The Empire that was established by Charlemagne had an enormous impact on the history and
culture of Western Europe.
It oversaw the greatest territorial expansion in Western Europe since the days of the Roman
Empire and promoted a period of cultural development known as the Carolingian Renaissance.
The splendour of the realm would fade away with the multiple Carolingian members who
succeeded Charlemagne.
In this video, we will look at the heirs of the Carolingian Empire, its complicated splintering
and how Europe developed following the end of the dynasty.
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Charles the Great, the conqueror of the Saxons and Lombards and the first western monarch
to be crowned Emperor after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, had intended in 806
to divide up his kingdom among his male children , as was custom for the Carolingian and Merovingian
dynasties.
Excluded from the division were the illegitimate children, including Charles’ controversial
first son Pepin, and his daughters, as the Salic law of the Franks did not allow them
to inherit land.
Following the death of Charlemagne in 814, the crown of the Frankish kingdom and the
Imperial title passed to his only surviving son, Louis the Pious.
To ease our understanding and lessen the confusion over the numerous family members, we are going
to use the nicknames with which they are usually known as today, even though they might be
anachronistic.
The new emperor soon decided to divide up his dominion, both to safeguard the empire
from future internal conflict among his sons in case of his death, and to help administer
the huge swaths of land.
In the ordinatio imperii of 817 preparations were made to divide up his lands: his eldest
son Lothair was proclaimed co-emperor and would be the suzerain over his family members,
while his other two sons Pepin of Aquitaine and Louis the German received Aquitaine and
Bavaria as Kings.
The division did not satisfy all: first of all a surviving nephew of Louis, Bernard,
had kept the title of King of Italy following the death of his father Pepin son of Charlemagne.
Worried that his position was threatened and unhappy with becoming a vassal of his cousin
Lothair, the king of Italy began to plot against the emperor but he was swiftly arrested with
his conspirators and was blinded.
The Carolingians were not as good at blinding deposed family members as the Byzantines and
Beregnar died from his wounds, leaving behind a newborn son who would live on and establish
a cadet branch in Vermandois.
The execution of a member of the Carolingian family, although involuntary, became a stain
on the reputation of Louis.
The Emperor had to undergo public penance for the death of his nephew, which made him
look weak in the eyes of the nobility.
Another problem that arose was the birth of a fourth son, Charles the Bald.
He was born in Louis’ second marriage and the Emperor wanted to leave him a domain to
rule over like he had with his elder sons.
This sparked a lot of frictions among the family members: the decade from 830 to 840
was marred by constant fighting between the father and his sons, with Louis being deposed
and then reinstated in 832.
Another threat that emerged were the Viking raids which began during Louis’ reign.
And would be a constant thorn in the side of the Carolingian rulers.
In 840 Louis died of sickness, leaving the Imperial title and the central part of his
realm to Lothair the First, the eastern part to Louis the German and the western part to
Charles the Bald.
Louis’ second son Pepin of Aquitaine had died in 838 and his sons were ousted for the
succession in Aquitaine, although the eldest of the Pepin the Second would continue to
claim the Kingdom for himself in the following decades.
Once ascended to the throne, Lothair the First attempted to claim the whole empire for himself
but his brothers banded together against him by swearing the Oath of Strasbourg and defeated
Lothair’s army at the Battle of Fontenoy.
Hostilities came to an end in the famous Treaty of Verdun of 843, which sanctioned the division
of the Carolingian empire into three pieces.
Lothair kept the Imperial title and was assigned the lands along the Rhine and Meuse rivers,
the heartland of the Carolingian territory, the Rhine Valley and Italy, creating a corridor
from modern day Netherlands to Provence.
Charles the Bald became king of the Western Franks, encompassing Neustria and Aquitaine
in modern France and the Spanish March, while Louis the German became king of the Eastern
Franks ruling over Saxony, Alemannia, Franconia and Bavaria.
The Treaty of Verdun has been viewed by historians as one of the most important events of European
history, as it gave birth to the polities that would develop into the modern states
of France and Germany, while the central state would become the battlegrounds for future
european conflicts.
The central part of the Empire, sometimes called Middle Francia, and the Imperial crown
thus passed to Lothair the First: the morphology of his realm made it difficult to defend,
stretched as it was from north to south and with many different cultures and people in
its borders.
He spent most of his reign defending it from Viking raids in the north and Saracen attacks
from the south of Italy, who had sacked Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome in the year 846.
He gave the task to rule and defend Italy to his eldest son, Louis the Second, who recaptured
Benevento from the Saracens,and for this was crowned co-emperor and King of Italy.
Lothair remained in the old Carolingian hearthlan around Aachen and ruled there until 855 when
he died.
In the Treaty of Prüm, his lands were once again divided up among his three surviving
sons: Louis the Second was confirmed King of Italy and inherited the Imperial crown,
Lothair the Second obtained the modern-day Low Countries, Lorraine and part of Burgundy,
while the youngest son Charles of Provance, still a kid, was given Provence and the southern
part of Burgundy.
Charles of Provence, who was around ten years old at the death of his father, came under
the regency of local nobles and he had to fend off the ambitions of Charles the Bald.
In 860 a treaty at Coblenz reaffirmed the arrangement among the brothers but three years
later Charles died and his realm was divided along the Rhone river by his brothers.
Lothair the Second, who would give the name to the region of Lorraine (or Lotharingia
in German), is mostly remembered for his struggles to divorce his wife Teutberga who had not
sired him children, so he could marry his mistress Waldrada who had given him children.
Lothair spent most of his resources trying to garner support from his family members
to have the marriage annulled , something they were not too keen to do hoping to inherit
the land of the heirless king.
In the year 869, while returning from Rome where the Pope had given his consent for the
annulment, he died of a fever.
His lands in Lotharingia were swiftly divided in the Treaty of Meerssen between his uncles,
Louis the German and Charles the Bald, declaring Lothair’s children illegitimate while his
brother Louis the Second did not have the support from the local nobles to overrule
the occupation.
Louis the Second ruled the Kingdom of Italy in some form from 842: he spent much of his
reign going to war against the Saracens, who had occupied Sicily, Bari and Taranto by this
time.
He hoped to expand outside of Italy, first by inheriting the crown of King of Provence
from his minor brother, but he was unsuccessful in retaining the legacy of his father in Lotaringia.
He thus decided instead to concentrate his efforts on unifying the rest of italy and
in 871 he managed to expel the Arabs from Bari and tried to establish his rule over
the smaller duchies of southern Italy.
He fell ill in 875 and died near Brescia without any male heir; he wanted to leave the Italian
kingdom to his cousin Carloman of Bavaria, but the King of the Western Franks Charles
the Bald invaded first and took Italy and Provance for himself.
The youngest of the three sons of Louis the Pious, Charles, nicknamed the Bald, inherited
the Kingdom of the Western Franks, which had been one of the main reasons of conflicts
with Louis the German and Lothair.
Charles spent the first years of his reign campaigning in Aquitaine, where his nephew
Pepin the Second had gathered the support of the local aquitanian nobility and viking
raiders, while rebellious Bretons regained their autonomy defeating Charles . Both the
unrest in aquitaine and the viking raids, who in 845 under the command of a certain
Ragnar managed to occupy Paris and forced the king to pay a ransom for the city, continued
to plague his reign up to the eight hundred sixties.
Threats did not only come from external entities, as he also quarrelled with his other family
members, such as his nephew Louis the Young who invaded to take over Aquitaine.
Charles also expanded his dominion: after attempting to take over Provence twice, he
took over half of the Kingdom of Lotharingia in 869 following the death of Lothair the
Second.
Charles the Bald’s brother Louis the German instead inherited the Eastern part of the
Kingdom of the Franks.
The region had been populated by various germanic tribes and polities such as the Bavarians,
Saxons, Alemanians and Franconians.
Louis was an effective ruler and managed to defend his lands against the neighbouring
Danes, Slavs and Hungarians, but he often quarreled with his youngest brother especially
once their realms bordered, and had to quell the insurrections of his sons: Carloman of
Bavaria, Louis the Young and Charles the Fat.
When the Emperor Louis the Second died in 875, it began a convoluted time in the Frankish
kingdom that would briefly resee it reunited.
Charles the Bald was the fastest one to cross the Alps and take over the Kingdom of Italy
with the support of the Pope, but was confronted by Carloman of Bavaria who had been designated
as the heir to the Kingdom and had the support of the greatest feudal lords of Italy.
The ensuring conflict saw Charles victorious, who was crowned emperor but was attacked and
defeated the following year on the Rhine by the Eastern Franks .
The following year, 876, Louis the German died and his kingdom was divided among his
sons as previously stipulated: Carloman received Bavaria, Louis the Young obtained Saxony,
Franconia and Eastern Lotharingia and the youngest Charles the Fat inherited Swabia,
Alemania and Alsace.
In October 877, Charles the Bald, the last son of Louis the Pious, also died leaving
his kingdom to his only son Louis the Stammerer.
Carloman of Bavaria had already invaded Italy a few months before and had been crowned Emperor
and King of Italy, but he soon fell ill.
The year 879 saw new developments: in the eastern half of the realm the ailing Carloman
gave the title of King of Italy and Emperor to his brother Charles the Fat, while his
second brother Louis the Young occupied Bavaria, ignoring the claims of Carloman’s bastard
child Arnulf of Carinthia.
In the west, Louis the Stammerer also died, leaving his kingdom to his two sons Carloman
the Second and Louis the Third, the first becoming king of Neustria and the latter King
of Aquitaine, while a third unborn son Charles the Simple would become king at a later date.
In this year we also find the first rebellion and declaration of independence of a non-carolingian
family member, when Bozo of Provence declared himself King of Provence.
In 880 the Treaty of Ribemont, the last among the Carolingians, was meant to seal the peace
among the feuding family branches and to defeat the Provencal usurper, but it latter didn’t
happen.
Meanwhile Lotharingia was unified under Louis the Young but then in 882 Louis the Young
and Louis the Third died without male descendants, with their realms being absorbed by their
respective brothers, while in 884 Carloman the Second also died, which meant that the
whole Carolingian realm was now controlled by Charles the Fat, unified for the first
time since 840.
Although the records of his failures are exaggerated, it is true that Charles the Fat still failed
to keep the enormous realm together.
It was simply too big to govern by himself and with the constant threat of Norman invasion,
such as the Siege of Paris of 886 which was lifted only after a heavy ransom.
The king, sick and unpopular, was deposed in 887 and died a few weeks later, by a council
of nobles at Tribur headed by his nephew Arnulf of Carinthia.
This marked the end of an era, as no longer would the empire ever again be unified.
The reason for the dissolution of the Carolingian power has been historically attributed to
the ineptitude of the numerous kings, and their infighting, which certainly had its
part.
The rise of the aristocracy has also been pointed as a reason, giving a clean and easy
explanation on how the power went from the centralized state to the periphery, though
some modern scholar argue that the powerful nobles who were the intermediary with the
lower nobility of a region were crucial for the emperors to keep their power.
However, when Charles the Fat was deposed only the illegitimate Arnulf and Charles the
Simple, still a child, were left as Carolingian candidates, and as Bozo of Provence had demonstrated,
it was possible for a non Caroligian to take over the Crown themself in the power vacuum,
just as they had with the Merovingian dynasty.
Also the constant viking raids, although not a direct reason for the fall of the Carolingians,
did weaken and stretch their forces on multiple fronts.
When Arnulf of Carinthia deposed his uncle, he became king of the Eastern Franks and of
Lotharingia, where he would reign until his death in 899.
He focused his efforts on defending against Norman attacks and campaigning in Italy.
Following his death he was succeeded by his son Louis the Child, who oversaw the beginning
of the Magyar raids.
When he died after 12 years of reign, the powerful dukes of the Kingdom decided to elect
one of them as king to confront the Hungarian threat, first Conrad of Franconia and later
Henry of Saxony, who began the Ottonian dynasty.
In other parts of the Empire, the nobles who had been the closest collaborators of Charles
the Fat and had Fluid network of patronage and allegiance within the aristocracy took
over in their respective regions as reguli, or petty kings.
In Western Frankia Odo of Paris was elected king and had some success against the Vikings,
while in Aquitaine Ranulf took power.
The Kingdom was plagued the following half a decade by a struggle for power among the
other great families of the kingdom, the Robertian and the Bosonid.
Charles the Simple inherited the crown after Odo and retook Lotharingia, but would be deposed
in 922.
The Caroligians returned to power in 936 and gave three more kings until 987 when Louis
the Fifth died and was finally succeeded by Hugh Capet, who founded the Capetian dynasty.
Lotharingia remained bound to the Eastern Kingdom of the Franks apart from a short period,
while in southeastern France two kingdoms emerged: the Kingdom of Provence and the kingdom
of Burgundy.
They would be united in marriage and be remembered as the Kingdom of Arles, which would be absorbed
into the Holy Roman Empire in the eleventh century.
Finally, Italy went through a period known as the Anarchy where local dukes and foreign
rulers fought over the Imperial Crown and the Kingdom, until 951 when Otto I of Saxony
invaded Italy and would later become Holy Roman Emperor, uniting the fate of Northern
Italy to the Empire.
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