Folcuin of Lobbes and the Mysterious Changing Paternity of Charles the Simple

The decade or so between 877 and 888 can be pretty confusing. There are a lot of kings, who die very quickly, and have the same names. Distinguishing between Louis the Younger, AKA Louis III, who ruled Lotharingia; and Louis III, no AKA, who ruled the same bit of Lotharingia in a slightly different way at exactly the same time, can be a bit of a pain in the arse. It’s also been a pain in the arse for a very long time. Around 975, Abbot Folcuin of Lobbes, in his Deeds of the Abbots of Lobbes, wrote down an account of these decades.

He described how, after the deaths of Lothar I and Louis the German and their sons, only Charles remained. He was blessed as emperor by ‘good pope John’, and made his son Carloman abbot of Lobbes. When his son Louis became king, Carloman was replaced by one Franco. Louis then died in the fourth year of his reign, leaving a two-year-old son Charles. In response to Charles’ youth, various Frankish magnates became kings.

In this account, Folcuin has evidently confused a number of figures: to start with, Emperor Charles is clearly Charles the Bald, but his assumption of the whole realm of the Franks is evidently derived from Charles the Fat. Louis as his son should be Louis the Stammerer, but the Louis who appointed Franco was Louis the Younger. The final set of events, those of 888, are transposed to the death of Louis the Stammer in what should be 879.

Even more confusingly, Folcuin wrote another work, the Deeds of the Abbey of Saint-Bertin, over a decade prior, in around 962. In this work, he gives a different version of the same events. This time, Charles dies in the Alps in 877 having been kicked out of Italy by Karlmann of Bavaria, and is succeeded by Louis. Louis then dies in 879, dividing the realm between his sons Louis and Carloman, who die in 881 and 884 respectively. Then Charles, king of the Swabians (i.e. Charles the Fat), son of Louis the German, gets the whole realm of the Franks, at least until he dies in the fourth year of his reign and is replaced by Odo, in lieu of Charles, son of Carloman. This account, besides being totally different, is also much more accurate. So my question becomes: why did Folcuin change his account?

There are three broad categories of potential motivation behind Folcuin’s decision here, I think. First, he could have come across what he considered to be more authoritative sources. Second, he could have adapted his story to what his audience believed to be true. Third, he could have deliberately written down information both he and his audience knew to be wrong for a specific authorial purpose.

Let’s start with the third and work backwards. Folcuin, we know, has no problems putting in false information for a didactic purpose. In the Saint-Bertin Gesta, for example, he has a lengthy story of how King Louis IV ambushed and lynched Count Heribert II of Vermandois on a hunting trip as revenge for the imprisonment of his father. However, Heribert’s daughter Adele was married to Count Arnulf the Great of Flanders; both are major characters in his narrative and Folcuin knew both of them personally. He must have been fully aware that Heribert died peacefully in his bed; but he decided instead to write a story that was both more exciting and showed God’s punishment of traitors. Equally for our purposes, Irene van Renswoude has argued that Folcuin deliberately mixes up his chronology here to present the period between c. 850 and the accession of Otto the Great as a confused and disordered time before the restoration of peace and concord by the Ottonians. I am not really convinced by this argument: Otto, and by extension the restoration of order to the kingdom in general and Lobbes in particular, shows up in chapter 22. Chapter 23 is then an excerpt from the Vita Brunonis about how Archbishop Bruno of Cologne was compelled by a serious conspiracy to depose his own candidate for the bishopric of Liège. It is true we then have the final Ottonian victory over the Hungarians in 955 in chapter 25; but that is then followed by internal dissent and the worst lay spoilation of the whole work in chapter 26 and more conspiracies – against Folcuin personally – in chapter 28. For Folcuin, the Ottonian period was not substantially more peaceful or ordered than the Carolingian epoch. Moreover, such an argument wouldn’t really explain the different genealogical perspective in Folcuin’s later work. He already knew what he knew in the Saint-Bertin Gesta, and if he really wanted to portray the later ninth century as a time of confusion, it’s hard to see how a radical simplification of the Carolingian family tree would help rather than hinder.

Equally, our second option, ‘he changed his story in line with what the monks of Lobbes believed’, doesn’t really stack up. If we compare Folcuin’s work to the Annales Laubienses (written somewhat later than Folcuin but on the basis of earlier sources) we can see that the Annales are able to portray the Carolingians’ dynastic vicissitudes fairly correctly: unlike Folcuin, for instance, the Annales have Charles the Bald being outlived by his nephews, and they distinguish between the various Louis’ in a way Folcuin doesn’t. On the other hand, the Annales place Franco’s abbacy as beginning in 887, under Charles the Fat. They are almost certainly wrong here, and Folcuin is more correct in putting it under a King Louis (even if Louis the Stammerer rather than Louis the Younger) – but if this view was widespread at Lobbes and Folcuin was pandering to his audience, why not include this detail as well?

This leaves us with the question of sources. We have a good idea of what Folcuin’s sources were for the relevant bit of the Saint-Bertin Gesta, and they were actually pretty darn good. For the death of Charles the Bald, he appears to have used Hincmar of Rheims’ Annals of Saint-Bertin. For what followed, he used a text printed by Pertz in the MGH under the tile of the Francorum regum historia. This is one of those short texts which have been constructed somewhat artificially by nineteenth-century editors, but in this case we are lucky to possess a manuscript, Saint-Omer MS 764, which contains the version of the text which Folcuin copies directly.        

This leaves Charles’ death and Odo’s succession. Here, the main clue is the filiation of Charles the Simple as a son and not a brother of Carloman II. There is one other more-or-less contemporary historian who gives similar details to Folcuin, and that’s Richer. Richer also shares some other details (notably the story of Count Fulbert) with Folcuin, and given that he did not have direct access to Folcuin and that they don’t share anything else in common, I’m thinking that they are working off a shared body of oral tradition.

(This is also interesting, because what it shows is that Folcuin evidently had access neither to Witger, a genealogist working (probably) at Saint-Bertin around this time, nor to his sources.)

By contrast, although identifying new any sources he might have had access to for this period in Lobbes is very difficult, I am pretty confident that one of them must have been this genealogy from late tenth-century Compiègne (or something very similar to it) which Folcuin’s description of Charles blessed by ‘good pope John’ paraphrases closely. This is interesting. We know, because Folcuin tells us, that he was on speaking terms with the highest echelons of the West Frankish aristocracy. He has a lengthy story about visiting Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims and consulting Flodoard’s Historia Remensis ecclesiae. More specifically, Folcuin was, I think, an ally of the West Frankish court – he probably wrote an important royal diploma for Saint-Bertin in 962, and his appointment as abbot of Lobbes becomes a lot more explicable if we assume that King Lothar was involved, as he was the highest-profile, and probably the only, person with connections both to Folcuin and to Bishop Heraclius of Liège, who appointed him. (Plus, at around the same time, another cleric with connections to Lothar got appointed to a Western Lotharingian prelacy.)  

It is therefore reasonable to assume that Folcuin could have had access to this text even before a comparison of the two side-by-side makes it clear that he almost certainly did. What this means, then, is that Folcuin is basing his presentation of the later ninth-century Carolingians on something that was about as close to the ‘official line’ of the Carolingian family c. 975 as we can reconstruct. A golden age under Emperor Charles and Good Pope John failed when Louis the Stammerer died leaving a very young Charles the Simple as heir. Non-West Frankish Carolingians have no place in this story, which leaves the Western branch as the sole heir of the Carolingian legacy; and non-Carolingian kings too are presented as not really kings (Folcuin calls them reges interregnantes). There are other implications of this, that I might unpack down the line in a post I’ve already got planned about historical memory and source preservation. For now, though, it lets us give a reasonable answer to why Folcuin changed his portrayal of the later ninth-century Carolingians: he got new information from his patrons at the Carolingian court, and that was as authoritative as any chronicler could want.