The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  The division of the empire was a return to the norms of the sixth and seventh centuries, and was regarded as inevitable and indeed appropriate by nearly everyone; after all, Charles Martel and Pippin III had both divided their lands temporarily, and Charlemagne would have done so. It was also a return to the bickering and occasional warring of the decades around 600. Lothar’s northern heartland around Aachen looks the quietest, though this may be because the two major continuators of the Royal Frankish Annals, the Annals of Saint-Bertin and the Annals of Fulda, were written in Charles’s and Louis’s kingdoms respectively. Louis the German, too, seems to have been in full control of East Francia, at least after his bloody quelling of a peasants’ revolt, the Stellinga, in Saxony in 842. Louis spent his long reign (he died in 876) fighting on the eastern frontier, particularly against the Bohemians, and the increasingly powerful Moravian rulers Rastislav (846-70), who was captured and blinded by the Franks, and his successor Sviatopluk or Zwentibald (870-94): these princes had expanded their power into the political vacuum that followed the collapse of the Avars. Zwentibald, in particular, fought the Franks as an equal, and had considerable influence over eastern Bavarian aristocrats by the mid-880s. But the importance of the eastern frontier, and the traditional nature of the campaigns there, allowed Louis to sustain a military effectiveness focused on offensive war that had not been known since Charlemagne’s time. Hence, doubtless, the ease with which he faced down successive revolts by his three sons in 857-73. East Francia was harder to rule, on one level, for very little of it had been part of the Roman empire, so it lacked good communications or cities except in the far south and far west; Louis probably had little direct control in still-peripheral Saxony, and rarely went there. All the same, he ran placita there and did justice, like any Carolingian king, when he did go there, most notably in 852; and, although he did not issue capitularies, and seems to have had a simpler administration than his brothers, his bishops, headed by the influential archbishops of Mainz on the Rhine - a Roman city, and in a Carolingian royal heartland - behaved just like other Carolingian ecclesiastical communities, holding councils and making law. (Louis’s first appointment to Mainz was indeed the influential theologian and biblical commentator Hraban Maur, 847-56.) This, plus Louis’s armies, made the East Frankish kingdom a still-functioning heir of that of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.

  In Italy, too, Lothar’s son Louis II (840-75), who was in sole control of the kingdom (with the imperial title) by 850, operated without recorded difficulty, and seems to have been an effective ruler. He was certainly a practitioner of Carolingian reform, and as early as 850 enacted capitularies and conciliar legislation to combat abuses, the first of an Italian sequence that would only end in 898. He and his wife Angilberga (d. 891), an unusually influential queen, had a more hands-on control over government than most Carolingians; Louis was secure enough to promote Lombard aristocrats for the first time in half a century, alongside three or four major families of the Reichsaristokratie (including his wife’s kin, the ‘Supponids’). He was clearly the heir of kings like Liutprand, while also taking seriously his imperial title; in a letter to the Byzantine emperor, he claimed to represent the whole Carolingian dynasty. Louis II, uniquely among Carolingian rulers, could take the risk of a long unbroken period (866-72) campaigning abroad, against the Arabs who had taken Bari in southern Italy; he took Bari back but was then imprisoned by Prince Adelchis of Benevento (853-78) in 871, who had no reason to welcome Carolingian power stretching so far south. This was a humiliation for Louis, and he had to be re-crowned to counteract it - but he was still unopposed in the north of Italy. Here, too, then, the norms of Carolingian power were not yet under threat.

  Charles the Bald faced by far the greatest problems out of the Carolingians of this period. This, plus the extensive documentation for his reign, has meant that he is the best-studied later Carolingian, although he was also the least typical. For a start, his was the only kingdom in 843 with another claimant, Pippin the Younger, who contested Aquitaine rather effectively until 848 and then intermittently until his death in about 864. Secondly, he had to face the most systematic external attack, from Viking raiders. The Vikings in Francia and England were mainly from Denmark (Norwegian Vikings went mostly to Scotland and Ireland). They were standard war-bands of an early medieval type, on the scale of early Anglo-Saxon armies, although they were never as large as Frankish ones, even when they got bigger later in the century. They were private enterprises, in that they were not under the control of the kings of Denmark (at least, this is what the latter said when the Franks upbraided them, and it was plausible enough, given the limits on Danish royal strength: see Chapter 20). They were pagan, so were less inhibited than Christians about sacking churches, major wealth depositories, to the particular horror of ecclesiastical writers. And they were based on ships: this was the big difference from local Frankish border raiding, which was otherwise very similar, for it allowed the Vikings to hit and run, far up rivers into Francia, before any defence army arrived.

  Major Viking raids began in 834, with an attack on the Rhine port of Dorestad; ship-owners were also merchants, and knew Dorestad well - as well as also knowing that the Frankish political system was busy in 834. They attacked Dorestad and, more widely, Frisia after that as well, and as early as 841 Dorestad was given in benefice by Lothar to Harald, a Danish royal family-member, and then to his younger brother Rorik. Rorik controlled much of Frisia, and defended it for the Franks more faithfully than not, for most of the period 845-75. Almost certainly as a result, Vikings seldom came further up the Rhine to bother Lothar’s and Louis the German’s heartlands, except for big raids in 881-3. Charles the Bald, however, had to face regular attacks on his long coastline, and up the Seine, Loire and Garonne, without a break from 841. Charles could never get rid of them; they were a permanent wound in his side. Vikings soon over-wintered at river-mouths as well. Charles alternately fought them off and bought them off with tribute (the least popular but most effective response); twice at the end of his reign he actually organized a general tax to pay them. Most effectively of all, perhaps, he fortified bridges over the Seine in 862 and the Loire in 873, to block their path. The major Viking push for fifteen years after 865 was into England, which eased the pressure on Francia a little in Charles’s last years. But the Vikings never really went away.

  The aura of military failure, or at least crisis, thus hung over Charles the Bald, and this must be one of the main reasons why he had greater difficulties with his aristocracy than did his brothers and nephews. Charles’s anti-Lothar alliance with his brother Louis broke down in the 850s, and in 854 Louis the German’s son Louis the Younger went to Aquitaine to test out the seriousness of invitations to his father by Aquitanian aristocrats. It turned out to be weak then, but by 858 disaffection was much stronger (it was a bad period in terms of Vikings, and Pippin the Younger had reappeared in Aquitaine), and numerous magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, were prepared to invite Louis the German in. Charles still had support, not least from Hincmar of Reims and most of his other bishops, and Louis retreated; but the episode showed the uncertainties Charles had to face. The pro-Louis group, which included the powerful Robert ‘the Strong’, count of Anjou (d. 866), who was from a major Rhineland imperial aristocratic family, the ‘Rupertines’ or ‘Robertines’, gave in, and retained their honores. Charles did not have to face a revolt like this again, but he had to negotiate with critical aristocrats on other occasions too, such as when, at the end of his reign, he occupied Italy (and took the imperial title) after the death of the son-less Louis II in 875, while simultaneously attacking in 876 - and losing - against Louis the Younger (876-82), who had succeeded his father in most of East Francia. Charles was trying to assert himself as the dominant Carolingian, without securing his base. Hincmar was furious, and several of Charles’s magnates thought he was over-stretching himself. But Charles died in 877, and normal politics resumed.

  Charles did remain hegemonic over his a
ristocracy. He built up the power-bases of his most useful fideles, such as Robert of Anjou, at least before 858, or Bernard marquis of Gothia, a new name for Septimania, who was his mainstay of support in the far south after 865. In particular, he patronized Boso (d. 887), brother of Charles’s second wife Richildis, who was made chamberlain of his son Louis ‘the Stammerer’ in his new sub-kingdom of Aquitaine in 872, as well as count of Bourges and Vienne, and in 876 Charles’s viceroy in Italy and husband of Louis II’s only daughter, Ermingard. But he also removed honores from magnates at will, and moved them around; when Robert died in battle against the Vikings, his son Odo did not inherit Anjou, and lost others of Robert’s counties in 868 - he did not return to royal favour until 882, when he became count of Paris. Similarly, Bernard of Gothia, who rebelled in 878 against Louis the Stammerer (king of West Francia 877-9), was summarily stripped of his lands and offices, and never got them back. Charles was generous with land; he gave out far more estates in full property than did other Carolingians, not just benefices; but he took them back as well with some ease.

  Charles also threw himself into the complexities of Carolingian correctio and Carolingian ritual. He developed his palace of Compiègne as another Aachen, including its buildings; he created some original ceremonial, as when he hosted a month-long synod at Ponthion in June- July 876, after his imperial coronation, wearing Frankish costume at the start but Byzantine costume plus a crown at the end. Imperial echoes were already visible in the most substantial of his many capitularies, the 864 Edict of Pîtres, which draws substantially on the Theodosian Code (as well as, explicitly, on Ansegis). Charles was as concerned for administrative refinement as was his father; Pîtres, for example, also involved a coinage reform, which coin-hoards show to have been effectively implemented. His missi still ran as in Charlemagne’s day. And Charles had a court almost as full of intellectuals as Charlemagne’s, including Hincmar of Reims, who wrote much of his legislation and was always at hand for advice, wanted or not, as well as writing some of the longest political tracts of his generation, and twenty years of the Annals of Saint-Bertin. The core of Charles’s ruling was not undermined, for all his military difficulties; and his ambition as a reformer was more elaborate than any other Carolingian after 840. Even Charles the Bald, then, despite many problems, remained on top of his kingdom in most respects, in different ways from Louis the German and Louis II of Italy, but with a similar result. The Carolingian project was still in operation into the late 870s.

  But it did not last a decade more. In 887-8 the empire broke up into five kingdoms, with six or seven claimants, only one of whom was a male-line Carolingian. This was seen as an end even by contemporaries, as a takeover by reguli, ‘kinglets’, as the Annals of Fulda put it. Historians have understandably sought long-term explanations for it, mostly in the ‘rise’ and growing autonomy of major aristocratic families, for it was these who provided the new kings of 888, the ‘Robertine’ Odo of Paris in West Francia, the ‘Widonid’ Guy of Spoleto in West Francia and then Italy, Boso’s son Louis in Provence, the ‘Unruoching’ Berengar of Friuli in Italy, and the ‘Welf’ Rudolf, from Queen Judith’s family, in Burgundy. All these were however families very close to the Carolingians, linked by marriage in the last three cases (Louis and Berengar had Carolingian mothers). Only one of them, too, had any serious track record of disloyalty: Boso, who broke with the whole Carolingian tradition in 879 and declared himself king in the Rhone valley (he only lasted until 882 as king, for all the Carolingians combined against him). The others show no signs of seeking power on their own account until the 887-8 crisis itself, which forced them onto the centre stage.

  What destroyed Carolingian power was simply genealogy. There had always been too many Carolingians, given the presumption of political division the family had inherited from the Merovingian past. Rulers had developed methods of excluding minor branches from succession, either by force (as with Carloman I’s son Drogo, or Pippin of Italy’s son Bernard) or by agreement (as with Adalard and Wala, who were content to be major players in their cousin’s court, or Bernard of Italy’s son Pippin, count of Beauvais, who effectively turned into a regional aristocrat; his heirs were the central medieval counts of Champagne), or through a growing concern to exclude illegitimate children. Even then, there were still a large number of them; as late as 870 there were eight legitimate adult male Carolingians, all kings or ambitious to become kings. In 885, however, there was only one. None of Lothar’s sons had legitimate male heirs; nor did Louis the German’s; Charles the Bald’s son Louis had three, but two were dead by 884 and the third, Charles ‘the Simple’, born posthumously, was only eight in 887. One by one, as the Carolingians died in the 880s, Louis the German’s last surviving son Charles ‘the Fat’, king of Alemannia (876-87, emperor 881) inherited their kingdoms, until he reunited the whole empire in 884 for the first time since 840.

  Charles the Fat has had a bad press. This is and was linked to some over-pragmatic showings against the Vikings, as when Odo of Paris fought off a big siege in 885-6, but Charles paid them to go away; and is coloured above all by hindsight, for he was overthrown by his illegitimate nephew Arnulf in 887, a few weeks before his death in 888. Charles was more able than this implies. But everybody must have known that the world was likely to change, for Charles was ill, and himself had only an illegitimate son, Bernard. (Boso indeed must have seen it coming in 879: most of these genealogical problems were by then predictable.) Lothar II had spent most of his reign trying to legitimate his illegitimate son Hugh, and failing, as we shall see in the next chapter; Charles the Fat had no rivals, but even he could not make Bernard his legal heir. Hugh, who had visible royal ambitions, was caught by Charles and blinded in 885; this, and also Arnulf’s succession, means that Bernard could well have tried to succeed anyway (he did rebel against Arnulf, and was killed, in 891), but Charles did not change the rules fast enough to make illegitimate sons normal royal heirs. Instead, he tried in 887 to divorce his wife Richgard, as Lothar II had also tried, so that he could remarry and aim for legitimate sons; it was then that Arnulf, who had previously been kept away from central power on the Carinthian borderlands of eastern Bavaria, staged his coup and took the East Frankish throne. This coup made the decisions of the most powerful aristocrats of the other sections of the empire easier; Arnulf had some standing in West Francia, Burgundy and Italy, but his genealogical claims did not seem so strong to most political actors outside the eastern kingdom, and someone had to rule. When they did, they varied in their effectiveness; but they did not use most of the Carolingian political practices discussed in this chapter.

  More important than the ‘rise’ of an aristocracy was its growing regionalization. This, paradoxically, was a reflection of royal power. Kings could confiscate benefices and offices, honores, and aristocrats feared this. We saw this in Einhard’s letters in the 830s; Nithard in the 840s is still clearer, for the whole of 840-41 was a phoney war in which Lothar and Charles prowled around each other trying to tempt followers from each other by promises, threats and an appearance of future success, which would be convincing enough to persuade worried aristocrats to tolerate losing honores temporarily in order to gain more later. Louis the German’s failed move into Charles’s kingdom in 858 was similarly structured. Each king who did this hoped for a catalytic change that would bring all a rival’s followers running in, as at the Field of Lies in 833; this seldom happened (887 is the only parallel), so what happened instead was usually that the followers of one king lost honores in the lands of the other. They were more likely to keep the land they held in full property, as Matfrid of Orléans did in the case of his family land in northern Francia when he followed Lothar to Italy in 834, or as a group of aristocrats in East Francia did in 861 when Louis the German abruptly expelled them from power. This land could remain very widely spread, as in the case of the ‘Unruoching’ Everard marquis of Friuli in Italy (the father of Berengar, future king of Italy, 888-924), whose will of 863-4, made with his w
ife Gisela, disposes between his sons and daughters of a book collection and rich treasures, but also estates stretching from Italy up through Alemannia to what is now Belgium. Such wide spreads favoured support for a single political system, as has already been noted for the ‘Widonids’. But Everard and Gisela gave at least their younger sons more geographically restricted territories; they also included explicit provisions for what might happen if political tension made it necessary to divide this land up further. The family regionalized itself as a result; Berengar’s brother Rudolf (d. 892) spent his career, not in Italy, but in Artois and on the English Channel. Similarly, the ‘Welfs’, whose lands lay both in Alemannia and in Burgundy, had to choose between Charles and Louis in 858; it may possibly be that those who chose Charles kept some of their properties in East Francia, but henceforth their careers would be entirely restricted to Burgundy, and their history became totally separate from that of their brothers and cousins who stayed with Louis. The tensions between the Carolingians, that is to say, persuaded prudent imperial aristocrats that it was sensible to have both their honores and their properties in one kingdom, not widely scattered as they had been since Charlemagne’s time. As kingdoms became smaller, this would become still truer.