and fairness between rich and poor close the list. That, too, is no accident: a text of counsel to power that begins with truth and ends with economic justice is not a text of complacency.
Our workshop occupies land where this text may have mattered. We claim no moral descent from an eighth-century emperor. We simply note that here, thirteen centuries ago, someone wrote that power is worth only its constancy, and that prosperity is earned rather than decreed.