Fraxinetum

The Frankish annals record Muslim raiders at Marseille in 838, carrying off men and women, clerical and lay, as slaves, and at Arles in 869, where the archbishop Roland was ransomed but handed back dead.

Liudprand of Cremona dated the occupation of Fraxinetum to about 887, when a ship carrying some twenty Andalusī sailors put in near Saint-Tropez. They seized the settlement at the foot of the hill and then the fort above, reached only by a narrow path through the ash woods that probably gave the place its name. Word went back to Spain and the Balearics, and about a hundred more warriors came, drawn by religious zeal and by plunder. Liudprand blamed their quick success on the squabbling of the Provençals after Carolingian authority collapsed. Latin writers called them Saracens, sometimes simply Spaniards; Ibn Ḥawqal made the settlement a dependency of the caliphate of Córdoba.

Within two decades they had subdued Provence and were raiding across the Alps. By 906 they held the pass of Mont Cenis and had attacked Acqui, Oulx and Susa; by 911 all the western Alpine passes were theirs. Embrun, the Maurienne and Vienne were raided between 915 and 918, Marseille and Aix in 920, the upper Rhône between 929 and 933; in 939 they struck the abbey of Saint Gall and razed Saint-Maurice d'Agaune. Like the Vikings of the same decades, they went for monasteries: rich and undefended.

Rule inside the enclave was indirect: Christians kept their religion and their towns their self-government by accepting the dhimma and paying the jizya, while the conquerors' main business remained the capture of Europeans for the slave markets of the Islamic world. Flodoard of Reims noted under 951 that the Saracens holding the passes took tribute from travellers to Rome before letting them through.

The destruction of the port of Fréjus in 940 brought a response from Hugh of Italy. In 941 or 942 he allied with Byzantium, sealing it with the marriage of his daughter Bertha to the emperor Romanos Lekapenos's grandson Romanos II, and attacked by land while a Byzantine squadron of chelandia burned the Muslim ships with Greek fire. With Fraxinetum on the point of surrender, word reached him that Berengar of Ivrea was preparing to invade Italy from exile in Germany, and he called off the siege and came to terms: the Muslims kept the Alpine passes, presumably in exchange for holding the Italian frontier. Christian writers condemned the bargain. Through the 940s Fraxinetum was at the height of its power; Adalbert of Italy took refuge there after his downfall in 962.

Otto I plainly believed the Umayyad court could rein Fraxinetum in, and embassies passed between them through the 950s; a raid into the upper Rhine valley in 956 prompted another. John of Gorze carried a letter judged insulting to Islam and waited three years before a milder one let him stand before Abd al-Rahman III. Afterwards material aid from Spain fell away sharply.

In July 972 the Saracens seized Maiolus, abbot of Cluny, as he recrossed the Alps from Rome, expecting a large ransom; the monks of Provence raised it and he was freed. The reprisal he organised drew Count William I of Provence, Count Arduin of Turin and men from Provence, Piedmont and Septimania, who beat the Saracens at Tourtour. The stronghold fell after a short siege, in 972 by some accounts and 973 by others. Those who did not go into exile were killed or sold into slavery; many converted and stayed in Provence as serfs, their lands parcelled out among the victorious Provençal nobles.

Where Fraxinetum stood is not settled. The name is Latin, fraxinetum for an ash wood, and may survive in Freinet; the hill above modern La Garde-Freinet is the usual identification, though the territory's limits were never clearly drawn. Arab geographers called it Jabal al-Qilāl, the mount of timber, an enclave of streams and fertile soil that took two days to cross; Ibn Ḥawqal mistook it for an island at the mouth of the Rhône.

The fort above La Garde-Freinet was long thought to stand on a Muslim qasr. Excavations by J. Lacam in 1965-66 and Philippe Sénac between 1979 and 1989 found instead a fortified village of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, after the counts of Provence took the region back. What Fraxinetum was is argued over too: Marc Bloch dismissed it as a nest of brigands, while later historians read it as a frontier state of economic and military weight, placed to obstruct traffic between the Italian merchant cities and southern Christendom.