From the sources 11: writing the fall of the Carolingian Empire or 888 and all that

 

As a follow-up to the previous post and to wrap up loose ends, lets answer two questions. Did people at the time think was going on and they feel like they were living through the end of the Carolingian era? And how do modern historians go about explaining the fall of the Carolingian Empire in 888?

Fortunately, we have quite a bit of contemporary comment on what went down in 888. Let’s focus on two accounts. The first one we’re going to look at is from a continuation of the Annals of Fulda, written at a monastery in Regensburg in Bavaria, in modern day Germany. It picked up where Rudolf of Fulda (one of the few Carolingian intellectuals known to have read Tacitus’ Annals and Germania) left off, and carried the story from Charles the Fat’s accession as king of East Francia in 882 through to that of Louis the Child in 900. The annalist, a monk at Regensburg, would have been quite well informed and broadly pro-Arnulf politically-speaking, since Bavaria was Arnulf’s principal support base for his coup. He would have also been writing in 889, and so his account is almost bang on contemporary to the events he wrote about. This is what he wrote:

At that time many kinglets (reguli) rose up in the kingdom of Arnulf’s cousin Charles [the Fat]. For Berengar [of Friuli], son of Eberhard, makes himself king in Italy. Rudolf, son of Conrad, determined to hold on Upper Burgundy to himself in the fashion of a king. Louis [of Provence], son of Boso, and Guy, son of Lambert, therefore decided to hold the Belgian parts of Gaul and also Provence like kings. Odo, son of Robert, usurped for his use the land up to the Loire River or the province of Aquitaine. Ramnulf [of Aquitaine] thereafter set himself up as king.

An eleventh century copy of the Annals of Fulda, written in the same Carolingian miniscule handwriting as the original. It is opened at the entry for 855, which describes the earthquake at Mainz. This version is housed at the Humanist Library of Selestat in Alsace, France. Photo Credit: By Alexandre Dulaunoy from Les Bulles, Chiny, Belgium - Manuscript du 11e siècle - Manuscript 11 century, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11779856

What’s very clear from this account is that the annalist was very aware of developments going across the erstwhile Carolingian Empire. He knew who all seven men claiming to be legitimate kings following the death of Charles the Fat were. And he also wanted to make it clear to the reader that he saw only one of them as actually being a legitimate king – Arnulf. The other six of them he refers to as reguli, a Latin word meaning petty kings or kinglets, which is a clear indication that he saw them as being men of lesser royalty compared to Arnulf. He also says that they emerged in Arnulf’s kingdom, which shows that he thought that Arnulf should have inherited all of the empire of his uncle, Charles the Fat. And the language he uses to describe how the other six kings took power in their respective regions further suggests that he saw them as usurpers who assumed the rule of their kingdoms illegally. Apart from the fact the annalist was living in East Francia and generally a supporter of its king, Arnulf, it seems that he held to what had once been the prevailing belief (and probably still was in East Francia) that only an adult male Carolingian could be a legitimate king. Arnulf was the only king in 888 for whom that applied, so as far as the annalist was concerned all the others were opportunistic usurpers and secessionist rebels. I imagine the people of Neustria, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence and Italy would have seen it quite differently.

And then there’s our second contemporary commentator, Regino of Prum (842 – 915). Regino was the abbot of Prum, a Benedictine monastery then in East-Frankish controlled Lotharingia, now in Germany, near the Belgian border. Prum had enjoyed a special relationship with the Carolingians since before they even became Frankish kings – it was founded in 721 by none other than Bertrada the Elder, the great-grandmother of Charlemagne, and the Carolingian monarchs had been its principal patrons since Pippin the Short rebuilt the monastery in 762. Before Regino became abbot there, the abbey had been badly ravaged by Viking raids both in 882 and 892. He spent most of his life trying to rebuild and reconstitute the abbey’s estates, navigating Lotharingian factional disputes (Arnulf had installed his son Zwentibald as sub-king in Lotharingia and he wasn’t popular) and trying to reform the church in the archdiocese of Trier for his patron Archbishop Ratbod. In the first decade of the tenth century, Regino of Prum wrote a history of the world from the birth of Jesus Christ to the year 906 called the Chronicon. He dedicated the Chronicon to Bishop Adalbero of Augsburg (d.909) and may have intended for King Louis the Child to read, as Adalbero was close to him. Chronicon has a very pessimistic outlook – he finished writing it less than twenty years after the events of 888, and it seemed like things were getting worse. And it is to an extract from the Chronicon, famous among early medievalists, that we shall now turn:

After Charles [the Fat’s] death, the kingdoms which had obeyed his will, as if devoid of a legitimate heir, were loosened from their bodily structure into parts and now awaited no lord of hereditary descent, but each set out to create a king for itself from its own inner parts. The event roused many impulses towards war, not because Frankish princes, who in nobility, strength, and wisdom were able to rule kingdoms, were lacking, but because among themselves an equality of dignity, generosity, and power increased discord. No one surpassed the others that they considered it fitting to submit themselves to follow his rule. Indeed, Francia would have given rise to many princes fit to govern the kingdom had not fortune in the pursuit of power armed them for mutual destruction.

A parchment folio from a mid-twelfth century manuscript containing the Thegan the Astronomer's Life of Louis the Pious and Regino of Prum's Chronicon. By 1150, Carolingian miniscule was starting to evolve into the Gothic script of the late middle ages, and it clearly shows here.  The British Library, Egerton 810 f.94. Image in the Public Domain

What’s immediately striking about Regino’s account of 888 is just how eloquently written and full of rich imagery it is. I just love the metaphor of kingdoms spewing forth kings from their guts. Its also very bleak in its outlook – the Carolingian empire has been dismembered, new dynasties of kings seem to be springing up everywhere and the only thing that’s going stop them from endlessly multiplying is the fact that they’re ultimately going to go to war with each other and one by one they’ll be eliminated on the battlefield. We can only wonder what Regino of Prum would have made of the next millennium of Western European history. He might have seen it as confirmation of his vision, or indeed as even worse than he thought. But certainly, up to 1945, he’d have found no consolation in it. There really is a definite sense of the end of an era here – the rule of the Carolingian dynasty is over and now begins a chaotic free-for-all in which every man who thinks he’s got all the qualities of a good leader will make his bid to become the king of some region in the erstwhile Carolingian empire.

Both the Regensburg continuator of the Annals of Fulda and Regino of Prum’s words became particularly resonant to later historians in the twentieth century. The experience of the two World Wars had basically seemed like the apocalyptic conclusion to what had begun in 888. While nineteenth century French and German historians might have celebrated the breakup of the Carolingian Empire as marking birth of their own nations which they knew and loved, by the 1950s it was clear that this was only the recipe for bloodshed and catastrophe. Its notable how, since 1950, the city of Aachen has awarded the Karlspreis to those who have worked to promote European unification. And sure enough, Charlemagne was adopted as a kind of spiritual father to the European Economic Community, created at the Treaty of Rome in 1957 – the direct forerunner to today’s European Union. Indeed, the EEC before 1973 consisted of almost the same territories as the Carolingian Empire, namely France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany and Italy. The more the EEC/ EU has expanded, however, the less resonant Carolingian Empire becomes. You can fit the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Spain and Croatia into the story of Carolingian Europe. But it’s worth asking what exactly Charlemagne means to Finland, Latvia, Romania, Cyprus and Malta? Nonetheless, this provides us with all the necessary context for why the Carolingian Empire has attracted so much interest from historians post-WW2, firstly in France, Belgium, Germany and Austria and then from the 1970s increasingly in the UK, Canada and the USA.

Like with the fall of any empire, from the Western Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, historians of the Carolingian empire sort of divide into two camps but with a broad spectrum of opinion in between. At one end of the spectrum are those who see the Carolingian Empire as a doomed project from the start. On the other end, are those who see its fall as mostly down to accidents and the pressure of events. I’ve arranged their views thus – most pessimistic at the top, most optimistic at the bottom. So here they are:

1.       Blackpill doomer levels of pessimism – Heinrich Fichtenau. Fichtenau was an Austrian historian writing in 1949, so at a time when the memory of Nazism and WW2 were fresh in everyone’s heads. Fichtenau was thus all too aware of the horrors that European nation-states were capable of inflicting on each other and their own people, but he was fearful of the growing tendency towards seeing Charlemagne as a prophet of European unity the Carolingian Empire as some kind of Garden of Eden. In his view, the Carolingian Empire was never going to work because it was riven with all kinds of contradictions and instability from the word go. Moreover, the empire was just too big and complex for the primitive and ramshackle government technologies of the period, and its governing elite lacked any kind of civic spirit or sense of duty to the state other than through personal bonds with the king/ emperor. Thus, even in the time of Charlemagne, the writing was on the wall.

2.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 1 – Jan Dhondt. Dhondt was a Belgian historian writing almost at the same time as Fichtenau, and he shared his gloomy post-war European outlook. In Dhondt’s view, kings and aristocrats were inevitably locked in a zero-sum game. With the various dynastic struggles between different members of the Carolingian family and the initial divisions of the empire between the 840s and the 880s, kings had to give away lots of their royal lands (the fisc) to secure fleeting aristocratic support but once given away they couldn’t give them back. Eventually kings were left with very little land. Then during the politically vacuum created by the death of Charles the Fat, some of these aristocrats became kings themselves like Odo, Rudolf and Berengar. The others proceeded to grab as much land as they could and usurp what had formerly been royal prerogatives. Thus by 900, post-Carolingian kingdoms like West Francia were already starting to resemble a chessboard of semi-independent principalities.

3.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 2 – Georges Duby and Timothy Reuter. Building on similar themes to Dhondt, these two historians argued the Carolingian Empire was able to work in the eighth and early ninth centuries because the Carolingian kings were rich and their aristocratic followers not so much. Above all, the Frankish economy was very underdeveloped and agricultural productivity was at subsistence level, so aristocrats needed kings because they couldn’t go it alone. Moreover, Charlemagne’s wars of expansion meant that there were lands, booty and provincial governorships to be won for the aristocrats who fought in the royal armies. But then the Empire’s territorial expansion largely ceased after 804, which meant increased competition for patronage at court leading to factionalism and ultimately civil war when dynastic rivalries between rival Carolingians were thrown into the cocktail. and as the ninth century drew on some measure of economic growth began to happen and aristocrats started to increase their power in the localities at the expense of royal government and the free peasantry. Thus, the empire became increasingly an irrelevance as the aristocracy could be rich and powerful without it.

4.       Pretty damn pessimistic version 3 – Walther Kienast? Some historians have argued that it was ethnic separatism that brought down the Carolingian Empire, and that the reason why kings appeared in 888 in East Francia, Neustria, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence and Italy was because these regions all saw themselves as their own distinct countries and national/ ethnic groups that no longer belonged as part of a single Frankish empire. Indeed, a few German historians have argued that in East Francia, the five “stem” duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, Swabia and Lotharingia might have broken away and formed independent kingdoms after the death of Louis the Child and the weak rule of his successor Conrad I (r.911 – 918), but that process was reversed in the 920s by the canny policies of King Henry the Fowler (r.919 – 936).

5.       Greyish view 1 – Marc Bloch and Peter Heather. Marc Bloch back in 1939, and Peter Heather much more recently in 2013, have argued that the main culprits for the fall of the Carolingian Empire are the Vikings. They argue that the Viking invasions were so rapid and devastating that due to the slow nature of communications and the ramshackle nature of the Carolingian government and military system, all the regions had to basically turn inwards on themselves and go their own way if they were going to adequately defend themselves. Out of these defensive needs to stop the final waves of barbarian invaders came increased local aristocratic power, castles and mounted knights, resulting in feudalism, political fragmentation – RIP Carolingian Empire.

6.       Greyish view 2 – Matthew Innes. One of the most influential Carolingianists currently working in the Anglophone world, Matthew Innes has a much more subtle take on the fall of the Carolingian Empire than the ones we’ve previously explored. Basically, he argues that the Carolingian Empire basically consisted of a sea of different local networks of aristocratic landowners and churches which the Carolingians were able to bring together into something bigger through patronage, justice, war leadership and collective rituals. The Carolingians were able to offer these networks and their individual members wealth and power beyond what they could possibly imagine if they accepted their authority, but in turn the Carolingians couldn’t run their empire except through these networks and established local bigwigs. The end of military expansion was initially bad, because it meant more intense competition for royal patronage, with the losers no longer being able to simply move to the expanding frontier and start themselves anew. However, with the initial division of the Carolingian Empire into kingdoms the 840s, these networks could now be more tightly managed and successfully negotiated with than ever before. But then between 869 and 884 most of the different branches of the Carolingian family died off and Charles the Fat hoovered up all the kingdoms back into a unified Empire. The reconfigured system could no longer work anymore. All the different aristocratic factions would now have to negotiate with and compete with each other at a distant imperial court, after they’d spent more than a generation being used to more local kings who were more responsive to their interests. Thus, as soon as Charles the Fat bit the dust, the empire fragmented into six kingdoms, this time mostly under men who weren’t Carolingians, and the normal state of politics could resume again.

7.       Cautiously optimistic – Simon MacLean. Most recently, in the first ever in-depth major scholarly treatment of Charles the Fat’s reign, Simon MacLean has argued that the fall of the Carolingian Empire was not at all inevitable and that all previous modern historians’ views mentioned have been blinkered by hindsight. Instead, he argues that it was essentially down to Charles the Fat’s blunders as emperor, and then him dying without a legitimate male heir. Thus, without a credible Carolingian candidate to succeed to the empire, the aristocracy were left to their own devices and had no choice but to elect regional kings from amongst themselves. Thus, it was biological accident and nothing else that doomed the Carolingians.

Now I’m not going to pass an overall judgement on which of these views I agree with. But what I can say is any explanation for the causes of a historical event is incomplete unless it can fully account for the who, what, where and when as well as the why and how. No explanation of, say, the French Revolution is any good unless it can explain why it broke out in 1789 as opposed to earlier or later. If they fail to do that, then they’re really explanations of why that event should have happened. That’s not to say that long term causes don’t matter, but we shouldn’t become so zoomed out in our thinking that we miss what’s actually quite critical in the immediate context. I got that impression from marking lots of essays from my year 9 class (13 – 14-year-olds) on whether long term or short-term causes were more important in causing WW1. Many of them didn’t mention Franz Ferdinand, Sarajevo or the July Crisis of 1914 at all and pinned the outbreak of the Great War on the classic MAIN (militarism, alliances, imperialism and nationalism) acronym so well-known to UK school teachers. A lot of historians of the fall of the Carolingian Empire have fallen into a very similar trap.

But Regino of Prum, who wrote with a couple of decades of hindsight from 888, didn’t fall into that trap. Instead, if we look at the passage from his Chronicon carefully we’ll see that what he identified as critical was the death of Charles the Fat itself and the fact he had no legitimate adult male Carolingian to succeed him. Thus, according to Regino of Prum, the aristocracy of the different regions had to elect kings from amongst themselves because no candidate from the Carolingian dynasty was forthcoming. The Carolingian Empire then could not be reunified because none of these kings had anything to mark themselves out as special and uniquely qualified to rule, in the same way that being a member of the Carolingian dynasty had done. Each had all the personal qualities befitting of a good leader, but then so did all the others. Thus, because no king was more legitimate than the rest, the Carolingian Empire was to remain forever divided into separate kingdoms. Thus, in my view, and contrary to what most people tend to expect of a medieval chronicler, Regino of Prum actually produced a brilliant piece of historical analysis that has stood the test of time – notice the similarities between his and Simon MacLean’s views!

A late seventeenth century engraver imagines Regino of Prum. Photo Credit: By Nicolas de Larmessin III, Esme de Boulonais - Isaac Bullart. Académie Des Sciences Et Des Arts. Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1682., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83827429 

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.

On this day in history 3: following in your grandfather's footsteps

 And so we're back again with another Carolingian imperial coronation, one which followed almost exactly 75 years after the one we looked at last time and one which was very much meant to replicate it. And this post concerns probably my favourite Carolingian monarch of them all, Charles the Bald. 

On this day in 875, King Charles the Bald of West Francia was crowned Western Roman Emperor at Rome by Pope John VIII, having been crowned King of Italy and received the imperial regalia at the Italian capital, Pavia. On 12th August 875, Charles' nephew, Louis II, the king of Italy and the Western Roman Emperor, had died aged 50. His only child was a daughter, Ermengard. With the death of Louis II, the branch of the Carolingian family descended from Charles' elder brother, Lothar I (795 - 855), became extinct. This was a crucial step in the "great-thinning out" (as I call it) of the Carolingian dynasty. In 862, there had been five Carolingian monarchs (six if we include the usurper Pippin II in Aquitaine), each with the potential to start their own royal line in their respective kingdoms - there's also a seventh branch of the Carolingian family, the counts of Vermandois (descended from Charlemagne's middle son, Pippin of Italy) but we don't talk about them. By 875, it had already narrowed down to two - the West Frankish branch descended from Charles the Bald and the East Frankish branch descended from Charles' middle brother, King Louis the German of East Francia. By 911, there would be just the one branch, Charles the Bald's branch, which would continue to rule in West Francia, with some interruptions, all the way up to its termination in 987 - again, the Vermandois branch survived into the eleventh century and indeed beyond (they're also the female-line ancestors of William the Conqueror and all English monarchs since 1066, not to mention a huge chunk of the British aristocracy), but for the last time no one talks about them!

Now, like when King Lothar II of Lotharingia died, also childless (save for an illegitimate son, Hugh of Alsace) in 869, Louis II's uncles immediately pounced and tried to get first dibs on his kingdom and the imperial title. Charles managed to win the race and so he was crowned King of Italy and Western Roman Emperor on this day in 875.

In a way, this was the fulfilment of Charles' lifelong ambition. Though Charles, unlike his three elder brothers, had never personally known his grandfather, the Emperor Charlemagne (d. 814), he did grow up with him as a role model. In 829, when Charles was eight, one of his father's court poets and leading advisers, Walahfrid Strabo, wrote in his poem "Concerning the vision of Tetricus":

Happy the line that continues with such a grandson: grant Christ that he will follow in deeds whom he follows in name, in deed, in character, nature, life, virtue and triumphs, in peace, faith, piety, intellect, speech and dignity. In doctrine, judgement, result and in loyal offspring.

Janet Nelson has suggested in her 1992 biography of Charles the Bald, still the definitive work on the Carolingian monarch 30 years on, that Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" was used as a mirror for princes in the 830s to provide the teenaged Charles with an education in political theory. Certainly, Charles had read Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne", as he quoted directly from it in a letter that he himself composed for Pope John VIII, shortly before his death in 877 at the age of 56. And all throughout his life, his courtiers were always trying to measure him up to Einhard's portrayal of Charlemagne as neo-Roman Emperor in the mould of Augustus Caesar, Vespasian and Titus.

This can also be nicely illustrated by comparing Charles to his middle brother, Louis the German (806 - 876). While the East Frankish king issued no legislation and kept his administration simple, he excelled in diplomacy and warfare, especially on his long eastern frontier with the Slavic realms extending all the way from the Baltic to the Adriatic. He was also very good at managing his sons, extended family and aristocracy, and never faced serious challenges to his rule from any of them in his 33 year long reign in East Francia. He also ruled much of his realm with a very light touch - he rarely set foot in the roadless, densely forested and still semi-pagan and tribal region of Saxony, but when he did in 852 he held public judicial assemblies (placita in the Latin sources) and his subjects eagerly petitioned him for dispute resolution and favours. Charles the Bald, on the other hand, was the opposite - the first twenty years of his reign in West Francia saw him experience revolts from both his sons, his extended family (his nephew Pippin II) and his aristocrats, and he wasn't all that militarily successful against the Vikings and Bretons and his East Frankish relatives. But Charles had a near-boundless vision. His legislation testifies to it - the Edict of Pitres in 864, which I've talked about here before, was the most lengthy and ambitious single piece of legislation any Western European ruler ever issued between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries. The Carolingian project of governmental reform and centralisation probably peaked under him - the coinage was very successfully reformed and put under tighter control, the foundations for a new system of national taxation (the first Francia had known since the old Roman tax system decayed in the seventh century), military service was extended to most of the free male population and missi continued to investigate the localities to ensure public justice was running smoothly and enquire into corruption and abuses with more vigour than ever. Royal assemblies, probably the most important institution of Carolingian government, were also at their grandest in his reign - Charles the Bald and his main adviser, Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (806 - 882) were absolutely obsessed with ritual. Charles was also a real intellectual, who had extensively studied law, theology and Roman history since childhood, and during his reign the Carolingian project of expanding education and literacy and the influence of intellectuals at court continued to thrive.

The image below, from the Psalter of Charles the Bald, produced c.869 by an artist in Charles' Palace School, nicely illustrates how this had always been Charles' great ambition. It shows Charles enthroned and dressed in an ankle-length tunic and chlamys like a contemporary Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. He has a crown on his head (a symbol of kingship since Biblical Israel) and he carries the orb and sceptre, symbols of rulership that seem to have developed under the Carolingians in the late eighth and ninth centuries, symbolising his authority over the world granted to him by God. He also sits underneath a canopy in the classical Roman architectural style. The inscription in Latin, written in the square capitals used for monumental inscriptions in ancient Rome (as the Carolingians would have known very well), reads:

When Charles the Great presides with his crown on, he is similar in honour to Josiah and the equal of Theodosius.

Ca. 869 AD. BnF, Manuscrits, Latin 1152 fol. 3v, École du Palais de Charles le Chauve, Wikipedia Commons

Thus Charles the Bald is consciously being compared to three of his personal heroes here - the seventh century BC Old Testament King Josiah of Judah, a great reformer of Judaism who compiled the books of the Torah together; the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius I or II, the former being the one who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire and the latter being the one who codified Roman law into the Theodosian Code which Charles the Bald cites regularly in the Edict of Pitres; and the third being his grandfather Charlemagne.

Indeed, at the month-long Synod of Ponthion in June 876, Charles the Bald would come dressed in the traditional Frankish costume of knee length tunic, cloak and leggings at the start, but by the end was dressed exactly how he is in that image - in the East Roman imperial costume and with a crown. His wife, Queen Richildis, was then given her coronation as Empress. This was done to make it real to the West Franks that Charles was now Emperor. The image below, from the San Paolo Bible, nicely illustrates how he would have appeared.

By Benedictine workshop, probably in the Reims region. - Bible of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7590481. I would translate the inscription if it wasn't too damn faded. But its a masterpiece of Carolingian art all the same, especially rich in its use of colour and decorative patterns.

Finally, Charles also had a splendid throne made for his coronation. It survives in the Vatican museum, and is richly decorated with carved ivories. Below you can see the throne itself, and individual panels from it. They depict episodes from the labours of Hercules, including Hercules wrestling the Nemean lion and cleaning out the stable of Diomedes. This is demonstrative of how Charles and his court absolutely adored classical literature and mythology, and how Charles saw parallels between his own triumphs and tribulations as king and emperor and those of the greatest of the Greek heroes. But it may also be a warning, perhaps even influenced by Theodulf's poem we looked at earlier this year, against the dangers of pride and trusting too much in your own abilities rather than in God to give you success, which Hercules exemplified. Indeed, Charles himself was guilty of this on many occasions, as his attempt to reunify the entire Carolingian Empire by conquering East Francia ended disastrously at the battle of Andernach on 8 October 876. His imperial glory was also fleeting too, as he enjoyed it for only two years before his death in 877. 

Photo credit: Helen Gittos https://twitter.com/Helen_Gittos/status/1398695600854536193/photo/1

Bibliography:

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

Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, Longman (1992)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 - 1000, Penguin (2009)

On this day in history 2: the coronation of Charlemagne and Merry Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas Day so, as well as being the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, it will also be the 1222nd anniversary of the coronation of Charlemagne. The Royal Frankish Annals, written very soon after the event, tell us what happened:

“On the most Holy day of Christmas, when the king rose in prayer in front of the shrine of the blessed apostle Peter, to take part in the Mass, pope Leo raised a crown on his head and he was hailed by the whole Roman people: to the august Charles, crowned by God, the Great and peaceful Emperor of the Romans, life and victory! After the acclamations the pope addressed him in the manner of the old emperors. The name of Patricius was now abandoned and he was called emperor of the Romans.”

But why did this event happen, and why was it significant. Let’s take a look.

First things first, a short potted history of relations between the papacy and the Franks. Before the eighth century, the Franks and the papacy had very little to do with each other. Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 - 604), arguably the most proactive pope of the early Middle Ages, only addressed 30 of his more than 800 surviving letters to Frankish Gaul. The popes’ horizons mostly consisted of Italy and the East, where the enjoyed ongoing yet often very fraught relations with the Roman emperors in Constantinople, whom the popes in Rome were politically the subjects of. Meanwhile, the Lombards, a Germanic people, were building a powerful centralised state in Northern Italy which threatened the areas of the Peninsula remaining under Roman imperial control and the city of Rome itself. And from the 680s, there was a movement from within the city of Rome itself to break free of Roman imperial control and establish a ”Republic of St Peter.”

Things got really nasty in relations between Rome and the city of Constantinople when the Pope got into a nasty little spat with the Roman emperor, Leo IV the Isaurian (nope, not a type of dinosaur, a person from the wild Midwest of what is now Turkey) over whether it was ok to worship images of saints. Leo ended up confiscating all of the lands the papacy owned in southern Italy and Sicily, as well as depriving it of jurisdiction over the churches in southern Italy, Sicily, Ravenna, Venice, Istria and Dalmatia and giving them to Constantinople instead. The popes were livid, and from then on basically dropped the Roman emperors as their protectors and went essentially independent.

But the Lombards were closing in all the same, and the papacy needed a new protector. The pope found one in none other than our old friend, who I’ve written a fair few things about, Charles Martel. You see, Charles was a super successful Frankish statesman and general who had ruled as the prime minister of the Frankish kingdom for almost two decades, ended the civil wars there, fought successful campaigns against the pagan Saxons over the Rhine, defeated and converted the pagan Frisians in the Netherlands and beaten the Muslim Arab invaders of Gaul at Tours in 732 and at the river Berre in 737. Now he looked like the perfect candidate to headhunt as the papacy’s new protector. So the Pope sent envoys to Charles Martel with gifts and was like “yo, how’s it going man? Wanna help me out against these Lombards whenever I need it in return for some nice gifts and moral support.” And Charles Martel was like “sure thing, homie.”

Now Charles Martel died in 741 and his sons, Pippin the Short and Carloman, became joint prime ministers. Carloman found it all a bit too overwhelming - he literally butchered almost the entire tribal nobility of Alemannia (southwest Germany) at a massive show trial at Cannstadt in 746 after they rebelled - so he was like “man, all this politics and war is incredibly depressing. I can’t cope with this anymore. Need a change of scene to something quieter, more mellow.” so he went down to Rome in 747, met the pope and became a hermit at Monte Soracte. Pippin was this left in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. But Pippin continued to be faced with rebellions across the Frankish kingdom, and realised that if he wanted his authority to be respected by all he needed to take over from the Merovingians, who by now were constitutional figureheads even more so than Charles III is now. But how was he going to do it. The Merovingian kings had ruled the Franks unchallenged for more than 250 years - longer than the USA has been around as of today. So how was he going to avoid coming across like an upstart parvenu. The answer was he needed to phone a family friend - none other than the Pope himself. So in 749, he sent the bishop of Wurzburg on an embassy to Rome, and the pope gave him the green light to overthrow the Merovingians, supposedly saying “it’s better to have a king that had real power than one without.” Thus in 751, Pippin deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in one of the most successful, bloodless coups d‘etat in history. He was elected king by the Frankish nobility at Soissons and then anointed - a relatively new royal ritual that had just reached Frankish Gaul from Ireland and Visigothic Spain, but a powerful way of demonstrating that his royal authority came from God.

But that wasn’t enough. Three years later, Pippin was feeling really anxious. He was a usurper, the last Merovingian king and his son still lived in a monastic jail cell, and many Frankish nobles were now thinking - “if Pippin can have a pop at taking the throne for himself, why can’t we? What really makes him special and unique compared to us? Nothing.” And as it happened the Pope was in trouble as well. The Lombard king Aistulf had conquered the last major outpost of the Roman Empire on the north Italian mainland, Ravenna, in 751, and was now threatening Rome itself. This in 754, Pope Stephen II came north to Gaul, the first pope ever to travel north of the Alps, and in a special ceremony he reanointed Pippin the Short, to bolster his sacred royal authority. But he also did the same to Pippin’s sons, Charles (the future Charlemagne) and Carloman. And to put Pippin’s anxieties to rest once and for all, he made the Frankish nobility swear an oath not to elect any king ever again, except from Pippin’s male descendants.

But now Pippin had to honour his part of the bargain. In 754 - 757, he led campaigns into Italy to bring the Lombard king Aistulf to heel, making him promise to never bother the papacy again. The papacy itself received Latium and the Romagna in central Italy as its own sovereign territories - the 750s are the true birth of the Papal States.

Pippin died in 768, and was succeeded by Charlemagne and Carloman. Carloman died in 771, leaving Charlemagne in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombards began to threaten Rome again and the pope was like “Charlemagne, my good friend. I’ve done so many favours for you, like anointing you when you were only six years old. Now come give me a hand against those bloody Lombards, who can’t honour a simple agreement if their lives depended on it.”

So Charlemagne invaded the Lombard kingdom in 774 and after laying siege to the capital Pavia, managed to conquer the highly centralised Lombard kingdom in a matter of months and took the Lombard king Desiderius and his family prisoner. The Pope showed his gratitude to Charlemagne by making him a patrician of Rome. Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian III were pretty good pals and in the Pope’s epitaph, possibly written by Charlemagne’s Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, Charlemagne is described as having basically viewed the pope as a second father.

By the late 790s, things were looking absolutely splendid for Charlemagne. He now had an empire that stretched from the roadless, still mostly pagan Saxony covered with thick forests to the ancient cities of Italy and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. He had just founded a splendid new capital in the Old Roman spa town of Aachen, which one of his court poets claimed was a new Rome with its own forum and senate - some pardonable literary exaggeration thete. Another court poet claimed that Charlemagne’s recent destruction of the Avar Khaganate in 795 - 796 meant that he had surpassed the achievements of Julius Caesar and the pagan Romans because he, unlike them was backed by Christ. Charlemagne’s courtiers nicknamed him king David, after the Biblical hero. and his court was a centre of learning and culture to rival that of Solomon’s. And in 789, Charlemagne had issued the general admonitions, a lengthy administrative document distributed across the whole kingdom which aimed to reform government to make it more centralised and efficient, tackle corruption and injustice, increase education and literacy and build a better, more moral society. So it seemed right, amidst all this euphoria, that Charlemagne make an ambitious statement about his achievements.

Now in 799 that opportunity came. The pope was now Leo III, a man of non-noble background whose father may have been an Arab. The mafiosi aristocracy of Rome and Latium didn’t like that they had an outsider in charge - they wanted someone from the in-group. So they sent a lynch mob of Roman citizens who ambushed the pope when he was on a procession from the Lateran palace to the church of St Lawrence, threw him off his horse, gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue before leaving him naked on the streets to bleed to death. The Duke of Spoleto rescued Pope Leo, who then fled north to seek Charlemagne’s help. Charlemagne was busy for the time being, but in August 800 he came down to give his friend the Pope a hand and teach those unruly Italians a lesson.

Charlemagne arrived at Rome at the head of a massive Frankish army on 24 November and had a triumphal procession in the city to Old St Peter’s with Pope Leo. In early December, Charlemagne convened a judicial assembly in Rome and held an inquest into what had happened last year. The citizens of Rome accused the pope of various crimes. But no witnesses came forward, so Pope Leo himself was like “very well then, let the Lord Jesus Christ and St Peter be my witnesses.” He ascended to the pulpit and put his hand on the gospel, St Peter intervened on his behalf and everyone then agreed the Pope was innocent.

The Pope was now completely in debt to God, St Peter and to Charlemagne. So what was he going to do? How was he going to say thank you and truly repay Charlemagne. Given that Charlemagne was the divinely anointed king of the Franks and Lombards, Patrician of the Romans and the most powerful ruler Western Europe had ever known since the Western Roman Emperors whose empire consisted of all six original member states of the EU plus a few other territories as well, there was only one thing he could really give him now. The Roman imperial title. So on 25 December 800, when Charlemagne went to St Peter’s Basilica to put the mass in Christmas, the Pope gathered together the Roman people, plonked the imperial diadem on Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him the first Western Roman Empire in more than 320 years in front of a cheering crowd. And, as they say, the rest is history.

But hang on a minute. We need to consider some important questions. Was this really a holiday surprise? What were its implications? And how did the still Roman emperors in Constantinople feel about this, given they weren’t consulted about it?

Einhard, Charlemagne’s faithful friend and biographer, readily provides the answers to two of those questions.

“He said that he would not have entered the church that day, even though it was a great feast day, if he had known in advance of the pope’s plan … the Roman emperors were angry about it. He overcame their opposition through his greatness of spirit, which was without doubt far greater than theirs, by often sending ambassadors to them by calling them his brothers in his letters.”

So Einhard claims that Charlemagne was completely taken by surprise about it all. But was he really? Some would suspect that Einhard was just trying to make his dear old friend, the emperor, look modest. When we look more broadly, we can see that Charlemagne didn’t loathe grandeur and ceremony. This was the king, after all, who was nicknamed “David” by Ovid courtiers, who was called “the father of Europe” by the author of an epic poem imitating the style of Virgil’s Aeneid in his lifetime, built a splendid palace in the ancient Roman style at Aachen and who got absolutely hyped when the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, the most powerful ruler west of China, recognised him as an equal by sending him an elephant called Abdul Abbas in 802. The imperial title may have been a surprise Christmas present, but I don’t see any evidence to really suggest that Charlemagne objected to it - on the contrary I think he saw it as literally his crowning personal achievement.

But as Einhard absolutely correctly hints at, the Roman emperors in Constantinople were not happy with it at all. In their view, the pope had shunned them as the latest incident in their ongoing diplomatic row by giving what was not his to give to a Germanic “barbarian” ruler. The pope tried to justify what he had done by saying that there was no Roman emperor so the position was vacant. That was because at the time the Roman Empire was ruled by Irene of Athens who had taken over from her deposed and blinded son Constantine VI (there really is an awful lot of blinding in this period) in 797 - the first woman to rule

in her own right in Roman history, and not the last (more reigning Roman empresses would follow in the eleventh century). Indeed, there was talk of Charlemagne marrying Irene and unifying the two empires. But in 802 Irene was deposed and the new emperor, a Roman general called Nikephoros, was not happy either and so from then until 812 Charlemagne and Nikephoros entered a kind of Cold War in which Charlemagne attacked the Republic of Venice, by now basically independent but still legally part of the Roman Empire. Einhard lightly glosses over this. But in the end, Charlemagne and Emperor Michael I came to a diplomatic agreement to peace and mutual recognition in 813. Still, relations between West and East were soured thereafter. It’s notable that Einhard correctly called Michael and Nikephoros the emperors of the Romans. Later Carolingian writers would call the Romans “the Greeks” instead, a highly insulting term, just like modern historians now erroneously call them the Byzantines - a wholly anachronistic term. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to view the Franks with classically Roman disdain as Barbarian upstarts. The exchange between Charlemagne’s great-grandson, the Emperor Louis II, and Emperor Basil I in 871 makes for fun reading, as both claimed to be the real Roman emperor and called the other a Greek/ German impostor. Many more exchanges like this would come over the centuries, as western and eastern emperors claimed exclusive rights to the ancient Roman legacy - honestly, why couldn’t they have just agreed to share it?

But it’s clear that Charlemagne getting the imperial title didn’t mean he ruled over a new state or that he ruled different. He continued his zeal for centralisation of government, moral reform and promoting education and classical Roman artistic and literary revival, but this has already begun no later than the 780s. And in 806, when Charlemagne drew up a succession plan for his three adult sons, the empire was to be divided equally between the three of them and there was no mention of the imperial title. It was only because only one son, Louis the Pious, outlived his father that the imperial title was able to be passed to future generations and wasn’t just Charlemagne’s personal trophy.

But the popes this meant a big deal. Pope Leo III, before his death in 816, built many additions to the Lateran Palace, and in its great hall he created some amazing mosaics in the apses. Like most art and architecture from the early Middle Ages, they sadly do not survive today, but are mentioned in the ninth century book of the Popes and we have detailed accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some early eighteenth century drawings of them. One of the mosaics shows Charlemagne and the Pope as equals standing below St Peter, and the inscription reads “blessed St Peter, give Pope Leo life and Emperor Charles victory.” Thus it would seem that the Pope saw him and Charlemagne as equals, both deriving their authority from God and protected by St Peter. But given that the Pope was the successor to St Peter, would that mean that the emperor was subject to the pope. Given that the Carolingian emperors were massively more powerful than the popes and de facto led the church in Western Europe, the poles weren’t going to challenge their authority or subordinate them to them. But after the papal revolution of the eleventh century, when the popes became much more powerful, many popes would demand subjection from the German emperors. Indeed, Pope Innocent III, the Uber-Pope of the Middle Ages, would claim he could make whoever he wanted emperor at will, and did so on multiple occasions in the opening decades of the thirteenth century during the great Welf-Hohenstaufen civil war, in which the pope backed both sides at different points. Thus, the memory of the coronation of Charlemagne was not treasured after the Reformation, and even more so in nineteenth century Germany when Otto Von Bismarck was trying to destroy the power of the Catholic Church in the southern regions of the German empire like Bavaria with his kulturkampf - the literal origin of the term culture war. This German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a big deal of Einhard’s comments, claiming that Charlemagne was a true Germanic king who was reluctant to become a Roman emperor because knew all too well that it was just an evil clerical conspiracy to subordinate the state to the church, which the Prussian monarchy was now working so hard to undo in its newly acquired empire.

early eighteenth century drawings of the ninth century Lateran palace mosaics, just before they were demolished, adapted from Paul Edward Dutton (ed), “Carolingian civilisation: a reader”, University of Toronto Press (2009)

Post-WW2, views of the coronation of Charlemagne have been a lot more positive, as a fusion of three integral elements to modern Europe - the Roman, the Germanic and the Christian. Indeed, Charlemagne’s empire has been seen as a forerunner to the EU, which had the Charlemagne prize for promoting European unity to this day.

Finally, Merry Christmas to one and all!

The nativity scene is depicted on the ivory book cover to the Lorsch Gospels (c.800), contemporary to Charlemagne's coronation and most likely by either one of the artists at Charlemagne's court or by the workshops at the royal monastery of Lorsch - a real masterpiece of Carolingian art, showing both the classical Roman artistic inheritance as well as many distinctively Carolingian stylistic features.