Treaty of Bonn

On 7 November 921, the Treaty of Bonn, which called itself a "pact of friendship" (amicitia), was signed between Charles III of France and Henry I of Germany in a minimalist ceremony aboard a ship in the middle of the Rhine not far from Bonn.Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, Patrick J. Geary, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 26.Eberhard Müller-Mertens, "The Ottonians as kings and emperors", in The New Cambridge Medieval History: c. 900 – c. 1024, vol. 3, Rosamond McKitterick and Timothy Reuter, eds. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2000), 241. The use of the river, which was the border between their two kingdoms, as a neutral territory had extensive Carolingian precedents and was also used in classical antiquity and in contemporary Anglo-Saxon England.Julia Barrow, "Demonstrative behaviour and political communication in later Anglo-Saxon England", Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 141.

The treaty, which "more than most such amicitiae, was decidedly bilateral, reciprocal and equal", recognised the border of the two realms and the authority of their respective kings.Geoffrey Koziol, "Charles the Simple, Robert of Neustria, and the vexilla of Saint-Denis", Early Medieval Europe 14:4 (2006), 385–86. It confirmed the legitimacy of...
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