On this day in history 3: RIP Charles the Fat and the end of an era?

 

On 13^th January 888, the Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat breathed his last and died of a stroke. He had been the first Carolingian to have ruled over the whole of his great-grandfather Charlemagne’s empire since 840. But in November 887 a coup d’etat from his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, ousted the emperor from his powerbase in East Francia (Germany), after which his credibility and as a ruler and his physical health both rapidly deteriorated. To make matters worse, Charles had no son to succeed him. And after Charles, no one was able to put back the empire together again. The story of his life can appear thus: a long period in which nothing very much went on, then a momentous rise and then a crushing downfall in which all the good luck he previously had deserted from him. But what exactly happened? How did Charles rise and downfall both come about so quickly and unexpectedly? And why did the Carolingian Empire fall apart, this time irreversibly?

The seal of Emperor Charles the Fat, from Bayerisches Nationalmuseum Munich. Photo downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Charles appears like a Roman Emperor with his laurel wreath, and has the trademark Carolingian look - short hair and a moustache. The seal is inscribed with the words Karolus Magnus ("Charles the Great"), and thus is consciously trying to portray Charles the Fat as a worthy successor to his great-grandfather. Whether he at all was, I leave that for you to decide.

The rise

Charles the Fat was born in 839 at Neudingen in the Black Forest. His father was Louis the German (806 – 876), the middle son of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 – 840). When Charles was only in his nappies (or should I really say, his swaddling clothes), civil war broke out between his father and uncles over the division of the empire. This went on for a few years but then at the Treaty of Verdun in August 843 they agreed on how to divide the empire between them. Louis got the territories east of the Rhine and north of the Alps – East Francia or, as we now call it, Germany.

King Louis the German reigned there until his death 33 years later with a great deal of success. East Francia was the least developed of the Frankish kingdoms and presented the greatest difficulties of travel and communications. The old Roman road network ended at the Rhine and Danube, and more than half of the kingdom was covered in dense forests. Yet Louis managed to rule the kingdom effectively with what was at once a firm grip and a light touch, and never faced any serious rebellions from his aristocracy. He was also probably the only ninth century (post-814) Carolingian monarch not to have failed in any of his patriarchal duties. Neither he nor his wives got caught up any sex scandals, he produced three healthy sons who survived to adulthood and he managed to keep those sons from running riot – any rebelliousness from them was headed-off successfully. In 865, Louis the German decided to establish his three sons as sub-kings over the three main divisions of his realm. His eldest son, Louis the Younger, was going to get Saxony (then the area of northern Germany between rivers Rhine, Elbe and Weser). His middle son, Carloman, was going to get Bavaria (bigger than the modern German state of Bavaria because it included what is now Austria as well). Meanwhile, the youngest, Charles the Fat, got Alemannia (modern day Baden-Wurttemberg and German-speaking Switzerland).

When Louis the German died in 876, his kingdom was divided between his three sons in this exact manner. Their uncle, Emperor Charles the Bald, tried to conquer East Francia for himself, but as we saw a week or soago, Louis the Younger thwarted his scheming uncle’s ambitions at the battle of Andernach. And after Charles the Bald’s death, Carloman crossed the Alps and became the new king of Italy. Charles the Bald’s son, Louis the Stammerer, lasted only two years in West Francia and when he died the kingdom was divided between his two sons, Louis III and Carloman. Louis the Stammerer also had a son from his second marriage, Charles the Simple, who was born a few months after his father’s untimely death at the age of only 32 on 10 April 879.

In May 879, it would have seemed like the Carolingian empire was going to remain divided for quite some time to come. Five cousins, all of them great-grandsons or great-great-grandsons of Charlemagne, now ruled in separate kingdoms. Much more ominous was that in October 879, Boso, the son-in-law of Charles the Bald and his former viceroy in Italy, was elected king in Provence by the local nobility. This was the first time a non-Carolingian (read: anyone who was not a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) had reigned anywhere between the Pyrenees, the North Sea and the Adriatic in more than a century. And this was also the first time a region had actually tried to secede, rather than just being apportioned to another member of the Carolingian family. Reunifying the Carolingian Empire would have thus seemed like an impossibility then.

Map of the Carolingian kingdoms as they would have looked c.880. From Wikimedia Commons. Apologies for the map being in Spanish. Territories in pink are Charles the Fat's, territories in green are Louis the Younger's, territories in purple are Louis III of West Francia's, territories in red are Carloman's and territories in orange are Boso's.

Yet if Carolingian political history in the ninth century teaches us anything, its that nothing is set in stone politically and that accidents and the pressure of events can be game-changing. Indeed, already in June 879, Charles’ brother Carloman abdicated as king of Italy and Bavaria due to ill-health, and so his kingdom was divided between his two brothers – Charles the Fat got Italy, and Louis the Younger got Bavaria. On 12^th February 881, Charles the Fat was crowned Emperor in Rome, which didn’t make any practical difference to his power but at least gave him symbolic prestige and technically made him the most senior Carolingian monarch. And on 20 January 882, Louis the Younger died. Charles the Fat was thus now the only Carolingian ruling anywhere east of the Rhine.

 Charles was by far the elder statesman compared to his West Frankish cousins. By working together, the West and East Frankish branches of the Carolingian family managed to crush the usurper, Boso of Provence – they didn’t defeat him completely, but by August 882 his kingdom had been reduced to nothing more than his principal stronghold of Vienne. From then on until his death in 887, Boso was essentially nothing more than a local count, all except one that called himself a king. The Vikings also raided up the Rhine in 882 – Alfred the Great had vanquished the Great Heathen Army in England at the battle of Ashdown in 878, so the Danish Vikings had moved their operations to the Continent. While the major cities of Aachen, Cologne and Trier were sacked by the Vikings, Charles was able to use shrewd diplomacy (and a good bit of bribery) to get the Viking leaders to accept Christianity and become his vassals. By 884, he was also able to secure peace on his eastern frontier with Sviatopluk, the ruler of the Great Moravian Empire. It was also in 884 that his West Frankish cousin, King Carloman, died, having outlived his elder brother by only two years and without any male heirs. Charles’ only competition from within the Carolingian family was a five-year-old boy, Charles the Simple. The West Frankish aristocracy knew who was the most sensible choice of candidate. On 12^th December 884, Charles the Fat was able to just waltz in and receive the West Frankish crown. Now the whole of Charlemagne’s Empire was finally reunited once again under one Carolingian ruler.

But did this situation last? Apparently not. Some might say that it was inevitable. Charles was in charge of the largest state Western Europe had known since the days of the Western Roman Empire, and indeed would ever see again except briefly under Napoleon and Hitler, in an age when information could only travel at the speed of a horse. And unlike the western Roman emperors of old, Charles lacked a large, salaried bureaucracy, a tax system or a standing army. And there were undoubtedly huge differences in language, culture and ethnicity between his subjects. Take the inhabitants of Saxony. Their great-grandparents had been pagans, they still had no roads, cities or written law and they spoke an early form of Low German. They therefore had precious little in common with the inhabitants of Italy or Aquitaine. Moreover, given how the Carolingian Empire had consisted of almost half a dozen kingdoms only five years ago, surely people would have wanted a local king who could be more responsive to their needs than an inevitably distant emperor?

But yet, as always, the Carolingians can surprise us. For the first three years that Charles the Fat ruled over an undivided empire, it looked like it was all going to work because Charles the Fat was very good at delegating power to trusted subordinates, as any successful Carolingian ruler had to. For example, in West Francia, the kingdom he was least present in, he entrusted the governance of the northern regions of the realm firstly to Hugh the Abbot and then to Count Odo of Paris as margraves (military governors) of Neustria, of the southwest (Aquitaine) to Margrave Bernard Hairy Paws and the southeast (Burgundy) to Margrave Richard the Justiciar. While they all came from established aristocratic families, these were men who owed their power and position, above all else, to Charles the Fat and the Carolingian state and could easily have been unmade if they rebelled or were seriously disloyal. And as Simon MacLean has shown, contrary to what some previous generations of historians have claimed, Odo, Bernard and Richard show no signs of attempting to secede or trying to rule as kings in all but name in their own regions – they always obeyed Charles’ instructions and relayed their decisions back to him.

The Fall

Rather, what did for Charles and the unity of the Carolingian Empire was what did for the hopes and dreams of most Carolingian monarchs in the second half of the ninth century – simple biology. Charles the Fat found himself in quite a similar situation to that which Henry VIII would find himself in 1527. Charles could not, for whatever reason, produce any children with his wife, Empress Richgard. He did, however, have an illegitimate son, Bernard (870 – 891), who he’d had with a concubine before his marriage. The obvious solution was divorce. series of Frankish legal precedents had meant that by the mid-ninth century, it was only possible if marital infidelity could be proven. Illegitimate children were also barred from Carolingian royal succession under normal circumstances. Charles the Fat could have changed the rules to make it possible for Bernard to inherit and he may have been planning to, as a few throwaway lines in Notker the Stammerer’s Deeds of Charlemagne (written in 886) suggest. However, he went for the nuclear option, and in 887 tried to divorce Richgard by accusing her of having an adulterous relationship with his chancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli. But Richgard didn’t go the way of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Much like when his cousin King Lothar II of Lotharingia (d.869) tried doing the same back in 858 – 865 by accusing his infertile wife, Queen Theutberga, of incest with her brother, it all blew up in his face. It was at that moment that Charles’ nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, the illegitimate son of Carloman of Bavaria, who had long been marginalised from politics, decided to pounce as his uncle proved himself incompetent. In November 887, Carloman launched a successful coup d’etat with the help of loyal east Bavarian marcher lords and the Moravians. All of Charles’ supporters among the East Frankish magnates quickly deserted him, the Alemannians being the last. At a royal assembly at Tribur, Arnulf declared Charles deposed and the East Frankish nobility elected him as their king, deciding to ignore the issue of his illegitimacy. Charles had no fight left in him as the 48-year-old’s health wasn’t in the best condition (he may have been elipeptic), and he died of a stroke less than two months later.

The aftermath

With Emperor Charles the Fat gone, what would become of the Empire? Arnulf’s illegitimate birth proved to not be a barrier to him being recognised by the East Frankish aristocracy as the legitimate ruling Carolingian monarch. But outside of East Francia, the governing elites weren’t ready to accept this East Frankish coup d’etat. There was one alternative claimant to the empire from the Carolingian family, Charles the Simple, but he was just an eight-year-old boy. Indeed, there were technically two. Count Herbert I of Vermandois (848 – 907) was a great-great-grandson of Charlemagne in the male-line. His branch of the Carolingian family, the so-called House of Vermandois, were the descendants of Pippin of Italy, Charlemagne’s second eldest son. Pippin’s son Bernard had been blinded for rebelling against his uncle Louis the Pious in 817, but Bernard’s son, Pippin, had been allowed to become count of Vermandois in the kingdom of West Francia when he came of age. But, as I’ve said before, no one ever talks about the Vermandois branch of the Carolingian family, and no one even considered them as candidates for kingship in 888, despite the fact that by the dynastic criteria they were supremely throne-worthy. Count Herbert I of Vermandois was not willing to put himself forward as a candidate for West Frankish king, perhaps because the memory of what happened to his grandfather seventy years earlier made him risk averse. But apart from Arnulf (representing the East Frankish branch of the Carolingian family), Charles the Simple (the West Frankish branch) and Herbert (the Vermandois branch), all other branches of the Carolingian family had since gone extinct by 888.

What happened was that each of the kingdoms within the Carolingian empire elected a candidate from within its own aristocracy. In Italy, the aristocracy elected Margrave Berengar of Friuli (845 – 924), from the Unruoching family, as their king. In Provence, the local elites made the young Louis the Blind (880 – 928), the son of Boso, their king. In Upper Burgundy, the area around the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva in modern day eastern France and western Switzerland, Rudolf (859 – 912) from the House of Welf was elected king by the nobles and bishops there. In West Francia, the magnates north of the Loire elected Margrave Odo of Neustria (857 – 898), the hero who saved Paris from the Viking siege of 885 – 886, as their king – the Viking threat still remained strong there, so they needed a “strenuous warrior” in charge. But those in Aquitaine elected Count Ramnulf II of Poitiers (850 – 890) as their king. Meanwhile, Duke Guy of Spoleto firstly made a bid for the West Frankish throne, but was deterred by news of Odo’s coronation, before then wrestling with Berengar for the Italian throne.

Thus in 888, there were seven kings, or at least men who claimed to be kings, in the Carolingian Empire – more than there had ever been. And unlike on previous occasions when the empire had been divided into kingdoms, only one of their rulers was a Carolingian (a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) – Arnulf. Berengar, Guy and Louis did claim descent from Charlemagne, in Berengar’s case through his mother (a daughter of Louis the Pious), in Guy’s case through his great-grandmother (a daughter of Pippin of Italy) and in Louis’ case through his mother (a daughter of Charles the Bald). But Rudolf, Ramnulf and Odo had no Carolingian blood at all.

End of an era?

Was this, then, the end of an era? In some ways, it most certainly wasn’t. Carolingians continued to rule in East Francia (Germany) without a break until 911, when the royal line went extinct there with the death of Arnulf’s son, King Louis the Child. And in West Francia, after Odo’s death in 898, Charles the Simple finally got the throne he had been unfortunately passed over for on two occasions. Charles the Simple was deposed in 922 by Odo’s brother, Margrave Robert of Neustria (866 – 923), and locked away in a dungeon by his cousin, Herbert II of Vermandois, in 923. But Charles’ son Louis was invited back from exile in Anglo-Saxon England to become king in 936, and the Carolingians then continued to rule in West Francia all the way up to 987.

Also, and this is perhaps most important to stress, this wasn’t the moment when the nations of Western Europe sprung forth and agreed to go their separate ways. People living on both sides of the Rhine continued to identify as Franks until after 1000. And all of the kingdoms that emerged in 888 – West Francia, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence, Italy and East Francia – were all based on political units that had either been created or endorsed by the Carolingians. None of them were the product of ethnic separatism. The kings did sometimes engage in meaningful forms of co-operation, and churchmen and intellectuals continued to move across kingdoms with ease in search of patronage and employment where they could get it. In many respects, Western Europe in the tenth century was still a Frankish world, even though the Carolingians no longer ruled over most of it.

But ultimately, I’d argue that 888 was still nonetheless the end of an era, for three reasons. The first is to state the obvious – the Carolingian Empire never came back. The imperial title continued to exist after 888 and was fought over by Arnulf, Louis the Blind, Guy of Spoleto and Berengar, but it basically meant nothing outside Italy and after 924 it was vacant. The Empire would be revived in the late tenth century by the Ottonians, the dynasty that succeeded the Carolingians in East Francia, after they conquered Italy in the 960s but it was territorially half the size of the realm of Charlemagne. Burgundy and Provence would not become part of the Empire (known from the late twelfth century as the Holy Roman Empire) until 1032. West Francia always remained independent from the German emperors, much to the gnashing of their teeth. And, as said before, no state in Europe would ever be as large as the Carolingian Empire until the incredibly short-lived empires of Napoleon and Hitler more than a thousand years later. The future of Western Europe was one of political fragmentation and inter-state competition, which would in due time give birth to overseas colonial expansion, the scientific, financial and industrial revolutions, constitutional democracy and the world wars.

The second reason is that it rewrote the rules for who could hold political power at the highest level. Ever since Pippin the Short and his sons were anointed by Pope Stephen II in 754, which we’ve talked about here before, it had been clearly established that only direct male-line descendants (his sons, their sons, their sons’ sons’ and so on) could rule as Frankish kings. This principle remained completely unchallenged until 879 with Boso of Provence, but outside of Provence his actions were seen as an illegal secessionist revolt and his fledgling independent kingdom was quickly crushed. But by 888, the goalposts had most definitely shifted, as only in East Francia did the magnates elect a Carolingian to be their king – in the other four or five kingdoms, they elected kings of less distinguished lineages. This is particularly striking in West Francia, where they elected Odo, whose family had only been established among the West Frankish aristocracy for one generation prior to him, when there were two Carolingian candidates they could have elected – Charles the Simple and Herbert of Vermandois. Its true that Charles the Simple was only a boy of eight, but that didn’t stop the seven-year-old Louis the Blind from being elected king of Provence in the same year. Clearly, family background and royal ancestry were no longer the supreme qualifiers for kingship. What exactly did make you a suitable candidate for the throne in all the different post-Carolingian kingdoms was, however, unclear and it would remain so for some time to come.

The third reason is that the tenth century, which followed shortly afterwards, has such a different feel to the Carolingian ninth century. This is true when it comes to both politics, intellectual life and the surviving source material. The Carolingian tradition, going back to Charlemagne himself, of kings issuing capitularies and other reforming legislation, had died in the 890s – Guy’s son and successor, King Lambert I of Italy, issued the last ever capitulary in 898. Tenth century kings did not legislate, whichever side of the river Rhine, Rhone, the Jura mountains or the Alps they ruled. In many ways, tenth century kingship on the Continent was a lot less ambitious than it was in the ninth century, essentially revolving around justice, ritual and warfare. Neither Otto the Great of East Francia (r.936 – 973) nor his West Frankish Carolingian contemporaries were interested in issuing new laws to reform government, society and morality like Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Lothar, Louis II of Italy and Charles the Bald had been. This went hand in hand with changes in the theory and ideology of government and politics. To summarise it crudely, while some sense of kings upholding the common good of the kingdom remained, after 888 the idea that kings were responsible for the moral health and spiritual salvation of their subjects had fallen by the wayside. No tenth century king on the Continent would organise realm-wide collective penances for famines and military defeats like Charlemagne and Louis the Pious had done. And while a (diminished) number of intellectuals still strutted round the courts of West Frankish, East Frankish and Italian kings, they no longer advised kings on how to build a better world – no more Alcuin, no more Benedict of Aniane, no more Hrabanus Maurus, no more Agobard of Lyon, no more Sedulius Scottus and no more Hincmar. By contrast to the ninth century, the tenth feels a lot more like an age of tough realpolitik.

All of this impression of difference between the ninth and tenth centuries is reflected in, or indeed created by, the surviving source material. Take for example the Patrologia Latina, an anthology of all significant Christian Latin authors whose names we know from Tertullian (c.200 AD) to Pope Innocent III (d.1216), created between 1862 and 1865 by the French Catholic priest Jacques Paul Migne. The whole thing runs at 217 volumes (excluding indices). For the ninth century, Migne compiled together 30 volumes of works by Latin authors, the overwhelming majority of them writing in the Carolingian Empire. For the tenth century, however, he could only compile together 7 volumes. Given that the challenges of survival for ninth century texts are the same as for tenth century texts, this is a strong indication that there was much less intellectual activity in the tenth century than in the ninth, resulting from the change in political climate. Its also the case that by 900 all of the three major series of late Carolingian annals, The Annals of Saint Bertin, the Annals of Fulda  and the Annals of Saint Vaast had all ground to a halt. With the exception of the Annals of Flodoard, written between 919 and 966, the first half of the tenth century is almost a total vacuum when it comes to history-writing, which only began to revive itself from the 960s at the Ottonian court. The second half of the tenth century saw something of an intellectual revival, with lots of exciting stuff going on in mathematics, astronomy and the study of the Roman classics, but it was all largely divorced from a broader political programme. For example, when Otto III invited Gerbert of Aurillac, arguably the smartest man of the tenth century, to his court he wanted to see him demonstrate the mechanical pendulum clock he had invented, not give him advice about how to morally reform his empire. The Carolingian era really was a very distinctive, almost unique, moment in early medieval history, and 888 really did bring it to an end.

The beginning of a bold new era? Or just another geopolitical headache? Europe in the year 900. Looking at something like this can make it seem that Charles the Fat's reunification of the Carolingian Empire was just an insignificant blip, but hopefully this post has shown that it was more than that, and that the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire in 888 really meant something important.