From the sources 13: Happy Valentines in Old French and Old High German

 

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Now I’m not going to write a post about the history of Valentine’s Day itself, though I’d like to say that yes it does have a medieval history but later than the kind of medieval I write about here. A lot of very significant historical events happened on this day: the Abbasid Revolution in Iraq in 748, the Papal Schism of 1130, the coronation of Akbar as the ruler of the Mughal Empire in 1556, Captain Cook being killed by Natives in Hawaii in 1779, Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and the launching of YouTube in 2005, to name just six. But of course, this blog bearing the name that it does, we’re going to be focusing on an event in Carolingian history that happened on 14^th February, in the year 842 no less.

Ninth Century Frankish cavalry in the Golden Psalter of St Gall, nicely sets the tone for this

842 of course was in the middle of the Carolingian civil war of 840 – 843, between the three sons of Emperor Louis the Pious. I’ve talked about this a fair few times before, but at the root of it were the same forces that meant that ninth century Carolingians could not have nice things – the failure to equitably share power among the dynasty’s members, aristocratic factionalism at court and opportunistic foreign powers (above all, the Vikings) deciding to get involved. Lothar was trying to hold the empire together with his nephew Pippin of Aquitaine, while his younger brothers Louis and Charles thought they deserved their own piece of the pie.

By this point, it seemed like the civil war wasn’t going great for Lothar, as in June 841 he and Pippin had suffered a catastrophic defeat at Fontenoy. The next 8 months of the civil war saw very little actual fighting. Instead, the rival Carolingian kings sent envoys between each other, trying to negotiate a peace. They try and win over supporters from amongst the Frankish nobles who were either trying to stay neutral, or were on the opposing side. Meanwhile, opposing armies marched around the countryside of Northern France and the Benelux countries, garrisoning citadels here, forcing enemy strongholds to surrender there, blocking off routes where the enemy might approach elsewhere, and so on. Contrary to what some people might think, battles weren’t all important in ninth century warfare and were often indecisive. Indeed, its revealing how our sources tell us so much about the campaigning side of Carolingian warfare, yet provide us with barely any description of how the battles were fought, instead focusing on their aftermath and consequences.

And there are a lot of sources for this section of Carolingian history. Indeed, the 35-year period 828 to 863 is quite possibly the best documented generation in Western political history between the fall of the Roman Republic (66 – 31 BC let’s say) and the age of Richard the Lionheart, John Lackland, Philip Augustus and Pope Innocent III (1188 – 1223). We know so much about the intricacies of Carolingian politics at this time, and the full range of partisan perspectives.

One of these sources is the historian Nithard (795 – 844). Nithard is a very interesting chap, indeed quite a remarkable one. He was the illegitimate son of Bertha, the third daughter of Charlemagne, and the court poet Angilbert. I don’t want to go too much into this now, but Charlemagne seems to have allowed his daughters an unusual degree of sexual freedom, which their brother Louis the Pious thoroughly disapproved of. The emperor’s sisters were among the first to be targeted in his attempt to “drain the swamp” at Aachen. Nithard seems to have been educated at Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen and thus was thoroughly literate, proficient in the Latin language and very knowledgeable of the ancient Roman Classics, especially the works of the historian Sallust and the poet Lucan (both of whom wrote about civil war). He had of course also learned how to ride, hunt, fight with weapons and conduct himself around court. Indeed, one might say his education was fairly typical of a high-ranking Carolingian aristocrat. Before the civil war, Nithard had been a courtier, soldier and lay abbot of Saint Riquier.

Thus Nithard’s Histories provide us, along with the works of Einhard, Angilbert, Eberhard of Friuli and Dhuoda, with valuable insights into the attitudes of lay aristocrats in the Carolingian Empire and how they saw the workings of politics. Nithard wrote his history as the events themselves unfolded, and like Xenophon, Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus before him, he wrote as a soldier and politician with first hand experience of it all. Of course, as your average 16-year-old in a GCSE exam might say, crudely, that means he’s “biased” – Nithard fought for Charles the Bald and portrays his king in a positive light, and the enemy Lothar in a very negative one. Above all, he saw the civil war as a tragedy tearing the Carolingian state (res publica in the original Latin) apart and highly damaging to the welfare of the Frankish people, yet kept faith that everything that unfolded was God’s judgement. Let us see what he has to say about what went down on 14^th February 842.

On the fourteenth of February Louis and Charles met in the city which was once called Argentaria but is now commonly called Strasbourg. There they swore the oaths recorded below; Louis in the Romance language and Charles in the German. Before the oath one addressed the assembled people in German and the other in Romance. Louis being the elder, spoke first …

The basic sum of what Charles and Louis says next is thus: Lothar is an absolute rotter, and the civil war is all his fault. We’ve tried to offer peace on the most reasonable terms, yet he refuses. But at least us two look out for each other as siblings, so we’re going to swear these oaths to show you what good loyal bros we are, and that we’ll work together to heal the body politic.

Nithard then records the oath Louis swore in front of Charles the Bald’s soldiers in Romance thus:

Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salva dift, in o quid il mi atresi fazet et ab Ludher nul plaid numquam prindrai, qui, meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

The English translation goes thus:

For the love of God and our Christian people’s salvation and our own, from this day on, as far as God grants knowledge and power to me, I shall treat my brother with regard to aid and everything else a man should rightfully treat his brother, on condition that he do the same to me. And I shall not enter into any dealings with Lothar which might with my consent injure this my brother Charles.

Charles then swore the same oath to Louis’ troops in Old High German:

In Godes minna ind in thes christianes folches ind unser bedhero gehaltnissi, fon thesemo dage frammordes, fram so mir Got geuuizci indi mahd furgibit, so haldih thesan minan bruodher, soso man mit rehtu sinan bruher scal, in thiu thaz er mig so sama duo, indi mit Ludheren in nohheiniu thing ne gegango, the minan, uuillon, imo ce scadhen uuerdhen.

Then Charles’ soldiers swore this oath in their own Romance language:

Si Lodhuuigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat conservat et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part non l’ostantit, si returnar non l’int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, nulla aiudha contra Lodhuuuig nun li iu er.

Which in English is:

If Louis swore the oath which he swore to his brother Charles, and my Lord Charles does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Louis nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

Louis’ troops then did so in their own language:

Oba Karl then eid then er sinemo bruodher Ludhuuuige gesuor geleistit, indi Ludhuuuig, min herro, then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es iruuenden ne mag, noh ih noh thero nonhhein, then ih es irruenden mag, uuidhar Karle imo ce follusti ne uuirdhit.

In English:

If Charles swore the oath which he swore to his brother Louis, and my Lord Louis does not keep it on his part, and if I am unable to restrain him, I shall not give him any aid against Charles nor will anyone whom I can keep from doing so.

The oaths as they appear in Nithard's histories 

Besides political significance, what makes the oaths so interesting is from the standpoint of written language. Here we are dealing with some of the very earliest examples of written Continental European vernaculars. In the case of what Nithard calls the “Roman” or “Romance” language, which is very clearly Old French, the Oaths of Strasbourg as recorded by Nithard are the very first text ever to have been written in that or any other Romance language. In the case of Old High German, a few texts had been written earlier in the Carolingian period, such as the Latin-Old High German glossary called the Abrogans (c.770), or the Merseburg Charms (the only surviving pre-Christian Germanic religious text). The oaths thus offer us lots of insight into what these languages were like at this point in time, and how they would later evolve.

As I’m not a philologist, I’ll keep the discussion of linguistics brief. For the Old French you can very clearly see the languages’ Latin roots. Some words are still in their Latin forms i.e. Deus (God), jurat (he swore – historic present), conservat (he keeps), numquam (never) and nulla (not any). But there’s clearly a lot of evolution i.e., amor (love) in Latin has moved closer to the French amour with amur; avant is recognisably the French word for before, as opposed to the Latin ante; and sendra, soon to evolve into the Modern French seigneur (lord). auxilia has evolved into aiudha, which is actually closer in spelling and pronounciation to the Spanish than the French word for help; likewise, podir, which has evolved from the Latin potere is cloiser to the Spanish poder than the French pouvoir. The verb tenses also appear to be closer to French i.e., for the conditional/ future words like salvarai and prindrai have endings recognisably like how they would be in Modern French.

For the Old High German, I really can’t claim much expertise – one term in year 7 is the only time I’ve ever formally studied any German, which I know is problematic given how much important Carolingianist scholarship is written in German. Still, you can see recognisable forms of German words in this text i.e., folches (clearly related to volk – people), bruodher (clearly related to bruder – brother), herro (clearly related to herr – lord or master), dage (clearly related to tag – day) and Got (God). And uuillon is clearly related to willa in Old English and will in modern German and English.

Thus, the Oaths of Strasbourg are a moment of huge historical significance in the history of Western European languages. Indeed, from the Romance side of things, it basically marks the terminus ante quem for when the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in Gaul evolved into Old French – when exactly one became the other is highly debated, but it was certainly before 842. Other Romance languages appear fully in written documents slightly later – Italian is the next to come, in the 960s, followed by Spanish and Portuguese; Romanian is the last, first appearing in 1521 (in Cyrillic letters, no less).

What was the attitude of the Carolingians to vernacular languages. Well, its safe to say that in order to successfully navigate high society in the ninth century Carolingian Empire, you had to be trilingual. Louis the Pious had his sons Lothar, Pippin, Louis and Charles educated in Latin, Old French and Old High German, of which the Oaths of Strasbourg are themselves evidence, and pretty much all of the high nobility (the reiksaristokratie) would have been educated the same, especially since many of them like Eberhard of Friuli owned lots of estates in both Romance and Germanic speaking areas. How much bilingualism, let alone trilingualism, spread down the social hierarchy is much less certain. Charles and Louis’ soldiers, who we can reasonably assume to have been drawn from amongst the middling landowners and well-to-do free peasants, could only speak their native vernaculars, and so said their oaths in them, unlike Charles and Louis who said their oaths in German and Old French respectively so the other side’s troops would understand. At the Council of Tours in 813, Charlemagne decreed that priests, depending on where they were, should preach either in the Lingua Romana (Old French) or Theodisc (Old High German) so the common folk could understand.

A ninetenth century artist imagines the scene of the Oaths of Strasbourg

As written vernaculars go, we have only one other example of written Old French from the Carolingian era, a short late-ninth century poem on the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia. After that, the next examples of written Old French appear in the twelfth century with the birth of the chansons de geste and other early chivalric fiction. For Old High German, there’s quite a bit more from the Carolingian period. For example, the monk Otfrid of Wissembourg (a monastery now in Alsace, France) produced the Evangelienbuch, an Old High German verse translation of the Gospels, for King Louis of East Francia. There are also some poems like Muspilli (a poem about Hell), the Hildebrandslied (a fragmentary epic), the Georgslied (about St George) and the Ludwigslied (about a Frankish victory over the Vikings). Still, the amount of Old High German literature that survives pales in comparison to the amount of Old English literature surviving from 685 to c.1100. Yet when you factor in the surviving Latin literature, far more poems, treatises and histories survive from Carolingian Francia in the ninth century than from the whole Anglo-Saxon period. Its because they’ve got an unusually high proportion of vernacular texts, that Anglo-Saxonists (or as some would now prefer to be called, Early MedievalEnglishists) are able to justify obsessively fixating on so few texts, to thepoint that Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon have been sucked dry and done todeath. Meanwhile, a great deal of medieval Germanist scholarship focuses on reconstructinghypothetical texts that may have never existed, rather than the Old High German texts that are actually there. The Carolingians, however, had different priorities to us and preferred Latin literature by far.

From the sources 12: Hilary the Englishman, a gay poet of the twelfth century

 

Happy LGBT History month everyone. Since its that time of the year, I thought I’d explore something I’ve barely ever touched on here – the history of medieval sexuality.

Why might the abduction of Ganymede by the lusty Zeus be the subject of a Romanesque column capital in the twelfth century monastery of Vezelay in Burgundy? More about that later ...

Scene from the Moralised Bible of Vienna, (Codex Vindobonensis 2554); Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, thirteenth century. The not so tolerant side of medieval attitudes towards homosexuality, which did get more severe in the Later Middle Ages.

The problem with studying LGBT history before about 1800 is basically twofold. The first is that the modern concepts of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism are all very recent concepts for classifying people – the first three are all essentially Victorian, while the latter was first used in 1965. And for most of human history, people wouldn’t have identified themselves according to the type of person they felt a physical and psychological attraction to. In Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (I’m less confident talking about non-western societies here), sexuality was about what you did to others or to your own body, not what you felt deep down inside. That’s not to say that there weren’t people back then who, in our modern terms, would be called straight, gay, bi or trans. In the same way, people of different skin colours have existed for millennia, yet it was only in relatively recent times that people started thinking in terms of “white people” and “black people.”

The second problem follows from this. How can we identify anyone who lived before the nineteenth century as gay? Its not as easy as you might think in the premodern sources named historical people who we can definitely show were exclusively attracted to their own biological sex.

Take for example one of the most famous gay men of Medieval England – Edward II. Did he have long-term sexual relationships with his right-hand men, Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger? The evidence generally suggests that he did. Was his marriage to Isabella of France a marriage of dynastic political necessity? Yes. But contrary to all the ingenious efforts of historical fiction writers to cast doubt on Edward III’s paternity (Mel Gibson making William Wallace a time-travelling paedophile has to be the most atrocious example), Edward II could get sufficiently aroused by his wife to father a son and heir. And while his wife Isabella was still a prepubescent girl, he fathered an illegitimate son, Adam Fitzroy, from an unnamed mistress in 1307. So, Edward II would be bisexual in our terms, right? That would probably make most sense.

 Similar things could be said about hundreds of other people from premodern history, from Alexander the Great to James VI of Scotland and I of England. That’s of course not to disregard the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, and that very few people are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual in their inclinations.

 And for some other noteworthy premodern gays, its all a matter of speculation. Take for example Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519). We know that he was arrested for sodomy with the goldsmith’s apprentice and gigolo Jacopo Saltarelli by the Florentine authorities in 1476. The charges were soon dropped, Leonardo never faced trial and no one made such accusations ever again. Was Leonardo homosexual? It’s a reasonable inference that he was. He certainly loved drawing and painting the (nude) male figure, he never married or had any known sexual relationships with women and he had a number of apprentices who weren’t very talented artists but were quite good-looking young men. At the same time, while it’s a reasonable inference to draw from the facts, even when put together they don’t exactly constitute proof either.

Thus for many figures in premodern history, especially from less well-documented periods (the late middle ages/ early modern period are much better in terms of sources than the early middle ages), we’re left with this dilemma. To say the historical figure in question was likely not gay can come across as mildly homophobic, or at the very least unable to read between the lines. This is brilliantly parodied in the popular meme format “historians … they were roommates.”

On the other hand, to say that these historical figures were gay without firm proof, bearing in mind of course that proof to the historian is somewhat different to proof for the lawyer or the scientist, can invite accusations of modern progressive wishful thinking.

Therefore, some historians would argue that it’s best not to focus on finding gay people in the medieval past. Instead, they would argue for focusing on how medieval people themselves thought about sexuality and what they saw as normal or deviant sexual behaviour, and how these things can be very different from our assumptions about human sexuality now. This is essentially the divide between LGBT and queer history explained, just how gender history differs from women’s history or the history of race differs from black history.

Still, I think we can find plenty of people who we can justifiably call gay in the Middle Ages. While there’s definitely too few sources to make medieval LGBT history anything more than a fairly small sub-field, what survives is actually quite rich and amounts to a lot more than political accusations of sexual transgression or records of homophobic persecution. For the pre-1200 period, the bit of the Middle Ages I’m mostly interested in, we have a surprising amount of Latin poetry written by clerics, monks and nuns that is undoubtedly homoerotic in tone. Whether monasteries were secret refuges for LGBT people or even gay subcultures hiding in plain sight, like the mollyhouses of eighteenth-century England, is debatable at best. And the very idea that LGBT people would have been more attracted to the religious vocation than straight people in the Middle Ages relies on all kinds of modern assumptions about masculinity and sexuality. To understand medieval monks, you’ve got to take seriously the idea that forsaking marriage and sex was once a lot more manly than it is now. Early medieval historian Rachel Stone has done some very good posts about why speculating about gay monks (but interestingly, not lesbian nuns) is fraught with problems but also a worthwhile historical exercise.

But anyway, here’s an example, one from the twelfth century by a certain Hilary the Englishman. We know almost nothing about him, except that he was apparently from England and he was one of the pupils of the great Peter Abelard, after his castration and separation from Heloise, at the Paraclete in Champagne in 1125. The poem is called “To an English boy” and goes thus:

Hail fair youth, who seeks no bribe,
Who regards being won with a gift as the height of vice,
In whom beauty and honesty have made their home,
Whose comeliness draws to itself the eyes of all who see him.

Golden haired, fair of face, with a small white neck,
Soft-spoken and gentle – but why do I praise thee singly?
Everything about you is beautiful and lovely; you have no imperfection,
Except that such fairness has no business devoting itself to chastity.

When nature formed you, she doubted for a moment
Whether to offer you as a girl or a boy,
But while she sets her mind’s eye to settling this,
Behold! You come forth, born as a vision for us all.

Afterward, she does finally extend her hand to you
And is astonished that she could have created anyone like you.
But it is clear that nature erred in only this one thing:
That when she had bestowed on you so much, she made your mortal.

No other mortal can be compared with you,
Whom nature made for herself, as if an only child;
Beauty establishes its home in you,
Whose sweet flesh shines brightly as the lily.

Believe me, if those former days of Jove should return,
His handservant would no longer be Ganymede,
But you carried off to heaven; by day the sweet cup
And by night your sweeter kisses you would administer to Jove.

You are the common desire of lasses and lads,
They sigh for you and hope for you, because they know you are unique.
They err or, rather, sin who call you “English”:
They should add letters and call you “angelic.”

(Translation is from John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the fourteenth century”, Chicago (1980), pp 373 – 374)

The poet is definitely trying to demonstrate how learned he is here. He of course imagines the youth he is infatuated with replacing Ganymede on Mount Olympus, which of course shows knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid Book V and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X both ancient Roman texts a well-educated twelfth century cleric with a good grasp of Latin would know. And at the end he humorously includes the incredibly famous pun (to medievalists anyway) supposedly said by Pope Gregory the Great in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History when he saw fair-haired slave boys in Rome in 590. Gregory’s pun of course works best in the original Latin where its non angli sed angeli. In another of his poems, to a certain boy of Anjou, Hilary refers to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus from Seneca, and to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife from the Hebrew Bible.

Thus some historians and literary scholars might argue that these poems were little more than just writing exercises used as a pedagogical tool for practicing writing poetry like Classical Roman authors, or were just playful intellectual games. But if so, that begs a lot of questions. Why do so by writing love lyrics? Surely the other genres of Classical Latin poetry, like epics, odes and even satires would be more appropriate. Or indeed, why did these twelfth century clerics focus so much on the literature of the Augustan age? Why not instead make your main schoolroom texts the Christian Roman poets of the fourth and fifth centuries? Why Horace, Ovid and Virgil rather than Claudian, Prudentius and Rutilius Namantianus?

What all of this demonstrates is two things. One, twelfth century Western Europe’s reverence for Classical antiquity was very deep indeed. If they were simply in need of poetic eloquence, they could find it elsewhere. The second is that Hilary’s poems and others like it were most likely written as genuine gay love poems. Indeed, there is evidence that some monasteries and cathedral schools were worried that routine poetry composition exercises in the scriptorium were being used to deviant ends. Our old friend, Guibert de Nogent, a few generations before Hilary, got into trouble when he wrote sexually explicit and obscene poems inspired by his adolescent reading of Ovid. Some might call it in his case the medieval equivalent of a geeky teenager writing a Kirk and Spock, Legolas and Gimli or Nico DiAngelo with half a dozen different characters from the Percy Jackson universe (before his relationship with Will Solace became canon anyway). Websites like Wattpad are basically devoted to this stuff. Of course, Guibert was writing his juvenile compositions in a conservative Benedictine monastery, Saint Germer de Fly. The world of the twelfth century schools that Hilary the Englishman inhabited may have been a bit more liberal in this regard, making it all the more possible to sneak in some gay love poems to fellow students while you’re busying yourselves with the trivium.

I aim to, in future posts, explore more of these gay love poems from the twelfth century, including some by women. I also want to look at what general medieval attitudes to what we would now call homosexuality were like.

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)