1 The rhetoric of election – 1 Peter 2.9 and the Franks Gerda Heydemann & Walter Pohl 1 [Accepted manuscript of the chapter published in: Rob Meens, Dorine van Espelo, Bram van den Hoven van Genderen, Janneke Raaijmakers, Irene Van Renswoude, Carine Van Rhijn (eds.), Religious Franks. Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke de Jong (Manchester: University Press 2016) 13-31]. Could the Franks be regarded as holy, as a chosen people? Alcuin wrote in his Vita Vedastis that through the baptism of Clovis the Franks had become a ‘holy nation’ (gens sancta), a ‘people of His own’ (populus adquisitionis). 2 This seems like a strong statement of Christian Frankish identity by Charlemagne’s Anglo-Saxon advisor, based on a quote from the First Letter of Peter in the New Testament. 3 It raises a number of important questions. What does it tell us about the attitude of ‘religious Franks’ towards Frankish ethnic identity? And how exactly were ecclesia, regnum/imperium and gens related? We owe fundamental insights on this problem to Mayke de Jong: ‘From the late eighth century onwards, the notion of ecclesia, including all its connotations of the eventual salvation of God’s people, was harnessed to the identity of the Carolingian polity, with the ruler’s responsibility for the salvation of its people as its defining factor.’ Therefore, ‘the Holy Church or the Christian people (sancta ecclesia vel populus Christianus) could be one way of defining the identity of the Frankish polity.’ 4 Of course, that did not mean that educated Franks considered Church, kingdom and people to be one and the same, but they strove to make them converge. Political thinking in early 1 Research for this article was supported by the Austrian Research Fund (FWF) in the Wittgenstein Prize project ‘Ethnic processes in Early Medieval Europe’ (2005–2010) and in the SFB ‘VISCOM’ F42-G18. A first version of this paper was discussed in January 2010 at a workshop in Hawarden, UK, in the context of a Research Councils UK grant, ‘Constantine’s Dream’, run by Kate Cooper (Manchester). 2 Alcuin, Vita II Vedastis 2, ed. B. Krusch, MGH SS rer Mer. 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1896), pp. 414–27, p. 417f. 3 1 Peter 2.9–10; and see below. 4 M. de Jong, ‘Ecclesia and the early medieval polity’, in S. Airlie, W. Pohl and H. Reimitz (eds), Staat im frühen Mittelalter (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 113–32, at p. 119, referring to Annales regni Francorum, a. 791, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SS rer. Germ. in us. schol. [6] (Hannover: Hahn, 1895), p. 58.