This series also began its life as facebook posts I did for a medieval history group. The West Frankish kingdom in the long tenth century (c.880 - 1030 lets say) is very close to my heart - indeed its the area I wrote my masters thesis on, and the Feudal revolution debate I've been obsessing over since I was a first year undergraduate, essentially hinges on the last decades of it. Yet its political history is little known and has received little attention from academic medievalists post-WW1 (the last time a biography of Charles the Simple was written was in 1899), though in the last couple of decades that has started to be rectified. Through this blog I want to show that the last Carolingians and early Capetians can be interesting, so we'll start at the beginning ...Charles the Simple was born in 879, five months after the death of his father, King Louis II the Stammerer of West Francia. Louis was the son of King Charles the Bald (843 - 877), who had been given West Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire was divided up by the sons of Emperor Louis the Pious (814 - 840) after a three year civil war. However, unlike Henry VI of England, Charles was lucky enough not to have the kingship thrust on him as an infant. He had two teenaged elder half-brothers, Louis III and Carloman. They had some promise in them. Louis won a great victory against the Vikings at Saucourt in 881, that would not long afterwards be immortalised in one of the oldest surviving epic poems in German, the Ludwigslied. By 884, however, both of them were deceased. The West Franks were not going to have a five year old boy rule over them, so they got in Charles the Fat (these Carolingian kings really do have great names don't they), the king of East Francia and Italy and the son of Louis the German (Charles the Simple's great uncle) to rule over them. Thus the Carolingian Empire was briefly reunified. However, Charles, who was widely held to be incompetent, was soon faced with deposition and rebellion at the hands of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, who had the support of the German nobility, in East Francia in 887, and in January 888 he suffered a stroke and died.
This was the final undoing of the Carolingian Empire and a seismic moment for West Francia. For the first time since 751, when Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short overthrew the last king of the Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III, and was anointed king of the Franks, there was not a single adult male Carolingian candidate for the throne of the West Frankish realms. Arnulf was not gonna become king of West Francia, because his support base lay squarely in Germany and to a lesser extent Italy. There was the Carolingian cadet branch of the House of Vermandois, descended from Charlemagne's grandson Bernard of Italy, but for some reason they always stayed out of succession disputes - though that didn't stop them from throwing their weight around otherwise. The branch of the Carolingian dynasty ruling over the Middle Kingdom (Lotharingia), had died out in 869. The only Carolingian candidate for the throne was of course Charles the Simple, and he was only nine years old. Now could not be a worse time for a child king. The Vikings had laid siege to Paris only two years earlier, and their attacks were only intensifying, given that in the last two decades they had been losing ground in the British Isles thanks to the efforts of Alfred of Wessex and Rhodri Mawr of Gwynedd. As you might have guessed earlier, there was no principle of primogeniture under the Carolingians. And while there was a sort of dynastic principle - the anointing of kings had been monopolised by the Carolingians for almost 150 years - a non-Carolingian king was not inconceivable. So the nobles and bishops of the West Frankish kingdom, figuring they needed an energetic warrior on the throne, gathered together and elected Odo, count of Paris, who had led the defence of the city of Paris during the Viking siege whilst Charles was away in Italy, as their king. At the same time, non-Carolingian kings were coming to power in Transjurane Burgundy (basically modern day Switzerland and the Franche Comte region of France) and Italy, and a non-Carolingian dynasty, the Bosonids, already ruled in Provence. The annalist of Fulda complained about "kinglets" and another contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prum, claimed that kings were being spewed from the guts of the old empire.
Odo seemed like a good choice on so many accounts. He was one of the most powerful officers in the kingdom and and major landowner - he was ex officio count of Paris, Etampes, Orleans, Blois, Touraine and Anjou (and those were just his most important ones) and lay abbot - part of the Carolingians' programme of monastic reform, was to appoint lay men as abbots to take care of estate management, political representation and military organisation while the monks got on with prayer and study - of seven monasteries, including Saint-Denis and Saint Martin of Tours, two of the oldest and most prestigious in the kingdom. He had also, like many ninth century Frankish noblemen, received a good education in the liberal arts (certainly grammar, rhetoric and logic - which would have involved the study of lots of Classical Roman texts) at Saint-Denis. The one thing that could be held against him was his background. Odo's father, Robert the Strong, had been a prominent government official and military commander under Charles the Bald, but nothing is known of his ancestry before then, beyond the realm of pure speculation - the whole theory linking Robert the Strong to Count Robert of Worms in c.800 strikes me as being rooted in essentially circular reasoning. I suspect, Odo's ancestors prior to his father were not noble, in the sense they didn't belong to the circle of prominent families who frequented the royal court - the reichsaristokratie (imperial nobility) as they're referred to in German scholarship. To my knowledge, Noble status defined by law did not emerge in Western Europe until the thirteenth century, and the Carolingians seem to have had a relatively open aristocracy, created and defined through service to the king and the state as well as landownership. Blood was largely insignificant (though family connections were certainly of no small importance to political success). Thereby, snobbery wasn't going to be too much of a problem, but above all Odo was not a Carolingian and that was going to come back to bite him.
From what little detail we have of his reign, Odo was a fairly successful ruler to begin with. He called the kingdom-wide royal ban - summons for all the free men in the realm to partake in military service for the Frankish state - against the Vikings and won some victories against them in Neustria (Normandy and Anjou area) and Aquitaine. But soon he received a knife to the back from Archbishop Fulk of Rheims. Fulk had resisted Robert's election in 888 but had been forced to yield. As soon as Odo started experiencing setbacks against the Vikings in Aquitaine in 893, Fulk made his move and anointed the not yet fourteen year old boy Charles the Simple, who was in his care, as king of West Francia. For the next four years, Fulk and Charles constantly harassed Odo, not managing to depose him but making his life very difficult. In 897 they came to an agreement - Odo would continue to reign as king until his death, but Charles would succeed him as king and Odo's brother Robert would succeed him in his offices (countships and lay abbacies) and family estates. Odo died the next year, leaving the pathway to the throne for Charles the Simple unobstructed at last.
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