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
