ABSTRACT
I It will have become sufficiently clear by now that, at any rate in the West-Frankish portion of the Carolingian inheritance, king and hierarchy pursued similar aims; they met each other, so to speak, half-way-in some respects an almost ideal method of making progress. But this process of reaching accommodation between royalty and episcopacy was greatly accelerated by the concomitant emergence of the power of the nobility: the aristocrats, themselves claiming to have a special blood charisma and not owing their position to either king or bishop, had begun by the mid-ninth century to exercise an influence in public matters which was in scope larger than that which could be observed on any comparable scale before.1 And this influence was largely based on their wealth. The nobility can be counted as a third force coming into the sphere of public life with rapidly increasing vigour. They were powerful, assertive and aggressive.
