Charlemagne's Successors and the Fragmentation of the Empire

Charlemagne’s Successors and the Fragmentation of the Empire

The Carolingian Empire of the Charlemagne survived his death in 814 by almost exactly a century. In that century it was partitioned, reunited, partitioned again, and finally overwhelmed by a combination of internal civil war and external invasion. The dynasty that had united western Christendom ended in the 880s and 980s as a regional power confined, in the east, to the Rhineland and, in the west, to the valley of the Oise. Yet the institutions and the cultural inheritance of the empire persisted, and the kingdoms that emerged from its carcass would shape the European Middle Ages for centuries.

Louis the Pious (814–840)

Charlemagne’s only surviving son, Louis, was about twenty-six when his father died and had been crowned emperor three months earlier, on 12 September 813, by his father in a ceremony at Aachen. Louis was the first Carolingian emperor to inherit the title in an orderly succession, and he was determined to rule in a more Christian and consultative style than his father. The portrait of Louis in contemporary sources — Einhard’s Vita Karoli, Thegan’s Gesta Hludowici, the Astronomer’s Vita Hludowici, the poetry of Walafrid Strabo and Ermoldus Nigellus — is of a deeply pious, conscientious ruler, with a taste for monastic life, who sought to govern in constant consultation with the bishops and magnates of his realm.

Louis’s first acts were the reverse of his father’s. He dismissed the palace guard, sent the women of the palace back to their families, and ordered the counts to be content with their lawful revenues. He took steps to correct the abuses of Charlemagne’s later years, particularly the harsh treatment of the Saxons and the over-mighty march counts. He convened a series of reforming councils that issued canons on the proper observance of the liturgy, the conduct of bishops, and the protection of the poor.

Yet Louis could not escape the central problem of every early medieval inheritance: the need to provide for multiple sons. The Divisio Imperii of 817, drawn up with the help of Benedict of Aniane, gave the imperial title and the bulk of the empire to Louis’s eldest surviving son Lothair, with the younger sons Pepin and Louis as sub-kings in Aquitaine and Bavaria respectively. The plan was undone by Louis’s second marriage to Judith of Bavaria in 819, by the birth of a fourth son Charles the Bald in 823, and by Louis’s repeated attempts to find a partition that satisfied all his children.

The result was a long civil war. The first crisis came in 830, when Lothair joined with the Italian rebels and the disaffected Frankish magnates to depose his father. Louis was restored, and the sons made peace, but the precedent had been set. The second crisis, in 833, was the famous Field of Lies, when Lothair and his brothers met their father near Colmar and persuaded the army to abandon him. Louis was deposed and forced to do public penance. The third crisis, in 838, was the revolt of Pepin II of Aquitaine, who invaded the imperial lands. Louis died on 20 June 840, at his palace of Ingelheim, while preparing to suppress the revolt.

The civil war that had convulsed Louis’s reign did not end with his death. The three surviving brothers — Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald — fought one another for two more years. The war ended only at the Battle of Fontenoy in June 841, when the army of Charles and Louis defeated Lothair in a bloody engagement in Burgundy. The Treaty of Verdun of August 843 finally settled the dispute.

The sons of Louis and the partition of the empire

The Treaty of Verdun divided the empire into three kingdoms: Lothair I received the middle kingdom, Louis the German the East, and Charles the Bald the West. The treaty was supposed to end the civil war, but it did not. Lothair, who had lost the battle of Fontenoy and the chance of holding the whole empire, spent the rest of his reign trying to recover the lost territory. He allied with the Vikings against his brothers; he invaded West Francia in 854; he tried to recover the East Frankish lands by diplomacy. None of it worked. Exhausted and ill, he abdicated in 855 and retired to the monastery of Prüm, where he died two days later.

His kingdom was divided among his three sons. Louis II received Italy and the imperial title. Lothair II received the northern part of the middle kingdom, which became known as Lotharingia. Charles received Provence. Charles died without heirs in 863, and his lands were divided between his brothers. Lothair II’s only legitimate child was a daughter, and the dispute over his marriage and his inheritance led to a long, painful conflict with his uncles. Lothair died in 869. The next year, Louis the German and Charles the Bald divided Lotharingia between them by the Treaty of Meerssen.

The East and West Frankish kingdoms continued under Carolingian rulers. Louis the German died in 876 and was succeeded by his sons Carloman, Louis the Younger, and Charles the Fat. Charles the Bald died in 877 on his way back from a failed Italian campaign, and was succeeded by his son Louis the Stammerer. Louis the Stammerer died in 879, and his sons Louis III and Carloman followed him to the throne in quick succession. Louis III died in 882, Carloman in 884.

Charles the Fat and the collapse of 887

The only adult male Carolingian still alive in 884 was Charles the Fat, Louis the German’s youngest son, who had inherited the East Frankish kingdom after the deaths of his brothers. Charles was crowned emperor by Pope John VIII in 881 and inherited the West Frankish kingdom on the death of Carloman in 884. For a brief moment in 884–885, all the lands of Charlemagne were once more under a single ruler.

The reunion did not last. Charles was a man of large ambitions and limited ability. He was also burdened with a mysterious illness, possibly epilepsy, that became worse as the 880s progressed. In 886, when the Vikings besieged Paris under their leader Sigfred, Charles marched to relieve the city, raised the siege by paying the Vikings a huge ransom of 700 livres of silver, and allowed them to sail on to ravage Burgundy. The capitulation earned Charles the contempt of his subjects. He was deposed at a diet at Tribur in November 887 and died in poverty in January 888.

The deposition of Charles the Fat is one of the most important political events of the early Middle Ages. For the first time in over a century, the empire did not pass to a Carolingian. The East Frankish magnates elected Arnulf of Carinthia, an illegitimate son of Carloman of Bavaria, who became king in 888 and emperor in 896. The West Frankish magnates elected Odo, count of Paris, who defended Paris against the Vikings in 885–886 and was the only Frankish ruler to have done so. The imperial title was vacant.

The last Carolingians and the rise of the new dynasties

The East Frankish kingdom continued under the last East Frankish Carolingians. Arnulf of Carinthia died in 899 and was succeeded by his son Louis the Child, who died in 911 at the age of eighteen without heirs. With Louis’s death the East Frankish line of the Carolingian dynasty came to an end. The magnates of the kingdom elected Conrad of Franconia, the first non-Carolingian East Frankish king, and after his death in 918, Henry the Fowler, the first Ottonian.

In the West, the Carolingian line continued in attenuated form. The last Carolingian king of West Francia was Louis V, who was crowned in 986 and died in 987 in a hunting accident. With his death the dynastic line in West Francia came to an end. The magnates elected Hugh Capet, duke of the Franks and count of Paris, who founded the Capetian dynasty that would rule France until 1792.

In Italy, the imperial title passed to a series of non-Carolingian rulers, including Guy III of Spoleto, Berengar I of Friuli, and finally the Saxon Otto I, who was crowned emperor in 962. The Holy Roman Empire, the institution that would in theory reunite Charlemagne’s realm, was born.

The Viking, Magyar, and Saracen attacks

The fragmentation of the empire cannot be understood without the simultaneous external pressure of the Viking, Magyar, and Saracen attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries. From the 830s onward, Scandinavian raiders began to attack the Carolingian realm in force. The great army of 845 sailed up the Seine and extracted a ransom of 7,000 pounds of silver from Charles the Bald. The siege of Paris of 885–886, the largest Viking assault of the century, was barely raised by Charles the Fat. In England, the Great Heathen Army conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia in the space of a single decade.

The Magyars, a steppe people from the Pontic region, swept into the Pannonian basin in the 890s and from there raided Bavaria, Saxony, Lombardy, and the Rhineland. The Magyar attacks reached as far west as the Meuse valley and as far south as the gates of Rome. The Magyars were not finally halted until Otto I’s great victory at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, after which they settled in the Hungarian plain and adopted Christianity.

The Saracens, finally, established raiding bases in Provence — at Fraxinetum, in the hills above modern Saint-Tropez — and from there raided deep into the Alps, the Rhône valley, and the passes of Piedmont. The Fraxinetum base was held for almost a century and was not finally destroyed until 972.

The combined effect of these three invasions was devastating. They exhausted the Carolingian treasuries, the imperial military levy, and the legitimacy of the dynasty. They also produced, as a side effect, the rise of new local powers: the counts, dukes, and margraves who held the frontier and became the nuclei of the principalities of the High Middle Ages.

The last flickering of the Carolingian inheritance

The Carolingian Empire did not disappear overnight. Even after 888, the Carolingian past remained a powerful political and cultural model. Charles the Simple, the son of Louis the Stammerer, ruled West Francia from 898 to 922 and tried, by the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, to settle the Viking problem by granting the Norman leader Rollo the territory that would become Normandy. His successors, Louis IV and Lothair, ruled the West Frankish kingdom as Carolingians until 987. The Ottonian emperors of the tenth century claimed the imperial title as direct heirs of the Carolingians, and the Ottonian court consciously imitated the Carolingian past.

The dynasty that gave its name to the dynasty of the Pepin the Short and Charlemagne was gone, but the empire it had built lived on, in pieces, in the political and cultural imagination of the Latin West. The French monarchy, the German monarchy, and the papacy all claimed the Carolingian inheritance, and all in different ways were shaped by it. The end of the Carolingian Empire was the end of one chapter of European history. It was also the beginning of the next.