So today I'm taking a break from my series on Guibert de Nogent to return to some Carolingian content, this time bringing royal politics back to into view again.
On this day in 771 died Carloman, king of the Franks. He had reigned for only three years.
Carloman was born on 28 June 751. His father was Pippin the Short (714 - 768). A few months before Carloman's birth, Pippin the Short, then the Mayor of the Palace (prime minister) of the Frankish kingdom, led a swift, bloodless and successful coup d'etat against the last Merovingian king Childeric III, deposing and imprisoning him and his son in a monastery. Pippin the Short was then elected king by the Frankish magnates and crowned at Soissons. The Royal Frankish Annals, written early in the ninth century, claim that Pippin was crowned by the great Anglo-Saxon missionary Saint Boniface, but Boniface's own letters and the other contemporary sources for his life do not mention that he did.
Certainly, contrary to how most of the early ninth century sources - the Royal Frankish Annals, the Earlier Annals of Metz and Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" - present it, the position of the Carolingians was actually quite precarious after they usurped the throne from the Merovingians. You see, the Merovingians had been in charge ever since Clovis (466 - 511) had eliminated all the other Frankish petty kings and conquered what remained of Roman Gaul and the Visigothic kingdom of Aquitaine. They had thus been in charge of all of what would later become France for a period longer than the United States has been existence as of today. While all historians would agree that for at least a generation before Pippin's coup d'etat, the Merovingian kings had wielded no effective political power, this was still an earth-shattering event. And Pippin had undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent. If he could usurp the throne, then why couldn't any other Frankish aristocrat do the same - with the Merovingians gone, the throne was basically an open goal. Long term readers of this blog will know that I've written about this at greater length before.
Carloman was thus from only the second generation of Carolingian monarchs, but unlike his elder brother Charlemagne, born in either 742 or 748, he was actually born into royalty.
When Carloman was only three, an extroardinary event happened. In 754 Pope Stephen II came to visit Gaul, the first time a pope had ever travelled north of the Alps on an official visit. At the church of Saint Denis near Paris, Pope Stephen II had Pippin the Short reanointed as king and granted him the title of "Patrician of the Romans." He then gave that title to the two young sons of the Frankish king, and had both of them anointed as Pippin's successors as well. As the "Short Chapter on the Anointing of Pippin" (written in 767) recounts, Stephen then made all the Frankish nobles assembled there swear on pain of excommunication never to elect a king again unless he was a male-line descendant of Pippin the Short. This text really highlights just how precarious the position of the first Carolingian monarchs really was, and the importance of their alliance with the papacy.
We otherwise know very little of Carloman's early life and upbringing. He would have certainly been taught how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court, as would befit a highborn Frank, as well as receiving instruction in the doctrines of the Christian faith. Given that Pippin himself had been educated by the monks of Saint Denis, it is very likely that Carloman was literate in the sense he could read Latin. But whether he could write is less certain - his brother Charlemagne, according to his biographer Einhard, tried to learn how to write late in life and never quite succeeded. Carloman was present at the assembly in 757 in which Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria swore an oath of vassalage to Pippin. But other than that, his childhood and adolescence, like that of most early medieval rulers, receives scant attention from the sources and so we know almost nothing about it.
In August 768, Pippin the Short died and his sons Charlemagne and Carloman were both anointed and crowned as kings of the Franks as per his succession plan. The kingdom was also split into halves between them, so as to defuse fraternal rivalry. The following year, Charlemagne led a successful campaign against the rebellious Gallo-Romans of Aquitaine and defeated and captured their last semi-independent duke, Hunoald II, with the help of Duke Lupus of Gascony. Carloman promised to lead his troops in support of this campaign, but never showed up. Charlemagne was not at all impressed by this.
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| A nineteenth century map of the division of the Frankish kingdom in 768. Territories in yellow are Charlemagne's, territories in pink are Carloman's. |
By 770, it was abundantly clear that the two brothers hated each other. What was exactly at fault for this is debated. Historians generally agree that Charlemagne was the favourite son of their mother, Bertrada. Bertrada managed to broker an alliance between Charlemagne and Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, and she arranged a marriage between him and Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius. This meant than Carloman's kingdom was now encircled by a triple alliance. However, in 771 Charlemagne divorced Desiderata so he could marry Hildegard of Vinzgouw (his favourite queen) instead. Desiderata escaped to Carloman's kingdom and brokered an alliance between Carloman and Desiderius instead. It even seemed likely that Carloman was going to join forces with Desiderius and attack the Lombards' long-standing enemy, the papacy. This escalated the situation almost to the point of war between the two brothers.
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| A silver coin (Denier) of King Carloman |
Yet on 4 December 771, Carloman suddenly died, apparently of a nosebleed (the same cause of death traditionally attributed to Attila the Hun), at the royal villa of Samoucy. While it was almost certainly a natural death, not an assassination, Charlemagne was able to quickly annex his brother's kingdom - Carloman's chief advisers, Adalhard and Abbot Fulrad of Saint Denis, soon went over to his brother. Carloman's wife, Queen Gerberga, fled with her two sons and the faithful Count Autchar to the Lombard court at Pavia. The Lombard king Desiderius then insisted that Charlemagne allow his two nephews to be crowned as co-kings of the Franks with him. Charlemagne then brokered an alliance with the pope, and in 773 - 774 he invaded and rapidly conquered the highly centralised Lombard kingdom after taking control of the capital, Pavia, and imprisoning Desiderius and his family.
Carloman's sons are mentioned in the papal correspondance with the Carolingian court in 774. But they vanish from history immediately after. How? Traditionally, its thought that the boys were tonsured and sent to a monastery - the Carolingians, unlike their Merovingian predecessors, generally refrained from murdering their rivals. But twenty-first century historians are more sceptical. If the boys had indeed been sent to a monastery, then as happened with Childeric III in 751 or indeed with Duke Tassilo of Bavaria after Charlemagne deposed him in a show trial in 788, they would have likely been remembered by the monastery they were sent for centuries to come or even become local saints. Therefore, foul play is suspected. Jennifer Davis in "Charlemagne's Practice of Empire" (2012) says outright that Charlemagne had his nephews murdered. Janet Nelson in "King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne" (2018) says that the accusation is not proven, but maintains that there is a high possibility that Charlemagne was indeed guilty of kin-slaying.
There is indeed some tentative and tenuous evidence to suggest he was guilty, besides the obvious fact that the boys after 774 simply vanish from history.
Clause 37 of the capitulary of the Missi, a lengthy piece of legislation concerning the administration of justice in the Carolingian Empire which Charlemagne issued in 802, reads:
That those who shall have been guilty of patricide or fratricide, or who shall have killed a maternal or paternal uncle or any other relative, and shall have been unwilling to obey and consent to the judgement of the bishops, priests and other judges, our missi and counts, for the safety of their own souls and in order to bring about a just judgement, shall be kept in custody that they may not infect other people until they are led into our presence; and from their own property in the meantime they will have nothing.
This indicates that Charlemagne himself, and Frankish society generally, saw the killing of one's own blood relatives as a heinous crime. At the same time, that doesn't mean he didn't do it, and some might even attempt a crude psychoanalytical reading and use this as evidence of the Frankish king, now emperor's guilty conscience for what happened almost thirty years ago.
Four years later, when Charlemagne drew up a plan for the division of the empire between his three surviving sons (Charles, Pippin and Louis) in 806, he include the following clause:
Concerning our grandsons, the sons of our aforesaid sons, already born or who shall be born hereafter, we command that none of our sons, for any reason whatsoever, shall cause any of our grandsons who has been accused before him to be put to death or mutilated or blinded or forcibly tonsured without a just trial or examination. We desire that [these grandsons] be honoured by their fathers and uncles and that they be obedient to them in proper subjection, as is fitting of a familial relationship.
Could Charlemagne, now repentant for what he had done to his nephews, have been trying to warn his sons not to do the same to theirs for fear of the wrath of the Lord? That might be overanalysing it, but its possible.
There's also this question that remains unanswered. If Charlemagne really did murder his nephews, how would our views of the "Father of Europe" change? Its tempting to make comparisons with Richard III of England, who has long been infamous for what happened to the Princes in the Tower. But whereas Richard III had recently seen attempts to rehabilitate him, and for the last century has had a devoted fan-club on both sides of the Atlantic who maintain that he was the greatest King that England never knew it had and that Shakespeare had it all wrong.
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| Monstrous hunchback who usurped the throne and murdered his nephews, or a good king who cared about justice and the welfare of the common man and never did anything wrong? Richard III's reputation is so controversial today |
But for Charlemagne, long celebrated as a heroic figure, it would be a shift in the other direction towards a more jaundiced view. I think its fair to say that Charlemagne could be ruthless when he chose to, like most people who have held supreme political power in any age. He was after all, lets not forget, the king who massacred 4500 Saxon prisoners of war at Verden in 785 and pursued a policy of conversions at the point of a sword, forced migration and draconian punishments for relapsing into old superstitions in order to subject the pagan Saxons to Frankish rule and the Christian faith. Nor did he himself follow Christian moral strictures to the letter - he had four wives and several concubines, from whom he had more than half a dozen illegitimate children. At the same time, he was undoubtedly a king and emperor who cared about uprightness and accountability of his government officials and the welfare of his people, and sponsored a great educational and cultural revival which we continue to benefit from to this day - without the Carolingian Renaissance, most of the Roman classics would no longer be with us today! So I think its still possible to say that while Charlemagne wasn't a saint we can still celebrate him as a great ruler. I must be frank (no pun intended here) and disclose that I am indeed something of a Charlemagne fanboy, though I try to be as scholarly and objective about it as possible. Meanwhile, poor Carloman has and shall remain largely forgotten except among academic early medievalist circles. History does not take kindly to short-lived rulers who go out in a manner neither glorious nor dignified, as will no doubt become abundantly clear when histories of British politics post-June 2016 start being written.
I guess we can wonder though as to how history would have been different had Carloman lived longer. Would the Carolingian Empire, at least in the form that we know it, have come about? Perhaps Carloman and Desiderius would have successfully resisted Charlemagne's attempts to conquer the southern realms. And how would Charlemagne's kingship have been different had he not ruled over a unified Frankish realm and definitely not murdered his nephews. A letter of Cathwulf, an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar (Joanna Story thinks he was Charlemagne and Carloman's private tutor), to Charlemagne in 775 is perhaps indicative of this. Unfortunately the letter is untranslated and I can't have it to hand to translate for you because it hasn't been published since 1885 - and in a German edition to boot. But from the summaries I have been able to access elsewhere, Cathwulf recounts the events of the past 25 years in his letter and tells Charlemagne that there are eight pillars of a just king and that Charlemagne has "few firm pillars to stand on." This letter may well have had a huge impact on Charlemagne as three years later he and Hildegard named their son Louis, which is really a variant on the name Clovis, the first great king of the Merovingian dynasty, a clear acknowledgement that the Carolingians needed to bolster their legitimacy by linking themselves to the previous dynasty they had usurped. And in the 780s, Charlemagne's kingship became a lot more moralising and preoccupied with justice and reforming the governance of the Frankish kingdom, culminating in the General Admonition of 789 - the program statement/ manifesto for the Carolingian Renaissance if there ever was one! It would definitely be too reductive to suggest that the hypothetical guilt for the equally hypothetical killing of his nephews, and Cathwulf's firm letter that followed, was what caused Charlemagne to begin the Carolingian renaissance. I think that, truth be told, Charlemagne's heart was mostly in the right place and that he genuinely believed in promoting education, church reform, governmental accountability and other good causes. But the quest for greater legitimacy really does lie at the heart of most of Carolingian politics. Furthermore, other great periods of cultural and intellectual accomplishment have followed dubious seizures of power and dynastic intrigue, be it Ptolemaic Egypt, Augustan Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Ming China, Medici Florence or Tudor England.
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| The original manuscript of Cathwulf's letter |
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