From the sources 2: well, how did you become a king, then? Or 751 and all that

 As a kind of natural follow-up to my series about Charles Martel, lets talk about his son, Pippin the Short. Immediately after Charles Martel’s death in 741, the mayoral succession was disputed between Charles’ three sons – Pippin, Carloman (both sons from Charles’ first wife, Rotrude of Hesbaye) and Grifo (the son of Charles’ second wife or concubine, depending on who you ask, Swanahild of Bavaria). Pippin and Carloman quickly agreed to divide the administration of the Frankish kingdom between them and become joint mayors. They also agreed to install Childeric III (the last surviving adult male Merovingian) as king, after four years of the throne being vacant, to give their diarchy some legitimacy and hold it together. They then teamed up against their illegitimate half-brother, Grifo, besieged him in the citadel of Laon and then imprisoned him in a monastery. However, in 747 Grifo escaped and successfully courted the support of his maternal uncle, Duke Odilo of Bavaria. When Odilo died the following year, Grifo tried to take the duchy of Bavaria for himself but Pippin the Short led a successful campaign there and installed Odilo’s seven-year-old son, Tassilo, as duke. Grifo, however, would remain a troublemaker until his death in 753. Meanwhile, Carloman, after executing almost all of the ancient Alemannic tribal nobility in a mass show trial for treason at Cannstatt in 746, which finally pacified the persistently rebellious client realm of Alemannia and brought it under direct Frankish rule, decided to leave secular politics altogether in 747. He went down to Italy on a pilgrimage to Rome, became a hermit at Monte Soratte and then a monk at Monte Cassino. Whether it was the result of a genuine crisis of conscience/ conversion to the religious life or just doing his brother a huge favour, we shall never really know. Now Pippin the Short was sole prime minister and de facto ruler of the Frankish kingdom, but was still feeling somewhat insecure about his position. Being a mayor of the palace, indeed having the office monopolised by his family (the Carolingians), simply wasn’t sufficient anymore. He needed to take that next step which, as we said in a previous post, Tolkien’s stewards of Gondor never dared to make …

Now, as I’ve said in previous posts, while even by the reckoning of the most revisionist historians, the Merovingian kings after 720 were just constitutional figureheads with no political power, they did maintain one trump card until the very end – dynastic loyalty. After Clovis had eliminated all the rival Frankish petty kings at the beginning of the sixth century, the Franks within a couple of decades came to accept the idea that all their kings had to be male-line Merovingians. Thus Gundovald, a late sixth century pretender to the throne backed by the Eastern Roman Empire, had to claim to be the son of King Clothar I and an unnamed concubine. In 656, Grimoald, Pippin the Short’s maternal great-great-great uncle and a mayor of the palace, had exiled the child Merovingian king, Dagobert II, to Ireland and installed his own son on the throne, but that had ended badly for them – Merovingian loyalism was too strong. And when in 737 Theuderic IV died, apparently childless, Charles Martel did not claim the vacant throne for himself, but instead simply carried on as de facto ruler of the kingdom without a king Gondorian style. But Pippin had an ace up his sleeve – the alliance his father had established with the papacy a decade earlier. The Royal Frankish Annals tell us what happened next:

750

Burchard, the bishop of Wurzburg, and the chaplain Fulrad were sent to Pope Zacharias to ask him whether it was good that at that time there were kings in Francia who had no royal power. Pope Zacharias informed Pepin that it was better for him who [really] had the royal power to be called king than the one who remained without [effective] royal power. By means of his apostolic authority, so that order might not be cast into confusion, he decreed that Pepin should be made king.

751

Pepin was, according to the custom of the Franks, chosen king and was anointed by the hand of Archbishop Boniface of blessed memory and was lifted up to the kingship of the Franks in the city of Soissons. Childeric, who was falsely called king, was tonsured and sent to a monastery.

754

With holy oil Pope Stephen confirmed Pepin as king and joined with him as kings his two sons, the Lord Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman. The archbishop, Lord Boniface, preaching the word of the lord in Frisia was martyred.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, p 12)

Miniature of Pippin the Short from the Anonymous Chronicle of the Emperors (c.1112 - 1114), Corpus Christi College MS 373, folio 14

Now in terms of sketching out the events in chronological order, there is nothing wrong with the Annals – they’re doing what they say on the tin. But because they are annals – brief accounts of the events that took place each year – they also leave much to be desired. They give no account of the causes, motivations or rationale behind the events they tersely describe. Indeed, some of the details of the events they are very vague on. By what “custom of the Franks” was Pippin made king? Nor do they give us a sense of the novelty of it all. The anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks, while it did derive inspiration from the anointing of Solomon in the Old Testament (mentioned in Handel’s Zadok the Priest, played at every British coronation since 1727), had no precedent in Frankish kingship. And why was he anointed twice, the second time with his young sons as well? And of course, the Royal Frankish Annals are written from a pro-Carolingian perspective, though that is the problem with all our sources on Frankish history post-720. Some reading against the grain is therefore essential.

A miniature of the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the Priest from a mid-fourteenth century French manuscript, Royal 17 E VII folio 147v 

Let’s see what another source, possibly written closer in time to the events than the Royal Frankish Annals by a few decades, has to say – namely the so-called Conclusion about the anointing of Pippin, added at the end of an eighth century copy of Gregory of Tours’ Book of Miracles.

If, reader, you wish to know when this little book was written and issued in precious praise of the holy martyrs, you will find that it was in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 767, in the time of the most happy, serene and catholic Pepin, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, son of the late Prince Charles [Martel] of blessed memory, in the sixteenth year of his most happy reign in the name of God, indiction five, and in the thirteenth year of his sons, kings of the same Franks, Charles [Charlemagne] and Carloman, who were consecrated kings with holy chrism by the hands of the most blessed lord Pope Stephen of holy memory together with their father, the most glorious lord King Pepin, by the providence of God and by the intercession of the holy apostles Peter and Paul.

This most prosperous lord and pious King Pepin had, three years previously, been raised to the throne of the kingdom by the authority and commandment of the lord Pope Zacharias of holy memory, and by unction with the holy chrism at the hands of the blessed priests of Gaul, and election by all the Franks. Afterwards he was anointed and blessed as king and patrician in the name of the holy Trinity together with his sons Charles and Carloman on the same day by the hands of Pope Stephen, in the church of the blessed martyrs Denis, Rusticus and Eleutherius, where, as is well known, the venerable Fulrad is archpriest and abbot. Now, in this very church of the blessed martyrs, on the same day, the venerable pontiff blessed with the grace of the sevenfold Spirit the most noble and devout and most assiduous devotee of the holy martyrs Bertrada, wife of the most prosperous king, clad in her robes. At the same time he strengthened the Frankish princes in grace with the blessing of the holy Spirit and bound all, on pain of interdict and excommunication, never to presume in future to elect a king begotten by any men other than those whom the bounty of God has seen fit to raise up and has decided to confirm and consecrate by the intercession of the holy apostles through the hands of their vicar, the most blessed pontiff.

We have inserted these things briefly, dear reader, on the very last page of this little book so that they may become known by common report to our descendants in subsequent pages.

(Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press, 2009, pp 13 - 14)

From this source, things start to become clearer. The first anointing in 751, which followed the election of Pippin as king by the Frankish nobility, was clearly done to establish that he was the legitimate ruler in the eyes of God, just as the kings of the Israelites, who were also anointed, had undoubtedly been. While individual Merovingian kings were sometimes seen as having been favoured by God, or were likened to Biblical figures, divine backing was not an essential component of what made a Merovingian king legitimate or not. But the Carolingians made it one in 751, and their precedent was widely followed ever since. The anointing has been an essential step in constituting a new British monarch since the tenth century, when the West Saxon kings of England consciously adopted it from Carolingian precedent, and is to this day still technically meant to symbolise how the monarch derives their right to rule directly from God. Indeed, the anointing was deemed too sensitive to be aired on live television when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was being filmed.

The coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Pippin the Short's legacy was still alive and well in the coronation of his 30x great-granddaughter just over 1200 years after his own.

As for why it was necessary to anoint Pippin a second time, and to anoint his sons as well, despite the fact they weren’t going to rule the Frankish kingdom for some time, the source provides us with some clues. The source says that Pope Stephen made the Frankish magnates “on pain of interdict and excommunication” swear that they would not elect another ruler except male-line Carolingians. He also made it explicit to them that this is so because only male-line Carolingians have God’s approval, manifested in the anointing of Pippin and his sons by the Pope, Christ’s servant and the successor of the Apostle Saint Peter, to become rulers of the Franks. From this, it is clear that Pippin was worried that the events of 751 actually set a dangerous precedent to the Frankish nobility. Pippin would have suspected that some of the Frankish magnates were thinking “if Pippin can do it, who’s to say that one of us can’t have a pop at it either. After all, what was he before he became king and who put him in charge?” Therefore, Pippin needed a second ceremony to say “get in line you cheeky buggers. Us Carolingians are special. God and his servant on earth, the Pope, say so. From now on you can have me and my descendants as your kings, and if you try to have it otherwise you risk exclusion from the church and your immortal soul burning for eternity in hell.”

And this isn’t the only source which suggests that there was some unease immediately after Pippin became king in 751. Notker the Stammerer, writing in 886 under Pippin’s great-great grandson Emperor Charles the Fat, tells us the following story about Pippin:

When he found out that the nobles of his army were accustomed in secret to speak contemptuously of him, he ordered one day a bull, terrible in size, to be brought out, and then a most savage lion to be set loose upon him. The lion rushed with tremendous fury on the bull, seized him by the neck and cast him to the ground. Then the king said to those who stood round him: ‘now drag the lion off the bull, or kill the one on top of the other.’ They looked down on one another, with a chill in their hearts, and could hardly utter these words amid their gasps: ‘Lord, there is no man under heaven, who dare attempt it.’ Then Pippin rose confidently from his throne, drew his sword, and at one blow cut through the neck of the lion and severed the head of the bull from his shoulders. Then he put his sword back in its sheath and said: ‘Well, do you think I am fit to be your lord? Have you not heard what little David did to the giant Goliath, or what tiny Alexander did to his nobles?’ They fell to the ground, as though a thunderbolt had struck them, and cried ‘who but a madman would deny your right to rule over all mankind?’

(Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics, 2008, p 106)

Not quite the same but it will have to do. A lion and a stag from an eighth century Lombard-Carolingian tomb I saw in Bologna. Photographed by yours truly

Of course, by Notker’s day, the reign of Pippin the Short was beyond anyone’s living memory, and Notker tells many legends and picturesque, moralising stories in his Deeds of Charlemagne. Any historian who wants to use Notker as a source for Carolingian politics has to do so with extreme care. Yet the fact that Notker chose to tell this anecdote does seem to show, that even after the Carolingians had continuously ruled as kings of the Franks for 135 years and seemed unshakeable (though that was going to change in just a few years), people could remember that there was a time when the position of the Carolingian dynasty had been a lot more unstable and their right to rule the Franks was not taken for granted. And while this incident with the bull and the lion probably never happened, it does nonetheless convey a broader truth – that new and innovative rituals, symbols and charismatic displays were absolutely essential to the establishment and maintenance of Carolingian rule. It was their creativity and dynamism that kept the Carolingians in power for so long, which left many significant and enduring legacies for later periods in the history of European royalty.