University of Virginia Library

THE KING'S CLAIM ON MONASTIC HOSPITALITY

To the north of the Church in a large enclosure, which
forms the counterpart to the court of the Hospice for
Pilgrims and Paupers, is a house whose elaborate layout
reveals it to be a guesthouse for visitors of unusual stature.
It is here that the traveling emperor or king was received,
his court or his agents (missi), and also, perhaps, the visiting
bishops and abbots.

The king's right to draw on the hospitality of the monasteries
for food and quarters while traveling dates back to
the early days of the introduction of monastic life in transalpine
Europe. But the use that the rulers made of it in the
time of the Carolingians was considerably more burdensome
than it had been under the Merovingians.[305] Ever-changing
political necessities, the protection of the boundaries, the
maintenance of peace in the interior, prevented the emperor
from establishing a permanent residence. "Performing his
high craft by constantly shifting around,"[306] he moved from
one of his royal estates to the other—making full use of the
obligations of the abbots and bishops to provide him with
lodging—according to the circumstances that his itinerary
imposed upon him, or simply in response to the necessity
of finding additional subsistance for himself and his court.
The primary motivations for such visits were not always of
an economic or military nature. Gauert's analysis of
Charlemagne's itinerary has shown that the emperor's general
travel schedule often had embedded in it a special
"Gebetsitinerar," at times involving lengthy detours for
visits to religious places where the emperor went primarily
for the purpose of prayer, to participate in important religious
festivals, or to venerate the local saints.[307] The heaviness
of the economic obligations that a monastery took upon
itself on such occasions depended on the frequency of the
visits, the length of the emperor's stay, and the size of his
retinue. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious availed themselves
of monastic hospitality with discretion; under the
later Carolingian kings the burden became heavier.[308] But
even as early as the second decade of the ninth century the
sum of monastic obligations in hospitality had reached proportions
so heavy as to drive the witty abbot Theodulf,
Bishop of Orléans, to remark desperately that had St.
Benedict known how many would come, "he would have
locked the doors before them."[309]