Boso's Consecration, 879

Hincmar sets the scene for his account of Boso's king-making by another explicit attribution of initiative: Boso was "persuaded by his wife, who kept on saying that she no longer wanted to live if, daughter as she was of the emperor of Italy, and former betrothed of the emperor of Greece, she did not

make her husband a king."^[38] The statement gains its point from the account that immediately precedes it in Hincmar's annal (and the word "meanwhile" signals the synchronicity of the two events) of the king-making of the Stammerer's sons. There the subject of the verb (regem) facere was the primores ; here the subject is Boso's wife! After this travesty of correct proceedings, we are not surprised to read that Boso "persuaded the bishops of those regions, who had in part been constrained by threats, in part drawn in by greed for the abbacies and estates promised them and later given them, to anoint and crown him king."^[39] Hincmar's single long sentence is carefully constructed: the final verbs "anoint and crown" are drained of their usual meaning, and rendered positively ironic, by what precedes them.

Further, as in the case of Carloman's fate in 873, the Boso episode needs to be read in the context of a whole annal. In fact it is framed by accounts of two other king-makings. Not only is it immediately preceded by the description of the consecrations at Ferrières, as we have seen, but it is immediately followed by this statement: "And also Hugh, son of Lothar II by Waldrada, collected a great gang of brigands and tried to seize the realm of his father."^[40] The use of the words "meanwhile" and "also" to introduce the successive sentences dealing with Boso and Hugh suggests that Hincmar means us to link these episodes. Boso's attempted coup "in those parts" has as complement the bastard Hugh's abortive "invasion" of Lotharingia. Only in the next sentence, with its neutral statement that Charles the Fat "obtained the kingdom" of Lombardy, does Hincmar recover his composure; he can go on to conclude this annal with an upbeat account of the young West Frankish kings' encounter with the Vikings, "and the army of the Franks, by God's will, returned home safe with victory."^[41]

Both in his record of Boso's consecration, and in his setting of it, Hincmar has packed a judgment. The omission of reference to primores (though other sources imply just such backing for Boso) is surely deliberate. For a man who lacked any hereditary right, only aristocratic invitation could have supplied legitimacy. A consecration performed by bishops under such circumstances was inoperative as far as Hincmar was concerned: in his remaining annals, he pointedly denies Boso the title of king. Far from elevating episcopal consecration to the cardinal constitutive act of king-making, Hincmar shows here his contempt for what the relationship of king to bishops could all too easily become: a mere matter of bribes and threats. By juxtaposing this to the very different case of the Stammerer's sons, Hincmar highlights the absence of the primores from Boso's inauguration and hence implies that no true king-making was effected.