Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (28 page)

Burgundy, for certain, is a complex word. It carries a mass of diverse connotations. In English, for example, it has two main meanings: a place and a product. According to the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
, the place is defined as ‘1. a Kingdom, and later a duchy of the Western Empire, subsequently giving its name to a province of France’. The product is ‘2. ellipt. wine made in Burgundy’. Of course, one cannot expect the English to be particularly knowledgeable on continental matters, and it is not a complete surprise if the
SOED
’s entry contains flaws. What is surprising is that a mistake in word order muddies the issue unnecessarily. If the entry had read: ‘Burgundy: 1. a Kingdom of the western Roman Empire, and later a duchy…’, it would have been accurate, though incomplete. As it stands, it is both inaccurate and incomplete. And as for the wine, connoisseurs would be appalled by the implication that any old plonk from the region would qualify for the ‘Appellation d’Origine Controˆlée’, the ‘Registered Name of Origin’ (score 1  :  15).
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The full
OED
repeats the above definitions, while adding others:

• ‘shade of red of the colour of Burgundy wine’

• ‘sort of head-dress for women = BOURGOIGNE (obsolete)’

• ‘Burgundy hay: applied by British writers to the Lucerne plant,
Medicago sativa
, but in French originally to Sainfoin,
Onobrychis sativa
(the two were formerly confused)’

• ‘Burgundy mixture, a preparation of soda and copper sulphate used for spraying potato-tops’

Under ‘Burgundian’, after ‘belonging to Burgundy’ (adj.) and ‘an inhabitant of Burgundy’ (subst.), the
OED
opts eccentrically for ‘one of the Teutonic nations of the Burgunds…’ and ‘2. (in form of
Burgonian
) A kind of ship… built in the Burgundian dominions, which in the 15th c. included the Netherlands’. The ‘Teutonic nation of Burgunds’ is conceptually mangled, but at least the geography is not Francocentric.
¹²⁹

Webster’s American Dictionary
is minimalist. It offers ‘a region in France’; ‘a blended red wine produced elsewhere (as California)’; and ‘a reddish purple color’. This suggests, eccentrically, that Californian burgundy is the real thing, while burgundy from Burgundy may not be.

Given the prevailing pro-French bias, one expects the French to be better informed.
Littré
is one of the older dictionaries: ‘
BOURGOGNE
,
s.m vin de Bourgogne, E de Burgundi, nom d’un peuple germain; s.f nom vulgaire du sainfoin
.’ The definitions are sparse: a wine, a state, a people and a sort of hay, as in the
OED
. But there follow the headdress, the province and, unusually, ‘a breakaway fragment of pack-ice’: ‘
nom donné par les marins aux morceaux de glace détachée de la banquise
’. No one else has spotted the ice-floes.

Robert
comes next, and again the haul is disappointing. Burgundy, as in
Littré
, is nothing more than a province (score 1  :  15). And, despite the list of grand crus, there is no sign of the AOC.

So one turns to Imbs, and his
Trésor de la langue française
(‘Treasury of the French Language’). This is no more fruitful. Burgundy is still a mere province (score 1  :  15). But separate words are given for the Burgundians of old (
Burgondes
) and the Burgundians of today (
Bourguignons
). Nonetheless, one must conclude: dictionary definitions are very inadequate, particularly on historical matters.

Encyclopedias form a large category.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1974) can draw on the phenomenal
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(11th edition, 1911). It doesn’t disappoint. After describing the ancient Burgundians as ‘Scandinavian’, it gives a brief account of six kingdoms of Burgundy plus the county, plus a duchy, plus the ‘states of Burgundy’, plus the province. The seventh kingdom is at least implied. The only items missing are the Imperial Circle, a duchy, a landgravate, and the province (score 11  :  15).

The
Nouveau Petit Larousse
, a household name in France, starts with an unsatisfactory definition: Burgundy, ‘a region in the east of France which is more of a historical than a geographical unity’. But the account that follows covers six kingdoms, plus the county, duchy, ‘states of Burgundy’ and province (score 10  :  15). Still no Imperial Circle. It concludes: ‘Burgundy found itself joined for a long time with Germany. The Kings of France ate into it bit by bit over the centuries.’ This is tremendous news:
Larousse
is not Francocentric.
¹³⁰

The international aspect of the problem is crucial. The Burgundian question defies national frontiers. Ideally, one would draw on reference works not just from France, but from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Each source would naturally be strong on some points and weaker on others.

A German
Brockhaus
happens to be to hand. The entry is suitably long and detailed. It distinguishes well between the Burgundy of the present, which is defined as ‘a Region made up of four French departments’, and five Burgundies of the past: the Koenigreich der Burgunder, from 443, the Burgundia of the Franks, from 534, the Koenigreich Burgund (Arelat), the Herzogtum Burgund, that is, the duchy, and the Freigrafschaft Burgund (Franche-Comté). In explaining the genesis of the Arelat,
Brockhaus
also mentions Boso’s ‘Kingdom of Lower Burgundy’ (score 7  :  15). Surprisingly, no Imperial Circle.
¹³¹

Seeking impartiality, one turns to a country with no direct links to Burgundy. An old copy of the
Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN
is also to hand. It transpires that the Poles still use the Latin form,
Burgundia
. The
EP
describes it as a ‘historical land (
kraina historyczna
) in eastern France’, and ‘an important region for wine production’. But the long, solid, historical summary contains few deficiencies. One meets ‘the 5th Century Kingdom of the Germanic Burgundians’; the kingdoms of Upper Burgundy, of Lower Burgundy, and of Arles; and from 1032 ‘a kingdom within the structure of Germany’. Five out of a possible seven is good. ‘The name of Burgundy’, it continues, ‘was only preserved… in the Free County (Franche-Comté) which had belonged to Germany until 1382.’ This statement is inaccurate, but the general narrative stays on course. ‘The Duchy’s period of greatness was launched by the rule of Filip Śmiały [Philip the Bold],’ it says. And it does not stop, as many accounts do, with the last of the Valois duke-counts: ‘After the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, his sole heiress, Marie, married the Archduke of Austria Maximilian; and a new partition of B. resulted. France recovered the Duchy of B. plus Picardy. The Habsburgs took the Netherlands plus Franche-Comté, which eventually returned to France in 1678’.
¹³²
(Score 9  :  15.) Still no Imperial Circle.

For people without French, German or Polish, the highest hopes have to be reserved for a recently published
Gazetteer of the World
, produced by a prestigious American institution. It specializes in the descriptions of geographical places and historical territories: ‘Burgundy (BUHR-ghun-dee), Fr. Bourgogne (BOORGON-yuh), historic region and former province of E central and E France. The name applies to 2 successive anc. kingdoms and to a duchy, all embracing a territory larger than the 17th–18th cent. prov. After 1790, it was divided into depts. Present-day, it forms one of France’s new administrative regions’. So far, not too bad (score 5  :  15). Before long, however, the anachronisms creep in: ‘Conquered by Caesar in his Gallic Wars, it was later settled (5th cent. A.D.) by Burgundians, a Germanic tribe, who established the First Kingdom of Burgundy.’ Times and places are wrongly associated, and convoluted misconceptions proliferate:

Partitioned during the Merovingian and Carolingian era, it was reunited (933) in the Second Kingdom comprising Cisjurane Burgundy (already known as Provence) in the S and Transjurane Burgundy (N). Soon a smaller duchy of Burgundy was created by Emperor Charles II and absorbed (1034) into the Holy Roman Empire. The duchy entered its golden age under Philip the Good and came to include most of the present Neth., Belgium, and N and E France.

The word ‘soon’ shows the editors trying to climb desperately from the mire. The chronology is topsy-turvy, the nomenclature scrambled, and the absorption of the duchy into the Holy Roman Empire imaginary. Fortunately, a partial recovery is staged in the final section:

During 15th cent. Burgundy was… an artistic center outshining the rest of the continent. The wars of ambitious Charles the Bold, however, proved ruinous… His daughter, Mary of Burgundy, by marrying Emperor Maximilian I, brought most of the expanded Burgundy (but not the Fr. duchy) to the house of Hapsburg. The duchy was seized by Louis XI who made it into a Fr. Prov… Burgundy now lies astride the main Paris-Lyon-Marseilles RR and auto routes.
¹³³

(Score: hard to calculate.)

So what is the information-seeker to do? Taken together, the ‘recognized authorities’ are really no less imperfect than any others. The Internet, like any other library, contains works of varying value. Like all sources, it has to be used with critical vigilance, but it is not markedly inferior. Analytical studies have shown that Wikipedia, for all its faults, can sometimes match the most prestigious academic brands. It has the virtue of being constantly corrected and updated.
¹³⁴

The search, in fact, need never end. The indefatigable may wish to go on and explore the multi-authored composite historical works, often recommended for reference purposes. Unfortunately, the relevant chapter in the composite
New Cambridge Medieval History
does not open too promisingly. ‘The region known as Burgundy’, it begins, ‘has had some of the most elastic borders of any region of France.’ Once again, Burgundy is conceived in its limited French form. Medievalists, above all, should take more care.
¹³⁵

Other searchers may try their luck with the romantically titled works of yesteryear.
The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy
, for example, which hovers between fact and fiction, opens with a flourish. ‘On such a night as this,’ the first sentence whispers conspiratorially, ‘Charles of Burgundy rode to his death. He lost an empire, monsieur, because he dare not rescue a beautiful woman.’ A few pages later, it gets worse: ‘The kingdom lives because its motley kings, tatterdemalion warriors, guitar-playing swashbucklers, and mace-wielding choristers have refused to remain in their moldy tombs.’ Then, on
page 8
, one meets a sentence for which all can be forgiven. ‘The ancient Burgundy was, and is, something quite apart from the France that enveloped it – a sort of Atlantis engulfed beneath seas upon seas of new people.’ The author possessed the priceless gift of imaginative sympathy which so many more prestigious compilations lack. And he produced another great line. ‘Moonlight’, he wrote, ‘is the great restorer of vanished kingdoms.’
¹³⁶

*
The author of that assessment, R. Lane Poole, sometime editor of the
English Historical Review
and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, wrestled manfully with the problem. His
Notes on Burgundy
, written before the First World War, could easily be dismissed as dry-as-dust delvings. Yet they brim with suppressed excitement as he compares ambiguous references in little-known charters and chronicles, or admires the precision with which Flodoard of Reims distinguishes between three people, all with the same name. Two of his studies embark on investigative detective work, trying to establish the identities of men whose full names have not been recorded. One study deals with ‘a duke near the Alps’, who reportedly married a daughter of the English king, Edward the Elder (r. 899–924); the other deals with a Burgundian known only as Hugo Cisalpinus. Was it Hugh the Black, or Hugh the White, or possibly Hugh, nephew of Hugh of Italy? Neither pursuit is successful. The pleasure lies in the chase.

*
In the preceding period, the name of France had rarely been used except for the small region in the Seine valley now known as the Île de France. It was as duc de France in this limited sense that Hugues Capet first rose to prominence. When, on becoming king, he applied the name to the whole of his far larger kingdom, he was giving expression to the political claim that he and his subjects were the only true heirs to the Frankish tradition of Charlemagne and Clovis. His success may be gauged from the fact that the German name of
Frankreich
, ‘Land of the Franks’, became attached to the western part of Charlemagne’s former empire, but not to the eastern part, which was now being subsumed into the concept of
Deutschland
. The shift in nomenclature was no doubt facilitated by the indifference of the Ottonian emperors, who as saxons did not take offence at the loss of the Frankish label in the east.

*
The
filioque
(literally ‘and the Son’) is the central element in the theological doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Spirit. Ever since the ninth century the Western Church has held to the view that the Holy Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father and the Son’. The Eastern Church, in contrast, believes in a single fount of the divine Godhead, and in consequence holds to the formula that the Holy Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father and
through
the Son’. This fine distinction caused no end of difficulties for many hundreds of years.