This post is a sequel of sorts to my previous post on the way the later Carolingians were remembered under the early Capetians. One of the key points there was that the Merovingian-Carolingian transition and the Carolingian-Capetian transition is the absence of serious doubts about Capetian legitimacy. The first four Capetians – Hugh Capet, Robert the Pious, Henry I, and Philip I – were, minus a few gripers (such as Fulk le Réchin of Anjou, whose wife ran off with Philip), generally treated as perfectly fine in legitimacy terms. They provoked little enthusiasm (except Robert, from some quarters), but also little opposition. The case of Archbishop Seguin of Sens is emblematic here: he was remembered in the Historia Francorum Senonensis as being an opponent of Hugh Capet; and we know from the letters of Gerbert of Aurillac that he was not one of Hugh’s supporters, but the way that expressed itself was that Seguin dragged his feet in coming to give the loyalty oath he eventually did give. That sort of slacktivisim is about as much hostility as the early Capetians tended to prompt. Why, then, was Capetian legitimacy so un-shaky from the very beginning?
A crucial difference is the emphatic full stop suffered by the Carolingian line of kings. When the Carolingians took over in 751, the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was a reigning adult who was thrown into a monastery in a coup, whereas the last Carolingian, Louis V, died in a horse accident and left the question of succession open because he had no sons and no brothers.
At this point it’s useful to draw what I think is an important distinction, which is that between ‘father-to-son succession’ and ‘dynastic succession’. Father-to-son is obvious; dynastic succession includes a wider range of relationships (such as uncles, nephews, cousins, and so on). The reason this distinction is important is that, while father-to-son succession is generally uncontroversial* dynastic succession in this period is just not that important. My view of who the Franks wanted to make kings is that they prefer, in order of significance: 1) an already-crowned son of the last king; 2) a son of the last king; 3) an already-crowned king; 4) the son of a king. There’s an enormous asterisk hovering over that, and that’s proximity: by the time your claims to kingship are being based on 4), and even on 3) if you’re far away enough (just ask Arnulf of Carinthia), then a man who has better connections to the kingdom’s nobility can succeed you quite happily unless you get outside backing. (In fact, I can’t off the top of my head think of anyone who claims a throne based purely on 4) and succeeds wholesale. Charles the Simple is probably the closest?)
The reason I bring this up is because the main challenger to Hugh Capet was Louis V’s uncle, Charles of Lotharingia, son of King Louis IV. Charles, though, ultimately didn’t make that much of a smash: he captured Rheims, Laon, and Soissons, which is not nothing; but he didn’t provoke a kingdom-wide uprising, or even really undermine the legitimacy of Hugh Capet’s regime, and I think that a major reason for that is that a dynastic claim to kingship was in itself not very strong.
That’s not to say that it was useless, and in fact I think it’s more important than it was after 888. A useful point of comparison are the events after the death of Otto III in 1002 in the Ottonians realm. There, the closest living male-line relative did end up as king, but the specifics are important. The succession of Henry II wasn’t a given, and it was far from clear that it would be him. Most of the other candidates were related to Otto, and several of them did make arguments that they had a right to the throne on the grounds of that kinship; but the definition of ‘royal kinsman’ was flexible (Henry II was not Otto’s closest relation), not every candidate was in fact a royal kinsman, and it is clear from even a cursory reading of the sources that even if ‘blood tie to Otto III’ was a reasonable argument to make, it was certainly not a trump card.
There is a flip side of the dynastic principle not being a trump card, and that’s that, with the exception of Richer, a lot of sources from the reigns of the early Capetians do in fact mention as a point in their favour that they are descended from royalty. This is true of people whose ideological viewpoints are otherwise really rather distinct: Helgaud of Fleury says that ‘the crown worn on [Robert the Pious’] head shows doubters that he came from a royal family back to his grandparents and their forefathers’; Adalbero of Laon that ‘[Robert’s] fathers were of old kings and emperors; you suckled the milk of an imperial mother…’; Abbo of Fleury describes Robert as ‘one who was born to royal ancestors’. To me this shows two things: first, that Robert the Pious really did win people’s enthusiasm in a way which Hugh Capet never managed (Abbo is writing during Hugh’s lifetime!) and in a way which reminds me a little bit of the contrast between Prince – erm, King – Charles and Prince William; and second, that there was a real sense that the Capetians were part of an extended royal family.
That royal family, the most prestigious and powerful of the era, was of course the Ottonians. Thanks to Hugh the Great’s marriage to Hedwig, sister of Otto the Great, Hugh Capet was cousin to Otto II and Otto III, and Robert was (naturally) only a degree further removed. He was, in fact, exactly as closely related to Otto III as Henry II was. The Capetians’ place as part of an Ottonian dynasty was part of the weft of politics in the latter part of the tenth century, and as a young person Hugh Capet had actually taken part in the kind of Ottonian showboating as seen in the 965 Cologne assembly. This was no mean factor in their prestige!
There’s an elephant in the room here, and that’s why, on Louis V’s death, Otto III didn’t become West Frankish king. It is possible that he could have found some support: Richer relays the story that Count Odo I of Blois-Chartres-Tours and Bishop Adalbero of Laon plotted to put him on the throne in the mid-990s, a story which I would love to believe but even if we take Richer seriously it’s an accusation delivered by Hugh Capet as part of a show trial. Nonetheless, an actual Ottonian candidacy for the West Frankish kingship was not a serious factor. There are three points as to why which are worth bringing up. The first is that, in 987, Otto III was quite a young child, something which always puts a big cross in the ‘Cons’ column. The second relates to our point about proximity: Otto II and Otto III had been relatively well-known to a segment of West Frankish nobles based near Lotharingia, but that’s not that many people. In addition – as Wolf has discussed in reverse in the case of 1002 – there seems, by the millennium, to be an increasing sense in the East and West Frankish kingdoms that the other group are not really part of their own political community. They were, if you like, ‘foreign’. (In the same way, English kings were never considered as rulers on the Continent.)
The third and final point deserves its own paragraph, and that’s the distinction between the factors which render someone plausible as a king and those which demand they be given a hearing. ‘Being the already crowned son of the last guy’ is the most straight-down-the-line possible version of the latter kind of factor: even a toddler, like Otto III was in 983, can derive a significant amount of legitimacy from it. It was this kind of claim which was needed to sustain a challenge against an already crowned king. ‘Being a member of a dynasty’, whilst of increasing importance, was still in the first category of factors and was just not that powerful. This, ultimately, is the significance of the Capetians’ royal descent: it did not give them a direct dynastic throne-right, but it did give their selection as king a burnish based on our point 4) above. Hugh and Robert might not have been born king’s sons, but they really were from a royal family!
*Not 100% of the time, as Charles Constantine of Vienne might testify, but, like, 98% of the time.
The Historian's Sketchpad 
Really interesting post that’s got me thinking about a lot of things that I never considered i.e., the Ottonians being potential candidates for the West Frankish throne in 987. I suppose that had Otto III been a bit older when Louis V bit the dust, he might have given the West Frankish kingdom a shot. After all, his ultimate goal was to revive the Roman Empire. Whether he would have been successful is of course another matter that very quickly goes into the realm of speculative fiction.
I’d generally agree that when we’re comparing 987 to 751, we’re not comparing like with like. In the case of 751, the Merovingian dynasty had had unbroken rule over the Frankish kingdom for more than 200 years, and any attempts to break their dynastic monopoly (Gundovald in 584 and Childebert the Adopted in 656) had ended in abject failure. Pepin’s coup d’etat in 751 really was a decisive change that required a massive propaganda campaign and for a rewriting of what constituted royal legitimacy. 987 was different because the Carolingian dynastic monopoly on power had already been broken between 877 and 923, and despite Lothar’s attempts to revive notions of Carolingian uniqueness the Capetians seemed royal enough to most people – after all, Hugh Capet was the grandson of two kings, and the nephew and grandnephew of two others, and in terms of actual political experience was immensely qualified for kingship. I think another thing is the possibility that much of the political community in West Francia may have been reluctant to support Charles of Lower Lotharingia because they wanted stability, or just didn’t want to get their hands dirty in another civil war.
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One interesting contrast with the Merovingian period, of course, is that all of their usurpers or rival kings still presented themselves as members of the Merovingian dynasty (Gundovald as an illegitimate son of Chlothar I, for example). Dynasty is important because, prior to Pippin’s usurpation, the only way to be considered a potential king of the Franks was to be a Merovingian (and genealogies even made the Carolingians descendants of Chlothar II).
You could say that Childebert the Adopted is the exception, but even adoption would have made him Merovingian enough. (Although actually I subscribe to the theory that he was Sigibert III’s son adopted by Grimoald rather than vice versa, and that the later historiographical tradition got muddled about what had happened.)
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Very good point. Obvious point of contrast with the Capetian kings there, who only really began to claim a dynastic connection with the Carolingians until very late – the thirteenth century really. And by that time it was basically to promote the spurious idea that there was only really one continuous royal bloodline going all the way back to Clovis which proved the special sanctity of the French kings. The Hohenstaufens had done the same in Germany and the Empire, claiming that all the western emperors were part of a continuous line going back to Augustus and ultimately to Aeneas.
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