The Political Significance of Gifts of Power in the Khmer and Mercian Kingdoms 793-926

Abstract

This paper compares four Latin charters and one recently discovered Sanskrit inscription recording various royal gifts of taxation to religious foundations in the contemporary Mercian and Khmer kingdoms in the early ninth and early tenth centuries. It draws upon philology and medieval history as its principal disciplines, and considers three models of gift-giving as a way of interpreting the data. Close textual investigation of these records is used to challenge narratives which suggest that such gifts of power weakened the power of rulers, and thus led to the breakup of states. It is equally possible to argue that these gifts of power enhanced the power of Mercian and Khmer kings. Moreover, other powerful factors, such as a cultural renaissance or environmental crisis, may be adduced to explain the context for the compilation of these documents, thereby opening up new perspectives for enquiry into the history of the Khmer and Mercian kingdoms in the early medieval period.Keywords: Cambodia; charters; gifts; Hwicce; immunities; inscriptions; Khmer; Laos; Latin; Mercia; military; Śaivism; Sanskrit; taxation; Vat Phu The comparison of the meanings of gift-giving in Buddhism and Christianity is to be valued as an important contribution to the historical debate on gift-exchange, which, as has been said before, when it explicitly makes use of anthropological models of gift-exchange, only refers to studies of gift-exchange in ›primitive‹, illiterate societies and seems erroneously unaware of the ongoing research on religious gift-giving in large-scale, literate traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Since the early twentieth century, comparative studies of gift-giving and kingship have shown that in primitive and pre-modern societies, royal gifts of land and power given to religious foundations in return for money and other counter-gifts may have had less to do with purely economic history and more to do with concepts of mutual obligation and the politics of negotiation.2 This approach has developed mainly from medievalists' engagement with anthropologists' studies of gift-giving in Africa, Asia and Polynesia in the colonial and post-colonial eras. 3 This article takes a different approach, and is intended as a step in the direction suggested by Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld (as stated in the epigraph to this article). We may start by briefly outlining three models of gift-giving evident in the work of medieval historians: 1. gift-giving and commercial transactions often operated in tandem, and thus many transactions which were presented as gifts and counter-gifts were in fact sales; 2. gift-exchange was used for the forging of alliances and in strategies of unification, with a view to enhancing the political power and social prestige of donors, and hence should not be viewed as evidence of the decline of royal power; and 3. gifts need to be differentiated from inalienable possessions, which, after they have been granted retained something of the distinct identities of their original owners and hence served to enhanc...