From the sources 5: Peasants and power

Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel (770 – 840), a Visigothic immigrant from Spain (like Theodulf of Orleans, friend of this blog, whom he knew personally) that became abbot of a monastery in what is now Lorraine in eastern France, wrote a commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict. If an elite man (potens) were to approach the monastery gate, he should pound on the gate with his fist or staff, and the gatekeeper would greet him humbly and ask for a blessing. But if a poor or low status man (pauper) approached, he should cry out humbly and the monastery gatekeeper would respond with a reassuring “Thanks be to God.” This should not be news, but Carolingian Francia was not a democracy, nor did it make any claim to being egalitarian. It was clear to everyone that kings, bishops and a landowning aristocratic elite, some of whom were tonsured and some of whom wore sword-belts, were in charge and that it was the duty of the common people to respect and obey them. The same principle of course applied for husbands and wives, fathers and sons and masters and slaves. Only the spiritual sphere did egalitarianism apply – the Bible had made it clear everyone had an equal chance of getting into Heaven.

Sourced from Chris Wickham "The Inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 - 1000." The hierarchical, walled structure of this ninth century Tuscan peasant village encapsulates the direction of travel of social change in the ninth century - the upper walled enclosure is probably an estate centre occupied by the landlord's agents.

This was however, not a caste society. People could and did rise above their station. As we saw in the Marseille polyptych, a few peasant boys left their homes to attend school. Those who did could join the clergy and rise high in society. The best example of this phenomenon is Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, the son of an unfree goatherd from northern Germany, who gained the favour of Charlemagne and was educated at his court. Yet the likes of Ebbo could not leave their backgrounds completely behind and faced snobbery at court – an official once said to Ebbo “[the emperor] made you free, not noble, which is impossible.” 

St Mark from the Gospel Book of Ebbo of Rheims (now kept in the municipal library of Epernay in Champagne, France), one of the most beautiful examples of Carolingian painting out there

Likewise, peasants could still serve in the royal army and win lands and other riches on the expanding frontier, at least until the end of Charlemagne’s reign, and as we saw in the Edict of Pitres, kings doubled down on their right to have all free men provide military service during the Viking invasions. And peasants (including the unfree) could also become warriors in the retinues of churchmen and aristocrats. Nonetheless, warfare was becoming an increasingly elite occupation in the ninth century, especially with the slow shift towards heavy cavalry warfare, which was expensive to equip oneself for. The idea that it was the right and duty of all free Frankish men to carry weapons and serve king and country in war was slowly dying out, as this repugnant incident (infamous amongst Carolingianists) from the Annals of Saint Bertin recounts:

859. The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people [vulgus] living between the Seine and Loire formed a sworn association [coniuratio] amongst themselves, and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had not been made without due consideration [incaute], they were easily slain by our more powerful people.

(The Annals of Saint Bertin, edited and translated by Janet Nelson, Manchester University Press (1992), quoted in Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 – 1000, Penguin (2009) p 529)

In the modern historiography, the ninth century is seen as a crucial period in the growth of aristocratic power in the Frankish lands, which meant the ebbing away of the relative freedom and autonomy that the peasantry had enjoyed in the three centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The work of Chris Wickham, who I’ve just cited, and “Reframing the Feudal Revolution” by Charles West are instructive here. To what extent were the peasantry completely passive players in all of this? And could the church and the state be of any avail to them. This is what we will investigate in the final part of our “from the sources” mini-series on Carolingian peasants.

Our first source takes the form of a record of a judgement issued in 828 by the royal court of King Pippin I of Aquitaine, one of the middle sons of Emperor Louis the Pious who was given a sub-kingdom to rule in his father’s lifetime. It concerns a dispute between the Abbey of Saint-Paul de Cormery in the Loire Valley and some of its free tenants from an estate in Poitou. Let’s have a read:

A silver denarius of Pippin I of Aquitaine (d.838)

Pepin by the Grace of God king of Aquitaine. When we in God’s name, on a Tuesday, in our palace at the villa of Chasseneuil in the county of Poitou near the River Clain, were sitting to hear the cases of many persons and to determine just judgements, there came certain men, named Aganbert, Aganfred, Frotfar, and Martin, they as well as their fellows (pares) being coloni of Saint Paul from the villa of Antoigne belonging to the monastery of Cormery and its abbot Jacob. There they brought a complaint against the abbot and his advocate, named Agenus, on the grounds that the abbot and his officers had demanded and exacted from them more in rent and renders than they ought to pay and hand over, and more than their predecessors for a long time before them had handed over, and that they [the abbot and his officers] were not keeping for them such law as their predecessors had had.

Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost of the monastery were present, and made a statement rebutting that claim as follows: neither the abbot nor themselves had exacted, or ordered to be exacted, any dues or renders other than those their predecessors had paid to the monastery’s representatives for thirty years. They forthwith presented an estate survey (descriptio) to be read out, wherein it was detailed how, in the time of Alcuin’s abbacy, the coloni of that villa who were there present, and also their fellows, had declared on oath that what they owed in renders, and what was still to pay, for each manse on that estate. That survey was dated to the thirty-fourth year of Charles’ reign [802].

The coloni there present were then asked if they had declared [the statements in] that survey and actually paid the renders stated in that survey for a period of years, and if that survey had been true and good, or did they wish to say anything against it or object to it, or not? They said and acknowledged that the survey was true and good, and they were quite unable to deny that they had paid the render for a period of years, or that they themselves, or their predecessors, had declared [the statements in] that survey.

Therefore we, together with our faithful men, namely Count Haimo [and twenty-three named men ending with John, count of the palace] and many others, have seen fit to judge that, since those coloni themselves gave the acknowledgement as stated above that the survey was as they had declared it, and as it was written down in that document there before them, and that they had paid the said renders for a period of years, so also must they pay and hand over the same each year and every year to the representatives of that house of God.

Therefore we order that, since we have seen the case thus heard and concluded, the above Agenus the advocate and Magenar [sic] the provost should on behalf of the house of God receive a record of it, showing that it has been done in this way and at this time.

I Deotimus, deputising for John count of the palace, have recognised and subscribed.

Given on 9 June in the fifteenth year of our lord Louis the serene emperor. Nectarius wrote out and subscribed it.

(Adapted from Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader, edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 229 – 230)

What we can see here is a case of Frankish free peasants, albeit ones in a dependent relationship to a monastic landlord, using their right as free men to use the public law courts. In their case, they chose not to go through the local county court (placitum or mallum publicum) but go instead to the second highest court in the land, that of their regional sub-king. The only one higher than that would be the emperor’s court, and they weren’t exactly going to trek all the way to Aachen or Ingelheim. As the source subsequently recounts, they lost the case. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. The peasants were at a huge disadvantage. The text tells us quite clearly that they didn’t have the written records to back up their claims. Meanwhile the monastery had its survey (descriptio) from a generation earlier (the time of Charlemagne and Alcuin), which it was able to use to demonstrate that the rents and other exactions it imposed on the peasantry weren’t any more burdensome than in the time of their fathers. Linking back to earlier posts, this reminds us why the polyptychs were created – they were documents designed to defend the rights of landlords in disputes with their tenants just like this by carefully recording what each peasant family owed in rents and services. This very document would give them more archival ammunition. The peasants themselves, however, could only rely on the vagueness of individual/ collective memory and testifying in good faith. The fact that the jury of Pippin of Aquitaine’s palace officials were all landlords themselves probably didn’t work in the peasants’ favour either. Finally, though we have no indication of this, Agenus the advocate and Magenar the provost were almost certainly better public speakers than the peasants, and as had been well-known in the Roman Empire, the better rhetoricians always won the case.

At the same time, the fact the peasants still bothered to argue their case in the law courts is still significant. And they weren’t alone in this. We have similar cases from northern Francia, Septimania (Languedoc) and Italy in the ninth century, in which peasants appealed to public law courts at county or kingdom level over personal legal status, rent or seized lands. In most, but not all, cases they lost. But it didn’t matter. Even if the judicial system was run by the aristocracy, to a greater extent than it had been in the seventh and early eighth centuries, when the county court had been a bottom-up assembly of local free men, the peasants still believed that it worked for them and that they could get justice like anyone else. After 900, peasants attending public law courts become much rarer, and by the mid-eleventh century local justice had become completely privatised by territorial lords in most of the former Carolingian Empire – Germany differed somewhat.

But now on to our next source. It takes the form of an extract from a collection of miracle stories written in 878 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, who I’ve mentioned here many times before. Hincmar was a very enthusiastic promoter of the cult of his see’s patron saint, Remigius (who we’ve also met before), And he wasn’t afraid to make a few things up to that end – his claim that Clovis was anointed with a chalice of holy oils carried down to Saint Remigius from by a dove heaven had no pre-existing foundation (Merovingian kings were notanointed, remember!) Thus, some might want to approach the following story with extreme scepticism as just a bishop doing some PR. Traditionally, that’s how historians saw miracle stories and saint’s lives. But now, historians have come to realise that the stories in this genre (hagiography) does significantly reflect popular culture. While they’re not a direct window on to the peasant world, they do more to tell us about the lives and beliefs of ordinary people than any other kind of narrative source from the early Middle Ages. So, let’s have a read:

Rheims Cathedral (author's own photograph) looking nothing like how Hincmar would have known it, but magnificent all the same - its one of the most beautiful cathedrals I have ever visited.

The abbey of Saint Remigius of Rheims (author's own photograph). Again, none of the Carolingian building survives - what's there is from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.

In our age a peasant from the village of the episcopate of Rheims which is called Plumbea Fontana lived next to the royal estate which is called Rozoy-[sur-Serre], but he was not able to use his land peacefully either for harvest or for grazing because of the harassment of the residents on the royal estates. He frequently sought justice from the royal officials, but he was not able to obtain it. Then he took for himself some beneficial counsel. He cooked loaves and meat and he placed beer into jars, as much as he was able. All these he placed into a container which is called in the vernacular a benna, and he placed it upon a cart. Hitching up his oxen, he hurried with a candle in his hand to the basilica of Saint Remi. When he arrived, he presently surprised the poor with the bread, meat, and beer; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint; he placed a candle at the sepulchre of the saint and beseeched him for help against the men of the royal estate who were harassing him. He also gathered the dust from the floor of the church, as much as he was able, tied it in a cloth, and placed it in the same container. He placed a shroud above it, as is usually put upon the corpse of a dead person. With his cart he returned home. Persons he met on the way inquired what he was bringing on the cart, and he responded that he was bringing Saint Remi. They all wondered at his words and deed, and thought that he had lost his mind. He called on Saint Remi to help him against his oppressors. The bulls and cows began with the loudest bellows to attack one another with their horns, and the he-goats to attack the she-goats with their horns, the pigs to fight with the pigs, the rams with the ewes, and the herdsmen dealt each other blows with sticks and arms. As the riot grew greater, both the screaming herdsmen and the animals according to their type began to flee towards Rozoy with the loudest noise and racket, as if a huge multitude of pursuers were beating them with sticks. The men of the royal estate, when they saw and heard these things, were struck with great terror and believed that they had no more than an hour to live. Thus reprehended for their arrogance, they abandoned the harassment of this poor man of St-Remi, and thereafter the poor man held his belongings in peace and without disturbance. And since he lived near the Serre River in a muddy place, he put up with a great bother in his dwelling from snakes. Taking the dust, which he had brought with him from the floor of the church of Saint Remi, he sprinkled it throughout his house, and thereafter a snake did not appear in those places, where the dust had been scattered. By the evidence of miracles, we can accept as certainly proved that, if firm in the faith, we ask from the heart for the help of Saint Remi, we shall be freed from the attacks of the angels of Satan, who as a serpent deceived the mother of the human race in addressing her; and by merit and intercession of Saint Remi we shall be freed from the wicked deeds of bad men.

(From Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), edited and translated by Paul Edward Dutton, University of Toronto Press (2009), pp 484 – 485)

A modern status of Saint Remigius in Rheims (author's own photograph) commemorating the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis in 1996.

Scepticism of the supernatural and Hincmar’s motives aside, this story does nonetheless reflect beliefs and practices that Frankish peasants could have held, and there are plenty of other stories like it. The story reflects a widely held view that if one was pious, charitable and lived a good Christian life, as the peasant in the story was by feeding the beggars at the church with his spare food, and venerated the saints, one could gain their protection against oppression from the powerful. This kind of attitudes would find their ultimate fruition in the post-Carolingian period, with the Peace and Truce of God movement, which we’ll explore another time once I’ve finally translated the relevant bits of Adhemar of Chabannes. Likewise, Hincmar’s sympathetic attitude to the plight of peasants on the lands of Saint-Remi shows that ecclesiastical landlords weren’t always inimical to the interests of their tenants.

To wrap things up, it is worth noting that there were virtually no peasants’ revolts in the Carolingian era. One exception is the Saxon Stellinga of 841, yet there are many reasons why Saxony was atypical of the rest of the Carolingian Empire and some historians doubt whether the Stellingahad a genuinely lower-class character. Now there are many other reasons why peasants’ revolts were almost completely absent from the Carolingian era and were essentially a late medieval/ early modern phenomenon. But we must not ignore the possibility that one of them was that the majority of peasants viewed the social and political system as just and legitimate. Partly that would have been due to lack of alternative set-ups, except in Saxony which had until a time in living memory been a loose confederation of pagan tribal societies. But clearly there were various ways in which the state, as we saw with the first source, and the Church, as we saw in the second, could at least in theory be made to work for them in the face of oppression and exploitation from certain elite individuals and institutions. Frankish peasants were not passive victims and broad acceptance of the status quo didn’t mean constantly tugging the proverbial forelock even in the face of maltreatment.

A somewhat overrated but still very important event: The Treaty of Verdun (843)

As background to my series' on the last Carolingian kings (starting with the mini-series on Charles the Simple) and ton the Ottonians, I am going to make a post about a certain event that happened 1178 years ago (the exact date is not known, but it took place in the month of august) at a certain place in what is now the Lorraine region of eastern France. 

The Long backstory

On Christmas day 800, Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards, was crowned Roman emperor in the West by Pope Leo III in St Peter's Basilica in Rome. This was literally the crowning glory to three decades of near constant political and military achievement, in which the Franks had acquired an empire comprising essentially the original six nations of the European Economic Community (the forerunner to the EU) - France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany and Italy - plus a few other areas, namely modern day Switzerland, Austria and Catalonia. This made Charlemagne's empire the largest political unit Western Europe had known since the collapse of the old Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. In many ways this might have seemed to have ushered in an exciting new era. Charlemagne set to work at building an imperial capital at Aachen replete with an imperial palace, whose chapel (the only bit that survives today, see image below) was modelled on the architectural styles prevalent in the still surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire (what modern historians choose to call the Byzantine Empire) and was constructed with classical Roman columns brought over from Italy. In 802, he made all free men over the age of 12 in the realm swear an oath of loyalty directly to him - an unprecedented display of authority which must have required some very concerted administrative effort -and doubled down on an ambitious programme of governmental, ecclesiastical and moral reform. In the meantime, as part of his ideology of Roman imperial renewal, an ambitious revival of classical literature, art and education took place - what modern historians call the Carolingian Renaissance.

Still, not everything was looking great. This was about the point in time the Vikings were starting to make a nuisance of themselves, and Charlemagne's ambitious reform programme was all the more necessary (and some would say all the more futile) as complaints about corruption, maladministration and the oppression of the poor by the powerful were mounting. And then there was the problem of the succession. Charlemagne had three sons who survived to adulthood - Pepin, Louis and Charles the Younger. He also had four surviving daughters and half a dozen illegitimate children from various concubines. Succession to the Frankish kingdom was governed by the Salic law that had been followed by the dynasty that preceded the Carolingians, the Merovingians, which ruled that all close male relatives were eligible to inherit a portion of a dead man's lands, and the kingdom was no different in this respect. Charlemagne being emperor made this no different - his coronation, while undoubtedly an important event, did not mark the beginning of a new state and at a certain level Charlemagne may have seen the emperorship as essentially being his personal accolade. In 806, he drew up a plan for the division of the empire after his death. Pepin would rule as king over Italy and Bavaria. Louis' kingdom would consist of Aquitaine, Burgundy, Provence, Septimania and the Spanish March (the southern half of France plus Catalonia, basically). Charles the Younger would get what was left - that being essentially the entire northern half of the empire. Revealingly, no arrangements were made about who would inherit the imperial title. However, this plan never saw the light of day. When the great Frankish emperor finally breathed his last in 814, only one son was still alive, and that was Louis. Louis thus inherited an undivided empire - he had already been crowned king of the Franks and co-emperor by his ailing father the previous year. 

Louis (see the coin of him below, modelled on Roman imperial coinage), or Louis the Pious as he would later become known (Ludwig der Fromme in German), was an idealist and a visionary who wanted to take the Carolingian reform programme of administrative and moral correctio (correction) to unprecedented levels. Like many people at the time, he subscribed to an essentially Old Testament view of kingship that saw the prosperity and security of the realm as dependent on the moral well-being of its rulers and people. Closely aligned with this, he firmly believed that as emperor he was responsible for the spiritual salvation of his people as well as their material security. What prevented his grand designs for  going as smoothly as he might have hoped was the issue that had dogged the final third of his father's reign - and indeed, would dominate Carolingian politics for the rest of the ninth century - that of the succession. In 814, three of Louis' sons had already been fortunate enough to have made it past infancy - Lothar, Louis and Pepin. Unfortunately for Louis, he had to decide what to do with them. In 817 he drew up a document called the divisio imperii, which stipulated that Lothar was to get the imperial title and have most of the territories of the empire under his direct rule, while his brothers Pepin and Louis were to rule in Aquitaine and Bavaria respectively as subordinate kings (if they had sons they would inherit their kingdoms when they died, if they did not then they would revert to the emperor). But in 818, Louis' wife, the empress Ermengarde, died - the two of them had been quite close, and Ermengarde had closely advised Louis on many of his policies - and Louis reluctantly remarried, on the advice of his counsellors, to Judith, who gave him a son, Charles, in 821. This meant he had yet another son to provide for, as per ancient Frankish law and custom, and that meant chipping away at his other sons' inheritances, specifically that of Lothar, whose piece of the pie was by far the biggest as per the divisio imperii. Lothar and Pepin resented this between 830 and 839 Louis fought three civil wars against him - they were joined by their brother Louis for the third At some points things looked pretty dismal indeed for Louis - in 833 he was forced to perform a humiliating public penance and was technically deposed, but was fully re-instated as emperor the following year with widespread backing from the nobility. By 840, Louis was clearly on top and peace and order had been restored to the empire, but the stress of near-constant campaigning had taken a toll on his health and, after retreating to his summer hunting lodge near the palace of Ingelheim-am-Rhine, he died on 20 June 840, having forgiven his rebellious sons and confirmed Lothar as the new emperor. 

What happened next was all-out civil war. Here, it was Lothar and his nephew Pepin of Aquitaine (so many Pepins to keep track of, I know), the son of the previous Pepin, trying to keep the empire together, while Charles (known to posterity as Charles the Bald) and Louis (known to posterity as Louis the German) were trying to carve out kingdoms of their own. On 25 June 841, a battle was fought between the two sides at Fontenoy-en-Puisaye in eastern France. A great slaughter followed. Andreas Agnellus, the bishop of Ravenna, estimated that 40,000 men died on each side - battlefield casualty statistics from early medieval writers are always to be taken with a pinch of salt, if trusted at all, but this was undoubtedly not a skirmish between a couple of thousand highly trained warrior retainers on either side (which is what some historians have argued to be typical of Carolingian warfare) but a major set-piece battle that really pitted the Frankish people against each other, and carnage ensued. For those who fought there, it was psychologically scarring. We are fortunate enough to know this because the Carolingian empire did have a mostly literate lay aristocracy, and two lay aristocrats who fought at the battle of Fontenoy expressed themselves eloquently on the matter - the historian Nithard and the poet Angilbert. Here is Angilbert's poem "Lament for Fontenoy." While it does contain some Old Testament imagery (as was standard for Latin literature at that time), one can nonetheless see genuine trauma in Angilbert's beautifully crafted verses, as genuine as that of any of the WW1 poets. 

 Fontenoy they call its fountain, manor to the peasant known,

There the slaughter, there the ruin, of the blood of Frankish race;
Plains and forest shiver, shudder; horror wakes the silent marsh.

Neither dew nor shower nor rainfall yields its freshness to that field,
Where they fell, the strong men fighting, shrewdest in the battle's skill,
Father, mother, sister, brother, friends, the dead with tears have wept.

And this deed of crime accomplished, which I here in verse have told,
Angibert myself I witnessed, fighting with the other men,
I alone of all remaining, in the battle's foremost line.

On the side alike of Louis, on the side of Charles alike,
Lies the field in white enshrouded, in the vestments of the dead,
As it lies when birds in autumn settle white off the shore.

Woe unto that day of mourning! Never in the round of years
Be it numbered in men's annals! Be it banished from all mind,
Never gleam of sun shine on it, never dawn its dusk awake.

Night it was, a night most bitter, harder than we could endure,
When they fell, the brave men fighting, shrewdest in the battle's skill,
Father, mother, sister, brother, friends, the dead with tears have wept.

Now the wailing, the lamenting, now no longer will I tell;
Each, so far as in him lieth, let him stay his weeping now;
On their souls may He have mercy, let us pray the Lord of all.

Overleaf: A much later (and more romanticised) depiction of the Battle of Fontenoy from a manuscript (dating to c.1460) of the Grand Chroniques de France, painted by the great French early renaissance painter Jean Fouquet.

In the end, the battle did have a clear winner - the divisionist side of Charles the Bald and Louis the German. Lothar and the imperialists were utterly crippled, and not long afterwards the emperor was forced to abandon the imperial capital, Aachen. In 842 Charles the Bald and Louis the German sealed their alliance at Strasbourg with mutual oath-taking, in which each of them swore oaths to each other's troops in the vernacular - Charles swore the oath before Louis' troops in a very early dialect of Old High German, while Louis swore the oath before Charles' troops in "the Roman language." The texts of the oaths is preserved and thus is a goldmine for historical linguists. The "Roman language" which Louis swore the oath in had clearly evolved quite some way from the spoken Vulgar Latin (as opposed to the high, literary Latin of Cicero, Caesar, Virgil, Ovid and Livy) of Roman Gaul into something that could now be called a Romance language. Some scholars have argued that the language of the text can be seen as the earliest written form of Old French. However, some more conservative linguists argue that it can't quite be considered Old French - it does not have any distinguishing features that would identify it as a forerunner to any of the literary dialects, either the Langue D'Oil of the northern French chansons de geste (songs of deeds in war), or the Occitan of Southern French troubadour fin'amour (what modern scholars call courtly love) lyrics, that attain written form when French vernacular literature gets going in the twelfth century. Indeed, there's one theory that the scribe who wrote the text of the oaths deliberately wrote in a kind of Gallo-Romance Koine, deliberately designed to be mutually intelligible to all regional dialects, like the Koine Greek of the New Testament. Below is the Gallo-Romance text:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en 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 salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

English translation (not my own): "For the love of God and the Christian populace and our joint salvation, from this day onward, to the best of my knowledge and abilities granted by God, I shall protect my brother Charles by any means possible, as one ought to protect one's brother, insofar as he does the same for me, and I shall never willingly enter into a pact with Lothair against the interests of my brother Charles."

The Treaty of Verdun and beyond

Lothar's position was incredibly fragile and so he agreed to come to a settlement with Louis and Charles. At Verdun in August 843 they agreed to divide the Empire into three between them (see the map below), but with Lothar keeping the imperial title. As you can see below, Charles' kingdom roughly corresponds to modern day France but plus Flanders and Catalonia and minus Alsace, Lorraine, the Rhone valley and Provence. Louis the German's kingdom is essentially West Germany minus some territories on the left bank of the Rhine and including some bits of modern day Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. Therefore, some have seen this moment as being the genesis of France and Germany. Lothar on the other hand got what remained in the middle. Some would say that Lothar's kingdom was doomed from the start, arguing that it was simply too unwieldy to govern in an age when information could only travel as fast as a horse's hooves and with the Alps forming a significant obstacle between the north and south of his kingdom, that it was too ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous (a roughly 60:40 split between Romance and Germanic peoples) and that it was too vulnerable to attack from either side (I am kind of guilty of this tendency myself, in a certain meme I made, one featuring my all-time favourite animal). But I don't think there's any good reason to see Lothar's kingdom as any less viable than West and East Francia. Size was a problem for them too, and they were all inhabited by various different peoples each with their own dialects, laws and customs. While the inhabitants of Charles' kingdom north of the Loire identified as Franks and were subject to the laws of the Salian Franks, the inhabitants south of the Loire identified as Burgundians, Gascons, Visigoths (in Septimania and the Spanish March) and even Romans (I suspect that many old senatorial families still lingered in the aristocracy of southern Gaul) and were subject to Roman law - the Theodosian Code of 438 in Aquitaine and the Visigothic Breviary of Alaric II in Septimania and Catalonia - and the laws of the Burgundians. East Francia was a land of even starker contrasts, with the recently converted Saxons in the north, who had been making sacrifices to Odin and Thor in a time still within living memory, and still lived in a rough, frontier society governed by tribal customs, versus the cultured Bavarians in the south who took pride in having once been a Roman province and having converted to Christianity earlier than all the other peoples of East Francia; and its administrative and communications infrastructure were the least developed of the three kingdoms. Meanwhile, Lothar's kingdom had the highly agriculturally and viticulturally productive Meuse, Moselle, Rhine, Rhone and Po river valleys, making it very wealthy, as well as so many different places of ideological prestige including the imperial capital of Aachen, the old Lombard capital at Pavia, many great cities and bishoprics that went back to Roman times like Cologne, Trier, Lyon, Vienne, Milan and Ravenna and the great Carolingian family monasteries of Prum and Stavelot-Malmedy. 

Above, all its crucial to remember that this was not an age of nationalism. The Carolingian nobility (what German historians call the Reichsaristokratie) continued to embrace a pan-Frankish identity and continued to own lands and act as patrons to monasteries in several different kingdoms - for example, Eberhard of Friuli (died 867), duke (military governor) of Friuli in the north east of the Italian kingdom, gave his lands in Italy and in the East Frankish kingdom to his eldest son Unruoch, his second eldest Berengar got his lands and monasteries in north western Lotharingia (modern day Wallonia region of Belgium) and his other two sons got his estates in northern West Francia. Church councils were still attended by bishops from across the Carolingian kingdoms, and flourishing intellectual networks drew in luminaries not only from all over the territories of the Frankish empire but also from the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Ireland and Christian Spain. And the kings themselves still kept to roughly the same royal ideology and carried on with the Carolingian reform project in their respective kingdoms.

What would do for Lothar's kingdom in the end was, yet again, dynastic problems. Lothar had three sons who survived to adulthood - Lothar II, Charles (so many Charles', I know, its confusing) and Louis (Louis was another name the Carolingians were hooked on calling their sons) - and when he died in 855 they proceeded to divide it between the three of them with the Treaty of Prum. Lothar II got the northern vertical strip from the North Sea down to the foothills of the Alps that soon became known for many a century to come as Lotharingia. Charles got the Rhone Valley and Provence. And Louis got Italy and the imperial title as Emperor Louis II. But biological good luck was not on their side. Charles died childless in 863 and his territories were shared between Lothar and Louis II. Lothar II quickly realised that his wife Queen Theutberga, whom he married in 855, was barren and so tried to divorce her and marry his concubine, Waldrada instead, but since the leading bishops of the ninth century were trying to assert ecclesiastical jurisidiction over marriage, and insisted on it as being sacramental and binding, Lothar had to fabricate an excuse in claiming that Theutberga had been engaging in incest with her brother, Hucbert. Hucbert offered to defend the reputation of him and his sister in trial by combat, and after Queen Theutberga was shown to be innocent in a trial by ordeal of boiling water (her hand healed rather than blistered a few days after being doused in boiling water) Lothar was forced to take her back. Lothar thus died without legitimate issue in 869 and his two uncles, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, briefly went to war with each other before signing the Treaty of Meerssen (see below), in which they divided Lotharingia between them.

Dynastic bad luck came next for Louis II in 875, who also died without male issue. Charles the Bald and Louis the German went to war again, this time over Italy, and by 880 it was annexed to the East Frankish kingdom. Dynastic bad luck then hit the West Frankish branch of the Carolingian family real hard - after Charles the Bald died in 877, his son Louis the Stammerer reigned for only two years and his two teenaged sons from his first marriage, Pepin (still more Pepins) and Carloman, ruled the kingdom jointly for three years and then with Carloman as sole ruler for two years. When Carloman died in 884, his only heir was his five year old half-brother, Charles the Simple. The West Frankish nobility didn't want a child king, especially since this the point in time at which the Viking invasions were at their most devastating, so they invited Charles the Fat, the youngest son of Louis the German who had already hoovered up East Francia and Italy by outlasting all his brothers, to become king of West Francia. For four years, the Carolingian Empire was reunited under a single emperor. But Charles the Fat was a uninspiring leader with too many talented subordinates, and he too had failed to procure a legitimate male heir. So when he died of a stroke in January 888 after facing a rebellion in East Francia from his illegitimate nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, the empire broke up again, this time forever, with the aristocracies of West Franica, Burgundy, Provence and Italy all electing kings from amongst their own ranks.

Long-term legacy

In the very long term, the Treaty of Verdun would indeed be very significant. West Francia and East Francia would, in the long-run, despite all the territorial configuration and reconfiguration all the way through the ninth century and beyond, prove to be quite durable political units and would, no later than the thirteenth century, develop into the distinct and recognisable cultural entities of France and Germany. Meanwhile, the old Middle Kingdom of Lothar would become a battleground between the rulers of the two kingdoms bestride it. I won't go into the details of what happened in the tenth century, since I'll cover them in other posts. Suffice to say that from c.1000 - 1643 the border between France and Germany/ the Holy Roman Empire lay squarely at the river Meuse, with Verdun itself being a border fortress, but after the Thirty Years' War concluded in 1648 France, which was among the victorious powers, got given various towns and fortresses east of the Meuse. Louis XIV fought a series of wars to bring the French border to the left bank of the Rhine, and also to conquer the Hapsburg Netherlands (modern day Belgium), in which he managed some further territorial acquisitions, including Alsace and French Flanders (the area around Lille and Dunkirk). Successive French leaders thereafter tried to achieve the same result - Louis XV managed to annexe all of Lorraine by 1766, and over the course of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792 - 1802) the First French Republic managed to bring its borders all the way to the left bank of the Rhine. Indeed, the areas under direct rule from Paris in the reign of Emperor Napoleon I essentially corresponded to West Francia plus the kingdom of Lothar (see map below).

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815 the French border was again set where it is now. But in 1871, Alsace and Lorraine were lost to the newly unified German Empire. They would only be regained by France after WW1, a war whose Western front essentially encompassed the old kingdom of Lothar II and its borderlands with West Francia (see map below). 

France would again lose Alsace and Lorraine to Germany with Hitler's invasion in 1940, and it was only in 1945 that the border between France and Germany was finally set where it is now, with its security and that of the Low Countries being guaranteed by the formation of the European Economic Community soon after. The European Economic Community would of course develop into the European Union. Interestingly enough, the EU's headquarters are located in Brussels and Strasbourg, both of them located in the old middle kingdom of Lothar II, and the EU annually awards the Charlemagne prize to those who they think merit it for the promotion of a pan-European identity. So one might say the story of the rise and crisis of the Carolingian empire is a central foundation myth to the European Union and its ideals.

The life of Charles the Simple (879 - 929) part the first: early years and rise to power (879 - 898)

This series also began its life as facebook posts I did for a medieval history group. The West Frankish kingdom in the long tenth century (c.880 - 1030 lets say) is very close to my heart - indeed its the area I wrote my masters thesis on, and the Feudal revolution debate I've been obsessing over since I was a first year undergraduate, essentially hinges on the last decades of it. Yet its political history is little known and has received little attention from academic medievalists post-WW1 (the last time a biography of Charles the Simple was written was in 1899), though in the last couple of decades that has started to be rectified. Through this blog I want to show that the last Carolingians and early Capetians can be interesting, so we'll start at the beginning ...

Charles the Simple was born in 879, five months after the death of his father, King Louis II the Stammerer of West Francia. Louis was the son of King Charles the Bald (843 - 877), who had been given West Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire was divided up by the sons of Emperor Louis the Pious (814 - 840) after a three year civil war. However, unlike Henry VI of England, Charles was lucky enough not to have the kingship thrust on him as an infant. He had two teenaged elder half-brothers, Louis III and Carloman. They had some promise in them. Louis won a great victory against the Vikings at Saucourt in 881, that would not long afterwards be immortalised in one of the oldest surviving epic poems in German, the Ludwigslied. By 884, however, both of them were deceased. The West Franks were not going to have a five year old boy rule over them, so they got in Charles the Fat (these Carolingian kings really do have great names don't they), the king of East Francia and Italy and the son of Louis the German (Charles the Simple's great uncle) to rule over them. Thus the Carolingian Empire was briefly reunified. However, Charles, who was widely held to be incompetent, was soon faced with deposition and rebellion at the hands of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, who had the support of the German nobility, in East Francia in 887, and in January 888 he suffered a stroke and died.

This was the final undoing of the Carolingian Empire and a seismic moment for West Francia. For the first time since 751, when Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short overthrew the last king of the Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III, and was anointed king of the Franks, there was not a single adult male Carolingian candidate for the throne of the West Frankish realms. Arnulf was not gonna become king of West Francia, because his support base lay squarely in Germany and to a lesser extent Italy. There was the Carolingian cadet branch of the House of Vermandois, descended from Charlemagne's grandson Bernard of Italy, but for some reason they always stayed out of succession disputes - though that didn't stop them from throwing their weight around otherwise. The branch of the Carolingian dynasty ruling over the Middle Kingdom (Lotharingia), had died out in 869. The only Carolingian candidate for the throne was of course Charles the Simple, and he was only nine years old. Now could not be a worse time for a child king. The Vikings had laid siege to Paris only two years earlier, and their attacks were only intensifying, given that in the last two decades they had been losing ground in the British Isles thanks to the efforts of Alfred of Wessex and Rhodri Mawr of Gwynedd. As you might have guessed earlier, there was no principle of primogeniture under the Carolingians. And while there was a sort of dynastic principle - the anointing of kings had been monopolised by the Carolingians for almost 150 years - a non-Carolingian king was not inconceivable. So the nobles and bishops of the West Frankish kingdom, figuring they needed an energetic warrior on the throne, gathered together and elected Odo, count of Paris, who had led the defence of the city of Paris during the Viking siege whilst Charles was away in Italy, as their king. At the same time, non-Carolingian kings were coming to power in Transjurane Burgundy (basically modern day Switzerland and the Franche Comte region of France) and Italy, and a non-Carolingian dynasty, the Bosonids, already ruled in Provence. The annalist of Fulda complained about "kinglets" and another contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prum, claimed that kings were being spewed from the guts of the old empire.

Odo seemed like a good choice on so many accounts. He was one of the most powerful officers in the kingdom and and major landowner - he was ex officio count of Paris, Etampes, Orleans, Blois, Touraine and Anjou (and those were just his most important ones) and lay abbot - part of the Carolingians' programme of monastic reform, was to appoint lay men as abbots to take care of estate management, political representation and military organisation while the monks got on with prayer and study - of seven monasteries, including Saint-Denis and Saint Martin of Tours, two of the oldest and most prestigious in the kingdom. He had also, like many ninth century Frankish noblemen, received a good education in the liberal arts (certainly grammar, rhetoric and logic - which would have involved the study of lots of Classical Roman texts) at Saint-Denis. The one thing that could be held against him was his background. Odo's father, Robert the Strong, had been a prominent government official and military commander under Charles the Bald, but nothing is known of his ancestry before then, beyond the realm of pure speculation - the whole theory linking Robert the Strong to Count Robert of Worms in c.800 strikes me as being rooted in essentially circular reasoning. I suspect, Odo's ancestors prior to his father were not noble, in the sense they didn't belong to the circle of prominent families who frequented the royal court - the reichsaristokratie (imperial nobility) as they're referred to in German scholarship. To my knowledge, Noble status defined by law did not emerge in Western Europe until the thirteenth century, and the Carolingians seem to have had a relatively open aristocracy, created and defined through service to the king and the state as well as landownership. Blood was largely insignificant (though family connections were certainly of no small importance to political success). Thereby, snobbery wasn't going to be too much of a problem, but above all Odo was not a Carolingian and that was going to come back to bite him.

From what little detail we have of his reign, Odo was a fairly successful ruler to begin with. He called the kingdom-wide royal ban - summons for all the free men in the realm to partake in military service for the Frankish state - against the Vikings and won some victories against them in Neustria (Normandy and Anjou area) and Aquitaine. But soon he received a knife to the back from Archbishop Fulk of Rheims. Fulk had resisted Robert's election in 888 but had been forced to yield. As soon as Odo started experiencing setbacks against the Vikings in Aquitaine in 893, Fulk made his move and anointed the not yet fourteen year old boy Charles the Simple, who was in his care, as king of West Francia. For the next four years, Fulk and Charles constantly harassed Odo, not managing to depose him but making his life very difficult. In 897 they came to an agreement - Odo would continue to reign as king until his death, but Charles would succeed him as king and Odo's brother Robert would succeed him in his offices (countships and lay abbacies) and family estates. Odo died the next year, leaving the pathway to the throne for Charles the Simple unobstructed at last.