Liutprand of Cremona

Liutprand was born around 922 in Pavia, the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, into a prosperous Lombard family with connections at the royal court ^[1]. His name, sometimes spelled Liudprand or Liutprando, recalled the great eighth century Lombard king, a sign of the family's pride in its heritage. Both his father and his stepfather served as envoys to Constantinople on behalf of King Hugh of Italy, so diplomacy toward the Byzantine Empire was almost a family trade before Liutprand ever took it up himself ^[2].

As a boy he entered the court of King Hugh of Provence, who ruled Italy from 926 to 947. Liutprand later recalled that his fine singing voice earned him a place among the palace clergy at Pavia, where he received a thorough education in Latin letters ^[1]. That training shows on every page he wrote: his prose is studded with classical allusions, scraps of Greek, and verse in a variety of meters. Few writers of the tenth century commanded such range, and fewer still deployed it with his appetite for wit and invective ^[3].

He was ordained a deacon at Pavia and moved into royal administration. After Hugh's fall, Liutprand attached himself to Berengar II of Ivrea, the marquess who became the effective master of Italy in the late 940s. He served Berengar as chancellor, a position that placed him at the center of Italian politics while still in his twenties ^[2].

In 949 Berengar sent Liutprand on his first great mission: an embassy to Constantinople, to the court of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus ^[1]. His stepfather paid the costs of the journey, reportedly because Berengar declined to fund it properly, a slight Liutprand never forgot. In the Byzantine capital he learned Greek, observed the elaborate ceremonial of the imperial palace, and left a memorable description of the mechanical throne that rose into the air while gilded lions roared and bronze birds sang ^[3]. On this first visit he was received with honor, and his account of it glows with fascination for Byzantine splendor.

Sometime after his return, Liutprand broke with Berengar. The causes are not fully documented, but his own writings drip with hatred for the king and especially for Queen Willa, whom he attacked in scandalous detail ^[2]. Around 950 he left Italy and found refuge at the court of Otto I of Germany, the most powerful ruler in western Europe. There he entered the circle of learned clerics around the king and met Recemund, a bishop and envoy from the caliph of Córdoba, who urged him to write a history of his own times ^[4].

Liutprand took up the suggestion in 958, beginning the book he called Antapodosis, a Greek title meaning retribution or repayment. He stated openly that part of his purpose was to repay Berengar and Willa for their treachery toward him ^[1]. The result, composed in stages over several years and never finished, covers European history from 888 to about 949 and remains a principal source for the period, however partisan its judgments ^[4].

Any list of Liutprand of Cremona achievements begins with his three surviving works. The Antapodosis ranges across Italy, Germany, and Byzantium, blending chronicle, anecdote, and satire ^[4]. His second work, the Historia Ottonis, is a short account of the events of 960 to 964, centered on Otto I's intervention in Rome and the deposition of Pope John XII. Written by a committed partisan of Otto, it is nonetheless the fullest narrative of that crisis to survive ^[2]. Historians treat both books with caution and gratitude in equal measure: caution because Liutprand settles scores on nearly every page, gratitude because without him whole stretches of tenth century history would be nearly blank ^[3].

Otto rewarded his service. In 961 the emperor appointed Liutprand bishop of Cremona, a Lombard see on the river Po, and he held it until his death ^[1]. As bishop he continued to work as a royal agent, drafting documents, attending synods, and serving as an interpreter between Latin and Greek speakers. He was present at the Roman synod of 963 that tried Pope John XII, where his command of both languages made him Otto's spokesman ^[2].

His most famous single work came out of failure. In 968 Otto sent him to Constantinople to negotiate a marriage between Otto's son, the future Otto II, and a Byzantine princess. The emperor Nicephorus II Phocas received him coldly, disputed Otto's imperial title, lodged him in miserable quarters, and sent him home with nothing ^[5]. Liutprand's revenge was literary: the Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana, a furious, funny report of the embassy that mocks Byzantine food, dress, ceremony, and the emperor himself. The Relatio is one of the most vivid first person documents of the entire Middle Ages and a foundational text for the study of medieval diplomacy ^[3].

As a cleric, Liutprand had no wife or recorded children, and what is known of his private life comes almost entirely from remarks scattered through his own books. He wrote affectionately of his education, his singing, and his family's diplomatic tradition, and bitterly of patrons who wronged him ^[1]. His personality comes through more clearly than that of almost any contemporary: proud, learned, quick to take offense, and gifted with a savage sense of humor.

His tastes were those of a court intellectual. He quoted Virgil, Terence, Horace, and the Bible with equal ease, inserted Greek words to display his learning, and enjoyed rhetorical set pieces, including the insults he put in his own mouth before the Byzantine emperor ^[3]. Modern readers have sometimes found his obscenity startling in a bishop; his attacks on Willa of Ivrea and on the women of the Roman aristocracy are notoriously coarse. Scholars read these passages as political weaponry in the style of Roman satire rather than as simple reporting ^[4].

For all his venom, Liutprand was a serious churchman by the standards of his day. He composed a homily on Easter, took part in the reforming synods of Otto's Italy, and administered his diocese of Cremona through a difficult decade ^[2].

After the failed embassy of 968, Liutprand returned to Italy and resumed his duties at Cremona and at court. The marriage negotiation he had opened did eventually succeed, though under a new Byzantine regime: in 972 the princess Theophanu arrived in the West and married Otto II, a union with lasting consequences for the German empire ^[5]. Some scholars believe Liutprand joined a final legation to Constantinople in connection with these negotiations around 971 ^[2].

He died in 972, roughly fifty years old. The place of his death is not recorded with certainty; later traditions suggest he may have died during or soon after the journey east, but the sources permit no firm conclusion ^[1]. His works survived in a small number of manuscripts, the most important of which, now in Munich, carries corrections that some researchers have argued come from the author's own hand ^[4].

Liutprand's reputation rests on the sheer usefulness and readability of his books. For the political history of Italy, Germany, and Byzantium between the 880s and 960s, he is repeatedly the only detailed narrative source, which is why every Liutprand of Cremona biography written by modern historians must wrestle with his biases while depending on his information ^[3]. His portrait of the so called dark century of the papacy shaped how later generations imagined tenth century Rome, for better and for worse ^[4].

The Relatio in particular has enjoyed a long afterlife. Historians of diplomacy mine it for details of protocol, gift exchange, and the clash between Western and Byzantine ideas of empire, while literary scholars study it as an early masterpiece of first person travel writing and polemic ^[5]. His disgusted description of a banquet drenched in fish sauce, and his sparring with Nicephorus over who deserved the title of Roman emperor, are quoted in nearly every survey of medieval East West relations.

Editions and translations have kept him in circulation for centuries. His complete works appeared in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series, and English versions by F. A. Wright in 1930 and Paolo Squatriti in 2007 brought him to a wide readership ^[6]. Among the durable Liutprand of Cremona facts is this one: a minor Italian bishop, writing to repay personal grudges, produced some of the most valuable and most entertaining history of the entire early Middle Ages.