When Did the Carolingian Empire Fall?

The Carolingian Empire did not fall in a single year. It fragmented over the course of the ninth century, and historians mark its end with three different dates: 887, when the last emperor who ruled the whole empire was deposed; 911, when the last East Frankish Carolingian king died without heirs; and 987, when the last West Frankish Carolingian king was succeeded by the Capetian dynasty. Each of these dates marks the end of a particular phase in the long collapse of the empire Charlemagne had built.

The first collapse: 840–843

The first great crisis of the empire came with the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Louis had tried to govern an empire that contained the seeds of three different kingdoms, and his repeated attempts to find a partition that satisfied all of his sons produced a long civil war. The crisis was settled by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided the empire into three kingdoms. The unity of the empire was broken, but the dynasty survived. The three kingdoms — Lotharingia, East Francia, and West Francia — were each ruled by a son or grandson of Louis the Pious, and the imperial title was held by Lothair I and his descendants in the middle kingdom.

The second collapse: 855–869

The middle kingdom, Lotharingia, was the first to fail. Lothair I abdicated in 855 and died two days later. His kingdom was divided among his three sons, and the part that went to his eldest, Louis II, included Italy and the imperial title. The northern part of the middle kingdom, Lotharingia proper, went to his second son, Lothair II. The youngest son, Charles, received Provence. Charles died without heirs in 863, and his lands were divided between his brothers. Lothair II, who had no legitimate sons, died in 869, and his kingdom was divided between his uncles, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, by the Treaty of Meerssen in 870. The middle kingdom had effectively ceased to exist.

The deposition of Charles the Fat, 887

The third, and most decisive, collapse came in 887. Charles the Fat, the last son of Louis the German, had inherited the East Frankish kingdom in 882, the West Frankish kingdom in 884, and the imperial title in 881. For a brief moment in 884, 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. When the Vikings besieged Paris in 885–886, Charles marched to relieve the city, paid 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 empire was dissolved.

The end of the East Frankish Carolingians, 911

The East Frankish kingdom continued under the last East Frankish Carolingians. Charles the Fat was succeeded by Arnulf of Carinthia, an illegitimate son of Carloman of Bavaria, who became king in 888 and emperor in 896. Arnulf was followed by his son Louis the Child, who became king in 900 at the age of six. Louis died in 911 at the age of eighteen without heirs. With his 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 of the Ottonian dynasty.

The end of the West Frankish Carolingians, 987

In the West Frankish kingdom, the Carolingian line continued in attenuated form. The last West Frankish Carolingian king of any consequence was Louis IV, who ruled from 936 to 954 and who tried, with the help of his formidable mother Gerberga, to defend the throne against the dukes of Normandy, the counts of Paris, and the rising power of the Capetians. His son, Lothair, ruled from 954 to 986 and maintained the royal title. His grandson, Louis V, was crowned in 986 and died in 987 in a hunting accident. With Louis V’s 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 the revolution of 1792.

The end of the imperial title

The imperial title was revived in 962, when the Saxon king Otto I, the great-grandson of Henry the Fowler, was crowned emperor by Pope John XII. Otto and his successors claimed the imperial title as direct heirs of the Carolingians, and the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation that they founded would last, in some form, until 1806. Yet the empire that Charlemagne had built was gone. The Holy Roman Empire was a new institution, based in Germany, and it had only an indirect relationship to the Carolingian past.

The causes of the collapse

The collapse of the Carolingian Empire was the result of three overlapping pressures: partition, civil war, and external invasion. Partition was the deepest structural cause. The Frankish custom of dividing the realm among all the sons of a deceased king, combined with the principle of partible inheritance, produced a political geography that was constantly being redrawn. Each new generation of rulers had to find a new partition, and each partition created new grievances. The system worked as long as the king was strong enough to enforce the partition and the brothers could be prevented from fighting. The system broke down when the king was weak or when there were too many sons to provide for.

Civil war was the result. The empire of Charlemagne was held together by the king’s personal authority, and when that authority was contested, the empire split. The civil wars of Louis the Pious’s reign, of the 870s, and of the 880s were the result of the system, and they weakened the dynasty and the institutions it had built.

External invasion was the final blow. The Viking raids of the ninth century extracted immense sums in tribute and exposed the weakness of the Frankish defense. The Magyar raids of the 890s and early 900s reached deep into the empire. The Saracen raids of the ninth and tenth centuries established a base at Fraxinetum that was not finally destroyed until 972. The combined effect of these three invasions was to exhaust the treasuries, the armies, and the legitimacy of the dynasty.

The legacy of the collapse

The collapse of the Carolingian Empire did not mean the end of the institutions it had built. The Carolingian minuscule, the corrected Bible, the Roman liturgy, the schools, the parish system, and the Benedictine reform of monasticism all survived. The counties, the marches, and the diocesan boundaries became the framework of the medieval kingdoms. The title of Roman Emperor passed to the Ottonians and from them to the Holy Roman Empire. The idea of a Christian emperor ruling a Christian people in defense of the Roman Church has shaped European political thought from the Middle Ages to the modern period.

The fall of the Carolingian Empire is, in this sense, less a death than a transformation. The empire that Charlemagne had built did not survive him. The institutions and the cultural inheritance he had created did, in fragments, in the political and cultural imagination of the Latin West.