ABSTRACT
The earliest migration during the decades around the year 900 was directed towards Francia. The name Gunzo is indeed well attested in the Milanese region in the ninth and tenth centuries, when we find several homonyms mentioned in documentary sources. Among them a priest redacting a charter for Archbishop Walpert of Milan in July 963 is a particularly interesting figure. By the early eleventh century, the Italian scholastic system had been restructured to offer a tailored education for students hoping for a future position in the administration of the empire. Post-Carolingian Europe might have been shaken by numerous political crises and endured violent military confrontations, but these did not affect the circulation of scholars and books before and after the so-called ‘Ottonian Renaissance’. The intellectual profile of the Italian masters recruited at court shows the fields in which they excelled and the knowledge they could offer to beat the competition.
