Source Translation: The Tenth-Century Genealogy of the Kings of the Franks

At the end of last year, I looked at the way that the tenth-century monk Folcuin apparently changed his views on how the later Carolingians were all related. I argued there that part of the reason was that, between writing his history of the abbots of Saint-Bertin and his history of the abbots of Lobbes, he had got hold of something which appeared to be West Frankish royal propaganda from the court of King Lothar. The closest analogy to what Folcuin seems to have had is a genealogical text, which circulated in a number of different forms, sometimes together with other genealogies of the Frankish kings and sometimes on its own. It’s yet another of those which have been printed in a slightly artificial version by nineteenth-century editors; but I have translated it as found in the MGH and, thanks to the efforts of twenty-first century digitisers, if you want to find out about its manuscript contexts from the comfort of your own home you can chase up Waitz’s references and see for yourself:

Genealogia regum Francorum

Carloman was mayor of the palace in Austrofrancia under Theudebert [II, r. 595-612), brother of Theuderic [II, r. 595/612-613]. He begat Pippin [the Elder], whom King Chlothar [II, r. 584/613-623/629] sent to govern Austrofrancia with his son Dagobert [I, r. 623/629-634/639] when he had obtained sole rule over the three kingdoms, that is: Burgundy, over which Theuderic had ruled, and Austrofrancia, over which Theudebert had ruled; and Neustria, over which he had ruled.

Pippin begat Grimoald, who was mayor of the palace in Austrofrancia [r. 643-657] under Sigebert [III, r. 633-656] son of Dagobert. His sisters were St Gertrude [✝659] and Begga [✝693].

So, Ansegis son of St Arnulf took Begga to wife. From her, he begat Duke Pippin the Elder [Pippin of Herstal, r. 680-714], who took King Theuderic [III, r. 673, 675/679-691], son of Clovis [II, r. 639-657] brother of Sigebert, in the fighting at Tetry; and he was mayor of the palace of the three kingdoms under him, in the Year of the Incarnation of the Lord 688.

He, although he was married to Plectrude, from whom he begat Grimoald, took in addition another wife, from home he begat Duke Charles the Elder [Charles Martel, r. 718-741]; and he assumed the leadership for 27 years.

The son Charles, having overcome Chilperic II [r. 715-721] and Ragamfred [r. 715-718], begat King Pippin [the Short, r. 751-768] and Carloman who was later a monk.

King Pippin begat Carloman [r. 768-771] and Charle[magne, r. 768-814], first king then emperor.

Emperor Charles begat Charles [the Younger, ✝811] and Pippin, king of Italy [✝810], and Louis, king of Aquitaine [Louis the Pious, r. 814-840], who was emperor after him.

Emperor Louis begat Emperor Lothar [I, r. 840-855], later made a monk at Prüm; and King Pippin of Aquitaine [Pippin I, ✝ 838] and King Louis of the Noricans [Louis the German, r. 840-876] from Ermintrude; and Charles the Bald [r. 840-877], later emperor, from Judith. Three of them, Lothar, Louis and Charles, and their nephew Pippin [II of Aquitaine, ✝ after 864] son of Pippin their brother, fought a battle at Fontenoy in the district of Autunois.

So, Emperor Lothar, first of the four brothers, begat Emperor Louis [II of Italy, r. 855-875] and Lothar [II, r. 855-869], who was excommunicated for Waldrada’s sake and ended this line of descent.

Pippin, king of Aquitaine, the next of the four brothers, begat Pippin, whom his uncle Charles tonsured in the monastery of Saint-Médard; and so this line of descent ended.

Louis, king of the Noricans, third of the four brothers, begat Charles [the Fat, r. 876-887], Louis [the Younger, r. 876-882], and Karlmann [of Bavaria, r. 876-880]. This Karlmann begat Arnulf [of Carinthia, r. 887-899]; Arnulf, Zwentibald [r. 895-900] and Louis [the Child, r. 899-911]. And this this line of descent perished.

Charles, fourth of the four brothers, outlived them all and obtained the empire, and was ordained by good pope John [VIII, r. 872-882]. He begat Louis [the Stammerer, r. 877-879], who rests at Compiègne. Louis begat Louis [III, r. 879-882] and Carloman [II, r. 879-884] and Charles [the Simple, r. 893/898-923], whom Heribert [II of Vermandois] later fettered. Charles begat Louis [IV, r. 936-954], who crossed the sea. Louis begat King Lothar [r. 954-986] and his brother Charles [of Lotharingia].

One of the manuscripts containing this text, Karlsruhe Cod. Aug. perg. 146 (source), which I think is from eleventh-century Reichenau – a long way for this information to travel but one which fits the pattern of places in Alemannia being surprisingly sympathetic to the West Frankish Carolingians…

Your first question is probably, ‘Fraser, why are you so sure that this is coming from the circles around Lothar?’ One reason is that the structure of the genealogy and its concerns are dead ringers for those of Lothar’s mature reign; but that’s a bit of a circular argument, so I want instead to point you at a key phrase in the final paragraph there: ‘Good Pope John’. John VIII had a crucial place in Compiègne’s memory of its own history: by the end of the eleventh century, diplomas of King Philip I were describing how John consecrated it alongside seventy-two other bishops, and this positive memory of him appears to have been largely unknown in other institutions. Along with the note that Louis the Stammerer was buried there – as of Lothar’s reign, the only Carolingian who had been – the case for a Compiègne attribution is pretty convincing. As we’ll see on Charter A Week in a few weeks, the intellectual resources of Compiègne were exploited by Lothar in legitimising his rule, and this is another case of that: like the Courte Histoire, this is a story about the Carolingians, not about the abbey of Saint-Corneille.  

Going back to Lothar’s preoccupations now that we have a way out of our circular argument, there’s two things that I find interesting here. The first is right at the beginning, where it mentions how the very early Carolingians were mayors of the palace in Austrofrancia, i.e. Austrasia. The Austrasian heartlands of the Carolingians had, by the tenth century, split into a western bit (Soissons, Rheims, Laon, that sort of area) which were still the heartlands of the tenth-century Carolingians, and an eastern bit, which was basically Lotharingia. Lothar was particularly interested in acquiring Lotharingia, and pointing back to his family’s very ancient claim to the territory would have contributed to his strategic aims. The second, and relatedly, is the part where it says that the whole of the Frankish imperium ultimately came to Charles the Bald. Obviously, when Lothar was king the title of emperor was held by his uncle Otto the Great and then his younger cousin Otto II. However, as his kingship matured Lothar imitated the Ottonians not only generally (as when he replaced his royal seal with one drawing on the design of that of Otto the Great) but also specifically in terms of empire – there’s a notable trend in his diplomas for his scribes to draw on models from the time of Louis the Pious and keep imperium-terminology rather than replacing it with regnum-terminology (as his predecessors did), and in fact there are some diplomas of Lothar where he is entitled augustus. This ideological interest of Lothar’s, then, is pretty easy to document, evidently aimed at competing with the Ottonians, and reflected in this text.

Ultimately, the language of imperium is somewhat peripheral to the main argument of this text: that because every other branch of the Carolingians died out, the West Frankish Carolingians are the heirs to the entire Carolingian legacy. Phrases like illa successio deperiit (‘this line of descent perished’) is if anything more charged than my translation makes it: there is no-one to succeed to these lines other than Charles the Bald and, through him, Lothar. This places Lothar rightly in charge of everything: Aquitaine, Austrofrancia, the imperium, and the Noricans (i.e., the East Franks). It’s a simple, but powerful, propaganda message.

It was also surprisingly widespread. The bones of this view of history can be found all over tenth-century sources, from the Aquitanian Miracles of St Genulf to the Life of St Waldebert by Abbot Adso of Montier-en-Der – a man of no little learning! And, of course, Folcuin of Lobbes with whom we started the post. Folcuin also points us to something interesting about this spread: as confusing as the genealogy of the later Carolingians can be, at least some of these authors had access to competing traditions. In Folcuin’s case, we know those traditions were both quite specific and more accurate; in Adso’s case (per Goullet, probably an early redaction of the Deeds of the Bishops of Toul) he at least knew that Zwentibald was after Charles the Bald. Granted, Adso also puts Louis the Pious after Charles the Bald; but my point is that it wasn’t just that the West Frankish court was producing historical material with an eye to contemporary political interests, it’s that it was at least a little influential! The short- and long-term incentives to forget the later Carolingians obscures this, but these fragments hint that there was, however little it survived, a royal view of the past that was promoted by the tenth-century court.  

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.

The Emperor and the Elephant: aka Shameless Self-Promotion

The Chronicle of Alfonso III tells of a battle that took place in 859 at Albelda in northeastern Spain. Here King Ordoño I of Asturias (r. 850-869) defeated the Muslim border lord Musa b. Musa, a man so powerful that according to the Chronicle he named himself ‘the third king of Spain.’ I first encountered this passage as an undergrad at the University of York in the summer of 2011. I was working on my dissertation, which was about the vikings in the Iberian Peninsula. This had drawn my attention to Musa, who played a prominent role in fighting Scandinavian raiders when they arrived in al-Andalus, and of whose wider career I wanted to get a better sense. But what caught me when I read about the battle of Albelda was the account of the aftermath, as the Asturians plundered Musa’s baggage train. There they found ‘gifts, which Charles, king of the Franks, had sent’. The question of why a Muslim border lord should have been the recipient of gifts from Charles the Bald (r. 840-877) fascinated me and I decided I needed to find out the answer.

A journey started for me that day twelve years ago, one that will end when my book, The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne comes out with Princeton University Press in a little under two weeks’ time on 11 July (American readers will have to wait until 26 September). In that book you’ll find out why Musa was campaigning with Carolingian presents, along with a lot of other things, like why the Prophet Muhammad only sent good-looking diplomats, how Charlemagne (r. 769-814) accidentally started a revolution in North Africa and how to use architecture as a method of assassination, as well as sundry musings on the significance of giant ants for historical causation. There may even be an elephant. (There will definitely be an elephant).

I love this cover. Please judge this book by its cover.

(If any or all of that sounds tempting to you, my book is available for pre-order for the low, low price of £35.00/$39.95. You can also read the first chapter for free at the link.)

This is not quite the end of my work on the Carolingians and the Islamic world. I currently have three works-in-progress in one form or another that relate to the subject. But the moment when I transition from someone who is writing a book about Carolingian diplomacy with the Islamic world to someone who has written one seems as good a place to mark an ending as any. And while most of me is simply appalled at the fact that almost every event in my life since the summer of 2011 have been shaped by my encounter with Musa b. Musa’s baggage train, it occurs to me that now is a chance to talk about why I wrote this book, and what I hope to achieve by doing so.

The first thing I want to communicate in this book is that Carolingian monarchs talked to all sorts of different Muslim rulers. Multiple generations of ʿAbbasid caliphs and Carolingian royals sent and received ambassadors who travelled the often-dangerous routes between Francia and Mesopotamia, chancing themselves against disease, storms and pirates along the way. The Umayyads of al-Andalus and the Carolingians were the two greatest powers of western Europe, and a merry cast of calculating warlords, vengeful Frankish counts and messianic prophets made a living in the complicated and shifting diplomatic space that lay in between them. Charlemagne kept close tabs on affairs in northern Africa, receiving visitors from the courts of the Maghrib and attempting to spread his influence there. Further, it should surprise us when we find places where such contacts were not made, as in southern Italy, and we should try to find an explanation for these cases.

The second point is that these connections mattered. Harun al-Rashid (r.786-809) gave Charlemagne expensive and hard to replace gifts. Charlemagne risked the lives of trusted and important agents in his communication with the Caliph. Both parties sank major resources into diplomatic contact with each other because they were important. This significance was even greater in the Iberian Peninsula. Córdoba and Aachen were dangerous to each other in ways that none of their other neighbours were. Their Great Game over the Pyrenees could easily draw blood. Both Umayyads and Carolingians paid close attention to rebels and dissidents within each other’s courts and were quick to befriend the powerful border lords on their frontier. In the century after 778, no Frankish or Andalusi leader could make a decision without a serious consideration of how it would affect relations between their two powers.

The importance of these relationships has not always been appreciated by specialists in the Carolingian period. It most certainly has not been appreciated by those who work on the Islamic world. The extent to which the Franks loomed in the apocalyptic imaginations of people in eighth-century Egypt suggests that being able to do business with them was a very big deal in the Caliphate. The emirs of Córdoba knew the Carolingians still better, and studied them deep into the tenth century, long after they were an appreciable danger. The Franks mattered, and a political history of the early medieval Islamic west that doesn’t include them has failed as much as a comparable account of the Carolingians would fail in the absence of the Islamic world.

But I also wanted to make a broader point about the importance of foreign relations in the early medieval world. The three largest political entities covered in this book, the ʿAbbasid Caliphate, the Carolingian empire and the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba, have a tendency to be analysed from their centres, with their fortunes determined by internal factors. The last major study of Carolingian diplomacy in general that I’m aware of is that of Ganshof in 1964. Approaching these polities from their foreign relations allows us to think about the way their development was shaped by changing pressures from the outside. It also brings different regions to the fore. Spaces like Septimania or the Upper March which can appear peripheral are central to my book.

I don’t want to present myself as a lone voice in the wilderness. Many others have worked on the subject of Carolingian relations with the Islamic world before. What I’ve tried to do is write something that builds on a wider range of sources to ask more questions. The most obvious way this manifested itself was through paying more attention to Arabic material. The history of Carolingian dealings with the Islamic world has been written on the basis of Latin texts because they almost always contain the earliest descriptions of this diplomacy. But I found Arabic sources immensely helpful, even when they contained no direct reference to the Carolingians. This was because they allowed me to build up a wider sense of context for the world in which caliphs and emirs operated and the constraints under which they were acting. I could avoid errors like assuming that Harun al-Rashid spent most of his time in Baghdad (he hated the place), had a lot of elephants (low single digits at most), and ruled a stable empire (so many rebellions, like so many rebellions, you wouldn’t believe how many rebellions, the French are sending an exploratory committee to take notes on the number of rebellions).

But this approach wasn’t confined to the Islamic world. I also applied it to the Carolingians as well. The overall idea was to build up a fuller and more rounded picture of this diplomacy. It seemed to me that too many accounts of this diplomacy treated it in isolation. Trying to analyse the gap between Harun al-Rashid’s last embassy to Charlemagne in 806 and that of his son al-Maʿmun (r. 813-833) in 831 without taking into account the civil war that raged within the Caliphate from 811 to 830 struck me as a mistake. So did examining the changing connections between Córdoba and the Umayyad-Carolingian borderlands without thinking about developments among the Gascons.

Going further, I wanted to think about the practicalities of this diplomacy. Perhaps the chapter I’m most proud of is the one where I tried to work out the mechanics of envoys, travel, gifts and diplomatic receptions that made any of this communication possible. Going hand and hand with these realities was the world of ideas. What did people in different parts of the Frankish and Islamic worlds think about diplomacy with each other? How did those ideas shape the significance of their interactions? In asking these questions, I was trying to move beyond the taciturn and often bland statements of the sources, using them instead as a starting point to explore a wider and more colourful world.

Have I succeeded? Only the readers will be able to say (although I hope this little blurb has tempted you to join their ranks). Many of the virtues of this book come from the efforts of others: the wonderful team at Princeton University Press; mentors and friends in multiple countries; and multiple universities and funding bodies that gave me the time and space to work. Their support, counsel and long-suffering patience in the face of endless anecdotes about whatever exotic animal I was interested in that day made this book what it is. The only things I can own entirely are the faults.

The end of a journey like this is a terrifying moment, when the line which guided your footsteps over the past decade comes to an end, and a new and trackless plain opens up ahead. But the book also acts as an aide-mémoire. Going through the proofs was a journey through time and space, and nowhere more so than when I came across the name Musa b. Musa, and found myself a nineteen-year-old in York again. And if you want to know why he had gifts from Charles the Bald in his baggage train, you’ll just have to read my book.

Men in the Middle: Evrebert

One group of people I’ve always been interested in are local elites – the sort of people who are definitely still aristocrats, and who are powerful in their own domains, but don’t necessarily have the huge, transregional interests (or even visible presences) of their greater contemporaries. The ‘mayor of Chesham’ types, if you will. However, my main source base is not really good enough to tell me about these people in much detail – I don’t work on the huge and early East Frankish collections or eastern Brittany, and otherwise it’s just not that granular. When I was casting around for postdoctoral projects I wanted to do something on central medieval southern Burgundy to use the Langres/Mâcon/Autun charter material to cast some light on ideological competition between exactly these sorts of figures, but nobody bit… (Let me know if you’re interested and have a few thousand quid to spare!)

Anyway, today I want to talk about one happy exception to the rule, a man who shows up in just enough evidence (four pieces!) to get a sense of who he was and what he was about. So let me introduce you to Evrebert, who flourished in the north-east of Charles the Bald’s kingdom, what would later become southern Flanders, in the latter half of the ninth century. Evrebert, insofar as he has a reputation, doesn’t have a great one, largely because one of our main sources for his times, the Annals of Saint-Vaast, ended up on the other side of a local political dispute in the 890s. But before that, we can see Evrebert operating as a minor figure in the court of Charles the Bald. He first appears as a vassus dominicus at Charles’ court in 861, in a famous diploma in which Charles judged that the peasants of Mitry, an estate of Saint-Denis, owed service to the abbey; Evrebert was one of the people making the judgement at the king’s court at Compiègne. He was clearly trusted by the king: a few years later, in 866 (according to a reference in a twelfth-century cartulary), he acted as a royal nuntio at Saint-Vaast in order to oversee a survey of the abbey’s property. This was a more pointed issue than it sounds. Saint-Vaast had only just been given to Charles the Bald by Lothar II, so assessing the value of his new acquisition was a matter of some importance. Here, the fact that we don’t really know much about Evrebert’s background becomes somewhat frustrating. He would go on to have a long and close relationship with Saint-Vaast, and it would be quite important to know whether this developed out of the missions he undertook at royal behest, or whether Charles ordered him on the missions because he already had the ties… By analogy, he would seem to be a local (the other two royal representatives were the prior of Saint-Vaast and a count from the region), but we can’t really tell. Evrebert then disappears from our sources for over two decades, but we know he was still active and important: he was rewarded with lands, almost certainly in the region around Bapaume, by Carloman II. This region was party central for viking attacks in the 880s, so it may well be that Evrebert played an important part in leading local defence. Either way, he was clearly a figure of some importance in the region.

The abbey of Saint-Vaast as it is today (source).

All this came to play in 892. In January of that year, Abbot Rodolf of Saint-Vaast died. The scramble for his lands and offices began almost immediately. The most vocal contender was Baldwin the Bald, the count of Flanders. Baldwin approached King Odo, asking for the abbeys of Saint-Vaast and Saint-Bertin. Baldwin was, let’s say, a controversial figure. At Saint-Bertin, he definitely didn’t have the local support he needed to back up his request:  the monks sent an emissary to the king to try and prevent his takeover by any means necessary, and succeeded in that. At Saint-Vaast, however, the situation was different. There appear to have been two factions of locals. Odo – and apparently the Saint-Vaast annalist – supported the claims of Count Egfrid of Artois to succeed Rodolf as abbot. Evrebert, however, favoured Baldwin, and prevailed upon a majority of locals to let him in to the monastery’s castle. Baldwin’s demeanour was conciliatory: he sent messengers to Odo asking for ex post facto legitimation of his possession. This didn’t work. Odo tried to attack Baldwin, although the attack failed. The fighting between the two dragged on. Yet Evrebert was no inveterate rebel: in summer 893, he issued a charter for Saint-Vaast dated by the reign of the ‘most glorious king Odo’. This charter is actually the last we see of Evrebert. He had two sons, Roland and Landuin, who are not otherwise known to the historical record. In 896, Odo launched another siege of Saint-Vaast, which had remained under Baldwin’s control, and a deal was struck. By this point, Evrebert may well have been dead.

The sources for Evrebert’s career aren’t everything I would like. Crucially, we have no real sense of Evrebert’s connections to Baldwin. Virtually all of our sources other than the Annals of Saint-Vaast stress his connections to royalty, but he was evidently a close political ally of Baldwin, enough to turn Saint-Vaast over to him. Exactly what he got out of the association is unclear. A patron in his local context, perhaps, much as we expect kingship to work; but in that case why not go directly to the king? In Odo’s case, admittedly, his strong Francian background (yes, north-east – he was a newcomer to Neustria in 886 and all his background points to Francia) meant he had lots of local enemies, and perhaps Evrebert was already one of them… What is more significant, though, is what Baldwin got out of Evrebert. Like Charles the Bald before him, powerful people needed men on the ground to get things done. This isn’t a new or original point, but the case of Evrebert shows how this worked in practice. Evrebert’s ties to a major monastic institution provided a crucial mechanism for controlling it, whether gently as in 866 or dramatically as in 892. He’s unusually visible in our sources, but we have to imagine hundreds and thousands of men like him across the kingdom.

For me the big question – and it is, sort of, answerable, but not in the detail I’d like – then becomes how he compares to other local elites. The first comparison that springs to mind is actually with someone like Adalmar, advocate of Saint-Martin. Here, it is easier to articulate how Adalmar stands out from Evrebert, via his participation in a calcified, crystallised Neustrian hierarchy; by contrast, Evrebert’s power seems much less defined. Further research would help here. After all, given the importance of these people to wider power structures, the differences in how they related to these wider structures have an obvious and crucial relevance to our broader understandings of Late Carolingian politics.

Charles the Bald and the Golden Idol

One of the best things about working on relations between the Carolingians and Muslim Spain is that it offers an unusual opportunity to get an external perspective of the Franks. The Carolingian empire produced a vast amount of written material and we are usually dependent on that to get a grasp on the story. Al-Andalus, however, had its own tradition of writing history – albeit one with many complications that we’ll discuss later in this post. That means we occasionally get to see the Carolingians from the outside, in ways that tell us a lot about both the Franks and the people observing them.

Such an exercise is not without its challenges. A case in point is the story told by the Andalusi historian Ibn Hayyan (d.1075) of the death of Charles the Bald (r.840-877), known to him as Qarluh ibn Ludhriq. Ibn Hayyan writes that:

He is the one who produced an image of the Messiah, the son of Mary – God’s blessings upon them both – according to what he believed to be true about the latter’s qualities. He created his image from 300 raṭl of pure gold, adorning it with rubies and emeralds, seating it on a throne encased with the most precious adornments. All the inhabitants of his kingdom bowed before it. Then he sent it to the master of the golden church so that he may safeguard it for him. When he returned to his castle, God struck him with a headache that stayed and did not stop until he emitted his last breath.

             (trans. by König, p.194)

There are a lot of reasons to be dubious of this story. Ibn Hayyan wrote a long way from Francia, almost two centuries after Charles’ death. His reference to ‘the master of the golden church’ doesn’t inspire much confidence either. Most suspicious of all is the moral underpinning the narrative. Muslim writers of the time were prone to describing Christians as polytheistic idol-worshippers and their rulers as tyrants forcibly driving their subjects away from good religion. Ibn Hayyan’s account of an impious monarch, bedazzled by his own wealth, who was punished by God for setting up a golden idol, hits all of these beats perfectly.

It’s therefore somewhat surprising to consider how much of this story is basically accurate. We know from contemporary sources that Charles travelled to Italy in 877 to meet Pope John VIII (r.872-882). Upon taking his leave of John, the Annals of St-Bertin inform us that Charles gave the Pope:

an image of the Saviour fixed to the cross: it was made out of a large amount of gold and adorned with precious stones, and Charles now sent it to St Peter the Apostle.

Charles’ health was not good and, on his journey back he fell sick with a fever, before dying in the Alps on the 6th October. There are some discrepancies in the two accounts. Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (d.882), who wrote the Annals of St-Bertin at this time, attributed Charles’ sickness to poison inexplicably administered by his Jewish physician, part of a running theme of antisemitism throughout the annals. Ibn Hayyan’s description of the image of Jesus doesn’t precisely match that of Hincmar, and his mention of a throne may be a garbled misunderstanding based on the throne Charles had given John two years earlier. Nonetheless, we have our monarch, our master of the golden church and our Messiah made of gold and precious stones.

Charles the Bald performs obeisance to Christ atop an impressively shiny gold cross, in this two-page illustration from Charles’ private prayerbook, Schatzkammer of the Munich Residenz, ResMü. Schk0004-WL, fol. 38v–39r.

This is interesting in a number of ways. It raises the question of where Ibn Hayyan was getting all this from. The Andalusi historian’s description of what Charles’ gift looked like is inaccurate, making it unlikely that he got the story from a traveller who had visited Rome and seen the cross and the throne. Instead, my suspicion is that this ultimately derives from records collected by Charles’ contemporary, the Umayyad Emir Muhammad I (r.852-886). Ibn Hayyan’s history is dependent on the tenth-century chronicle put together by the al-Razi family (father and son), who were court historians to the Umayyad Caliphs. They got their material from the archives in Córdoba. (The al-Razi history otherwise survives abbreviated in an early fourteenth-century Portuguese version, which in turn is only preserved in a garbled fifteenth-century Spanish translation, because we wouldn’t want to make things too easy for a scholar.)

There’s reasonable evidence that ninth-century Emirs kept tabs on Frankish politics. The Carolingians were their most powerful and aggressive neighbours, who had to be carefully managed. Raiding Frankish territory could provide plunder and political legitimacy, but was a dangerous sport that required good intelligence. A nice example can be found in 793, when several Frankish annals observe that Emir Hisham I timed his attack on the Spanish March to when he knew Charlemagne would be busy fighting the Avars in central Europe. Other expeditions took place when a Carolingian had recently died, or during civil wars. This suggests that Córdoba was reasonably well-informed about Carolingian military and political affairs.

The story of the golden idol takes us one step further. Charles’ movements and health were undoubtedly of interest for calculations about war and peace. That said, the frontier had been largely quiet since the diplomatic exchanges that culminated in the celebrated giving of camels in 864, of which I may have spoken about once or twice. The discussion of the presents Charles gave to the Pope goes beyond pragmatic observations of a potential foe. This account suggests that Córdoba was interested in gathering and preserving information about Carolingian rulers more generally.

Also of interest is the overarching narrative Ibn Hayyan presents. As mentioned above, it contains standard tropes of the tyranny of non-Muslim rulers and their tendencies toward idolatry. As such it could have been constructed by any of the Muslim links in the chain of transmission, most obviously the al-Razi family. But the death of Charles the Bald was not without controversy in Frankish circles. Hincmar of Rheims, who had fallen out with Charles, offers a particularly gruesome account of the emperor’s death of poison ‘in a wretched little hut.’ His reeking body had to be transported in a barrel. Later that year Hincmar circulated an account of a vision that one Bernold had of Charles in hell, his flesh devoured by worms, his one mission in his afterlife to beg someone to tell Hincmar that he was right in every way. (It’s humble and sensitive details like this that really bolster Hincmar’s case for the highly competitive ‘Biggest Tool of the Ninth Century’ Award.)

Charles was not accused of idolatry in these accounts, although in previous decades the propriety of depictions of Christ on the cross had been a subject of fierce debate, particularly during the reign of Charles’ father, Louis the Pious (r.814-840). Jonas of Orleans dedicated a defence of the making of such images to Charles in 842, shortly after the latter came to power. This seems to represent the last embers of the controversy, which then vanishes. Instead, Charles was portrayed by Hincmar as overproud, unwise and unwilling to listen to good advice (that is to say, Hincmar’s advice). 

That said, I’m intrigued by the way that narratives of Charles suffering an unpleasant end because of divine wrath circulated in Francia immediately after his death. I wonder if in Ibn Hayyan’s story, we can hear an echo of some these controversies, transmuted over the centuries and multiple transmissions into a shape that made more sense in an Islamic view of history and God’s agency. If this account derives from the mood from those Frankish sources, it suggests that the Umayyads were not just gathering raw information, but also engaging with Frankish metanarratives as well. This would have fascinating implications for how interested they were in their northern neighbours and how capable they were of picking up on the anxieties and tensions that beset the Carolingian world.

More broadly, this depiction is a helpful demonstration of the way in which people outside the Frankish world could view events within the Carolingian empire and interpret them in light of their own religious and political beliefs. The Franks did not own a monopoly in telling their own story, even the material they generated was often influential in shaping interpretations of events beyond their borders.

In Memory of Dealings Past: The Treaty of St-Quentin (1 March 857)

The Carolingian world after the death of Lothar I in 855, with the kingdom of Charles the Bald in brown, Lothar II in orange, Charles of Provence in purple, Louis II in red and Louis the German in blue.

Early medieval treaties sometimes seem scarcely worth the parchment they were written on. Despite the solemnity of the language used and the severity of the oaths sworn, they were frequently broken, and sometimes rather quickly at that (see here the Perpetual Peace of 532 between Rome and Iran, which lasted all of eight years, or the Fifty-Year Peace of 562, which managed a slightly more respectable ten years). This is notoriously the case of the treaties between the warring Carolingians of the middle of the ninth century, some of which I have been translating for this blog. But while the shelf-life of a treaty from the 850s sometimes resembled that of a mayfly, that did not mean that they were forgotten or irrelevant for subsequent negotiations. Rather, they formed part of the shared context by which future diplomacy could be interpreted. Not only could the terms of past agreements be referred to and repeated again, but treaties from years gone by were preserved and reread in order to be useful for defining the political landscape to come. That takes us to today’s translation, which is of the Treaty of St-Quentin of 857, made between Charles the Bald and Lothar II.

Karoli II et Hlotarii II conventus apud Sanctum Quintinum, in MGH Capit. II, no. 268, pp. 293-5.

The proclamation of Charles and his nephew Lothar at Saint-Quentin in March in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 857.

Charles’ Proclamation.

1.     We want you to know about the meeting which we held. After God called our father from this world, I have always received such advice from my beloved brother Louis as it was necessary for me and I sought from him and befit him to give; and by his encouragement and intervention it came to pass, thanks be to God, there was such unanimity between me and my brother Lothar [I] of good memory, just as should have been amongst brothers. And on account of such causes for complaint as lay between us, we found with our common followers that it was necessary that an assurance be made between us in accordance with God’s will concerning our common progress and assistance, and the salvation of our sons and kingdom and of our followers, in such a manner as we knew well from Our common followers who were present; and in his lifetime he preserved this towards us, and thanks be to God, we preserved it towards him; and by God’s help, as far as we know and we can, we seek to preserve towards his sons (our nephews), and they seek to do this towards us.

2.     After his death, as you have heard, partly because of my infirmity, partly because of the coming of the pagans, and because of the other things which occurred in our kingdom, until now there has not been an opportune point for me and my most beloved nephew to talk together and demonstrate to each another our present wishes that each of us keeps towards the other in our hearts.

3.     However, a suitable point emerged, because my dearest nephew talked with my most beloved brother Louis and found in him such agreement and council as was necessary for the one and befitting for the other to show him; which is fully pleasing to me. And now, when he talked to me, he told me that in regard to the assurances which I made with his father, my brother of good memory, and my reception of him into my protection, he wanted to persevere with that reception and that he wished, with the Lord’s aid, to observe entirely the assurance which his father, my brother, made with me.

4.     And we found with our common followers, that in order to address such needful matters as you know and see happening in this kingdom, we should confirm in turn, just as we have done, that we must safeguard and aid each other in turn for the honour of the holy church of God, and the common progress and salvation of our faithful, and to secure our kingdom against whosoever is necessary for us, just as an uncle should rightly seek to save and help his nephew and a nephew his uncle.

5.     And our followers who were present and gave this advice to us told us that they were prepared to assist us, with the help of the Lord, in all things, so that we each might be able to respect this assurance. And for this reason we wish to hear your consent and wishes from you, if this seems good to you, and if henceforth you wish to offer us help in order that we can observe this with God’s help and yours.

Lothar’s Proclamation.

Just as my uncle tells you, inasmuch as God has bestowed to the knowledge and power, and I wish to preserve that assurance he made with my father, by which he received me under his protection, and which my father made with him, I wish to firmly observe, with God’s help, that which I have made with him.

A further proclamation of King Charles.

We want you to know that on account of these robberies and plundering which have increased in our kingdom, partly because the pagans have come upon us, partly because of certain incidents which have happened in our kingdom, we have summoned and assembled a synod of bishops and a number of our faithful men, so that throughout our kingdom both bishops and our missi and our counts should hold assemblies in each diocese and county, and every man who ought to attend the assembly and dwells in these counties, should attend this assembly without exception or apology. And let the bishops demonstrate to all how grievous this sin is, and what kind of penitence it requires, and what kind of damnation one will gain unless penance does occur. And Our missi shall lay out our capitularies of the law and those of our ancestors on this matter to everyone, and banish so great a suffering. And let all know that whoever presumes to carry out such acts thereafter will receive canonical and royal punishment, as both our bishops and our missi will report more fully at that time.

A further announcement of Lothar

1.     Know also that we have decided that when  any criminal comes from one of our kingdoms to another, the bishop or missus or count from whose ministry they have fled in order that they might not give just compensation  or receive an appropriate punishment, should let the missi into whose missaticum in another realm they had fled know, and they should distrain him in such a manner that he should return to where he has committed the evil either to give compensation or to face punishment.

2.     And you may know that, as God [word missing: ‘has conceded’ or similar] through his mercy and through the goodness of my uncles, and through the help of my father and my followers, I have succeeded my father in the kingdom; thus, I wish, with the help of God and the counsel of my uncles and your help to endure in all goodness and in observation of those chapters which my father agreed and confirmed with his brothers, my uncles, at Meerssen concerning the will of God and the honour of the holy church and the stability of the kingdom and the salvation of the holy church and the followers of the kingdom.

Charles’ Third Announcement

May Almighty God grant us that we can earn your fidelity and your help, which you have always demonstrated towards us, along with every baron, just as our ancestors deserved in goodness from your ancestors, and we wish to merit together from you with all kindness.

Those of you who read previous treaty translations here and here will remember that one of the motivations driving the diplomatic activity was Emperor Lothar I’s desire to secure the succession of his sons after his death. That when the long-awaited event happened on 29^th September 855 it didn’t immediately cause an all-out war probably had relatively little to do with the treaties Lothar had made with Charles the Bald. As Charles observed in the Treaty of St-Quentin (Charles.1.2, Charles.2), it had been a busy few years. Pippin II disputed Charles’ rule of Aquitaine, while disease and Vikings appear to have been ubiquitous in the West Frankish kingdom. Louis the German spent much of these years battling Moravians, Sorbs and Bohemians on his eastern frontier. This limited Charles and Louis’ capacity to intervene in affairs. The nobles of Lothar I’s Frankish territories also seem to have upheld the old emperor’s succession plan. Lothar II, who inherited the territory that would be known as Lotharingia, was prevented from tonsuring his younger brother, Charles, who became King of Provence. Their older brother, Emperor Louis II, was unhappy to only be ruling Italy but had to lump it.

Ruling a small but immensely rich and politically significant kingdom sandwiched between two larger ones left Lothar II vulnerable. He began his reign aligned with Louis the German, being crowned in Frankfurt in his uncle’s presence. In February 857 Lothar travelled to Koblenz to have another meeting with Louis. But by then Lothar was probably already contemplating a change of direction, and that is what the treaty we’re interested in today represents. On 1 March Lothar agreed to an alliance with Charles the Bald at St-Quentin. Although none of the terms of the treaty are directed against Louis the German, they represent a shift of alignment, one which the East Frankish king responded to by coming to a parallel arrangement with his namesake nephew Louis II. For his part, Charles could do with all the goodwill and help he could get, particularly given recent East Frankish invasions.

In the treaty, both Charles and Lothar consciously hark back to the recent diplomatic past. Charles begins with an idealised summary of said past, referring to the treaty between him and his brothers at Meerssen in 851, presenting an image of cooperation and amity in the years that followed that bares only the vaguest resemblance to reality (Charles.1.1). While he alludes to Lothar II’s dealings with Louis, it’s as part of a necessary desire for concord (Charles.1.2) rather than out of shared interests. Lothar also mentions Meerssen (Lothar.2.2), expressing his commitment to its spirit, but he also makes repeated references to Charles’ recent agreements with Lothar’s father (Lothar.1, Lothar.2.2). The effect is to suggest that rather than switching between uncles for short term political gain, Lothar II was actually inheriting a long-standing affinity. These past relations solidified and stabilised what might otherwise be a very uncertain agreement.

The text also echoes past treaties. Lothar’s emphasis on criminals fleeing to another kingdom (Lothar.2.1) closely resembles his father’s concerns in the Treaty of Valenciennes of 853, as does Charles’ discussion of his domestic agenda. The result is to paint a general picture of inter-Carolingian harmony and good feelings over the past six years as well as a specific image of a particularly close alliance between Charles and Lothar I. One way in which this treaty is very different from that of Valenciennes is the palpable sense of crisis in Charles’ sections of the treaty. Vikings were clearly a major problem for him, one that demanded a great moral and spiritual response as well as a martial one, with much penitence and the restoration of law throughout the kingdom.

The treaty seems to have been reasonably successful. Lothar and Charles remained on good terms over the next couple of years. Lothar fended off the blandishments of Louis the German, failing to show up to a meeting with him in May 858 because of his alliance with Charles. In August 858, Lothar participated in Charles’ failed siege of a Viking army on the island of Oissel in the Seine. The relationship was not without its wobbles. Following Louis’ invasion of the West Frankish kingdom that same August, Lothar met with Louis at Attigny and they came to an agreement. Lothar was being pragmatic here. Forced to retreat to Burgundy, Charles looked utterly defeated at this point. The moment Charles recovered, Lothar renewed their alliance in February 859 and from there until the end of the war with Louis in June 860 they worked closely together. Lothar and Charles of Provence attended a synod hosted by Charles the Bald in June 859, bringing bishops and abbots from their kingdoms with them to join the deliberations.

The Treaty of St-Quentin was signed out of necessity. There was no sentimentality behind it and in 860 the relationship between Charles and Lothar broke down for good. Nonetheless, the memory of past agreements, particularly those between Lothar’s father and Charles, provided a context in which the treaty could be understood and presented to the assembled great and good of the Carolingian world. In doing so it demonstrates to us the way in which treaties were preserved, reread and reused in new contexts in the early medieval world.

The Ellwangen Relics Casket and Royal Family Feuds (Louis the Stammerer i)

Sometimes, something can be moved right from the bottom of the agenda to the top purely through serendipity. This happened to me recently when my wife came to visit me in Germany. We went to the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart, a museum I happen to really like and have visited on several occasions before. This time, though, I saw something I’d never noticed before:

The Ellwangen Reliquienskästchen, s. ix ex, photo by author

This is the Ellwangen Relic Casket, and the label says that the three figures on it are the Carolingian emperor Charles the Bald, his son Louis the Stammerer, and his second wife, Louis’ stepmother, Richildis. I had never heard of this thing before, and the portrayal of all three of them on a high-end luxury item got me to restart something I had been playing with and put aside a few months earlier: a rehabilitation of Louis the Stammerer’s role in his father’s late reign. 

Traditionally, Louis the Stammerer is seen as a peculiarly rubbish king. He is not well-served by the simple but unfortunate fact that his reign only lasted for eighteen months, after which he finally succumbed to an illness which had originally struck him down in the summer of 878. However, before that he had a twenty-year career during his father’s reign. Historians almost universally consider Louis’ role under Charles the Bald as that of a useless irritant who failed at everything he tried and whose relationship with his father was unusually toxic even by the low standards of Carolingian men. Louis first emerges on to the scene being crowned King of Neustria in 856, but he was driven out of the region a couple of years later. He returned in the early 860s, and in 862 was part of a conspiracy to rebel between Charles the Bald’s children, which led to his leading an armed revolt with Breton help for a couple of years before he submitted to Charles in the mid-860s. Charles then refused to confirm Louis in his royal title, before sending him in 867 to become king of Aquitaine in company with officials from Charles’ own palace. In 872, Charles sent his new favourite and brother-in-law Boso of Provence into Aquitaine as Louis’ chamberlain, seemingly ending what little role Louis actually played in governing the region. In 875, Louis was sent to Lotharingia to defend it against Louis the German’s invasion, which ended up steamrollering the area. By 877, when Charles set out on his final journey into Italy, he issued a capitulary at Quierzy refusing to confirm Louis as his sole heir and assigning him a series of minders to monitor his behaviour whilst Charles was away. Charles’ ultimate aim, it is argued, was to displace Louis as heir through having more sons with Richildis, and some historians have seen Richildis’ hand in the emperor’s hostility to his son. Ultimately, though, there is general consensus that in the face of Louis’ ineptness Charles refused to allow his son power, responsibility, or respect. 

I don’t intend to go over Louis’ entire career here. (I will in passing note that Louis was about ten years old when made king of Neustria in 856, so whatever went wrong there it’s unlikely to have been his fault*.) What I’d like to focus on for this post is that last decade, the 870s, and specifically Louis the German’s invasion of the West Frankish kingdom in 875. For context, in 875 Emperor Louis II of Italy had died, prompting an instant battle for possession of Italy between Charles the Bald and Louis the German and his sons. Whilst Louis’ son Karlmann got sent into Italy, Louis himself launched a speedily assembled invasion of the West, hoping to force Charles to return north of the Alps and perhaps hoping to take over some more of his kingdom’s west. Here, whilst it is true that Louis the Stammerer didn’t try and fight his uncle in Lotharingia, I’d like to argue that what he did instead was a more sensible and ultimately successful strategy. The first thing to note here is that Louis the German was a very successful and experienced military leader and the East Frankish army was much more battle-hardened than its West Frankish equivalent. In this context, actually trying to fight Louis the German in a pitched battle would have been very stupid. The defensive strategy adopted instead was to focus on strategy, logistics, and politics. The greatest threat posed by Louis the German – which we see too in his invasion of 858 – was his capacity to win over West Frankish magnates. His greatest weakness was the fact that his army had been assembled in such haste. Louis’ supply lines were short. West Frankish defence therefore focussed on ravaging the area where Louis was based, and on reinforcing the loyalty of border magnates. Both of these things we know about largely thanks to Hincmar of Rheims, who strongly disapproved of both. Hincmar’s bias, though, is very palpable, and there’s no reason to take his opinion seriously. Stripped of his commentary, what we can actually see happening is a strengthening of the political loyalties of eastern West Frankish magnates which meant that (unlike in 858) there was no mass defection in favour of Louis; and the constant attrition of his supply base ultimately forced him to retreat after only a few weeks. 

Yet there is more. Louis the Stammerer played a major role in opposing Louis the German, but he didn’t do it alone. Leading the defence alongside him, probably as the senior partner, was his stepmother Richildis. Carlrichard Brühl, referring to Charles’ perceived disdain for Louis as his heir, said it doesn’t take much imagination to imagine Richildis’ role in trying to disinherit her stepson. That’s literally true, but one would hope historians would apply a bit more imagination before basing their analysis on tropes from the Brothers Grimm. In fact, their actions during the events of 875 suggests that Louis and Richildis were effective co-operators and political allies.

This is where the Ellwangen Casket comes in. We have to admit right away that the identification of the three figures on the casket is not entirely certain. The argument was made by Percy Schramm. He noted that the scholar who originally described the casket, Fritz Vollbach, identified it as a product of the West Frankish ‘court school’ of ornamentation in the 870s. Schramm then argued that a) it was nothing originally to do with the abbey of Ellwangen (and indeed we still don’t really know how it got there) and b) probably wasn’t intended to house relics, because there’s no dedication to any saint on it. He then argued that the place of honour of the female figure made it likely that this person was the recipient of the casket. Furthermore, Schramm argued, we have more portraits of Charles the Bald than any of his contemporary kings, so surely one of them must by Charles making the woman Richildis and the other king likely Louis the Stammerer. I think Schramm’s argument could be strengthened here, actually – if it’s from the West Frankish court in the 870s, this makes it overwhelmingly likely Charles is pictured on it, something Schramm implies but doesn’t actually state explicitly. Anyway, that’s the argument for the identification of these figures, and it’s not universally accepted. I read one article making a very lengthy case that these three figures are supposed to represent the holy Trinity as part of an overall iconographic scheme based on the theology of the Irish monk Eriugena, an article I think mostly shows how much ingenuity can be used to read theological arguments into a golden box, but which nonetheless advises us to take a note of caution before accepting Schramm’s conclusions uncritically.

Nonetheless, if Schramm is right, and I think he probably is, then I’d be more inclined to see Richildis as the patron of the casket than its recipient. I’d also probably date it to around 875. (It can only be from 870-877 anyway, because that’s the dates for Richildis’ and Charles’ marriage.) The two men on the casket are dressed in Byzantine-style imperial regalia, making it likely it was produced in the context of Charles’ imperial ambitions and the conquest of Italy. If so, then the placement of Richildis next to Louis becomes very important. That the three figures are shown together is a public and material statement of their alliance. If Richildis is the patron, moreover, then the inclusion of Louis gains particular significance because she didn’t have to have him portrayed on there – a husband/wife pairing would be quite sufficient. It indicates that Richildis wanted her alliance with Louis specifically noted – perhaps because of their successful defence of the kingdom from Louis the German. In 875, an alliance between Richildis and Louis the Stammerer was not just empty words – it came off the back of a fierce fight to defend their kingdom and their own conjoined authority. Thus, it becomes a beautiful illustration of Louis’ effectiveness in constructing familial alliances in the context of effectively managing delegated responsibilities. 

This isn’t all I could say about Louis. The reason I wanted to write this blog post is because I’m currently working on an article about this and the blog format is one which forces me to summarise my argumentation, in turn clarifying the extended version I’m doing for the article. But the events of 875 are only one of the things we’re looking at. Next week, in a translation post, we’ll take a look at Louis’ inheritance, the Capitulary of Quierzy, and a little known capitulary text recently redated from Charlemagne’s reign to that of Charles the Bald. 

*In fact, we know what went wrong here, and it’s entirely down to Charles’ mismanagement of regional patronage. 

So You’re at War with the Carolingians: A Survival Guide

Picture it in your mind’s eye. You are the ruler of a medium sized polity in eighth- or ninth-century Europe, cheerfully going about your business extracting economic surplus from your people, when one of your advisors comes up to you with a worried expression on his face. He has just received bad news from your informants at the court of the Franks. Your mighty Carolingian neighbour is starting to muster his armies and you are the target. Maybe your idiot son has launched one too many raids into his territory. Maybe too many of his nobles have been talking quietly to his idiot son about the need for fresh blood in Frankish politics. Maybe his favourite exotic animal has just died and he’s in a bad mood. As the Byzantines say, ‘If a Frank is your friend, he is not your neighbour,’ and unfortunately this Frank is right next door to you. You’re in trouble. Thankfully, help is at hand. In this post we’re going to consider some of the options you have when the Carolingian war machine is at the gates. These are by no means foolproof, but they will give you the best chance you have to survive.

This is Fine. Everything is Fine. (The Golden Psalter, St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 22, fo. 141).

Rule number one of fighting the Carolingians is don’t. This is the family that conquered most of western Europe, including Aquitaine, Saxony, Lombard Italy, Bavaria, the Avars and the Spanish March. They carved out the biggest empire west of Byzantium and they did not do that by being bad at war. You should at the very least be exploring options for avoiding conflict with them. Offering tribute and becoming a client is an entirely viable move, particularly if it buys you time to regain your autonomy at a later date (see Benevento in 788). If you’re not already a Christian, consider converting. Not only will that endear you to your Carolingian neighbours, but the process of baptism also comes with free shiny new clothes and a pen-pal who lives in Rome. (Christianity also comes in Greek, which is less immediately useful in the circumstances but in the longer run may allow you to play the Franks off against Constantinople).

As Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria (r.748-788) could confirm, becoming a client of the Carolingians is not without risk and you may find yourself in front of a kangaroo court on dubious grounds, particularly if you have enemies at home eager to replace you (and who doesn’t?). Even if you’re willing to risk that, peace is not always an option. Sometimes the Carolingians are out to get you specifically. In the unhappy event that war is unavoidable, you are best served by avoiding a straight fight. People as far away as Baghdad know that Frankish swords are the best, and the wealth of the empire means that their armies are well-equipped with chainmail and horses. Most importantly, you will almost certainly be outnumbered. Whichever colourfully named Charles or Louis you’re facing can raise large forces made up of contingents from different peoples across the empire. They will probably place multiple armies in the field, something that Charlemagne (r.768-814) did against the Saxons in 774, al-Andalus in 778, the Bavarians in 787 and the Avars in 791 and 796, and that Louis the German (r.840-876) would still be doing against the Moravians in the 870s. Their aim here is to limit your room to manoeuvre and force you into a pitched battle, playing to their strengths in numbers and soldiers on horseback.

(The one potential exception here for avoiding a major battle is if your Carolingian opponent is Charles the Bald (r.840-877). Charles did not have a great record at winning battles, if his defeats at the hands of the Bretons at Ballon in 845 and Jengland in 851 and by his nephews at Andernach in 876 mean anything. He was a very successful ruler but not particularly lucky on the battlefield, with a tendency to try to be a bit too clever for his own good in his military tactics. High risk, cunning schemes like attacking Brittany in the middle of winter with a small army or attempting to manoeuvre his army at night often blew up in his face, so you could try to bring him to battle and hope he outsmarts himself.)

A core concept here is time. If you can’t go toe-to-toe with the Carolingians, your aim is to make the process of conquering you too long, difficult and unpleasant to be worth the continual effort (think Russia in 1812, or Geoffrey Boycott). Keep it going long enough and a crisis is going to happen somewhere else in the Carolingian world to distract attention, like the Saxon uprising that forced Charlemagne to leave the Iberian Peninsula in 778. Internal Frankish conflict in particular is your friend. As the Bretons in 830 can attest, Louis the Pious (r.814-840) can’t invade your lands if no one wants to show up to join his army. Playing for time is easier said than done and you may need to survive several years of being repeatedly invaded. It helps if, like Benevento, you are far away from the Carolingian heartlands between the Seine and the Rhine and getting to you is a bit difficult. Sometimes you’re just going to get unlucky and become someone’s pet project they keep returning to over the decades, as with Charlemagne and the Saxons.

Other powers will take advantage of the Carolingians being focussed elsewhere, such as Emir Hisham I of al-Andalus, who raided Francia in 793 at the height of the Avar Wars. It may be worth formalising such alignments of interest by allying with your neighbours. The Bohemians were quite big on this, allying with the Moravians in 871 in the face of Frankish aggression, and in 880 with the Daleminzi and Sorbs. On a larger scale, Prince Arichis II of Benevento entered into negotiations for Byzantine support in 787. Admittedly, none of these enterprises were particularly successful; but with that said, keeping your neighbours on side will help stymie another classic Carolingian strategy of allying with them against you, as demonstrated by Charlemagne’s deal with the Abodrites, targeted against the Saxons.

You can also try cutting deals with rebels within the empire. The Umayyads of Córdoba repeatedly destabilised the Spanish March by allying with the losers in internal conflicts in the region, such as Aizo and Willemund in 827, and William of Septimania in 847. By dividing the frontier regions, you make it harder for them to be used as springboards against you, while also gaining sources of intelligence about Frankish movements. The Moravians did similar things with the counts of the Bavarian frontier, suborning multiple figures such as Ratpod in 854 and Gundachar in 869. The Carolingians were not always good at keeping their family conflicts in-house, and frustrated sons resisting the authority of their fathers can also make useful friends. Salomon of Brittany (r.857-874) sent troops to support Louis the Stammerer against his father Charles the Bald in 862, while Rastislav of Moravia (r.846-870) allied with multiple rebellious sons of Louis the German. This is a high-stakes move. By interfering in Carolingian politics you are placing a target on your back for retribution, so make sure you’re not exposed if/when the scapegrace princes decide to reconcile with their family.

One of the best means of getting the time you need to survive is by building fortifications. High walls are not invulnerable to Carolingian armies, but they can slow them down nicely (making derogatory comments about the species and odour of the besiegers’ parents from the top of the walls is traditional). Something like the extensions to the Danevirke finished in 808 by King Godfrid of the Danes (r.804-810) serves as a deterrent and statement of intent, while getting your subjects facing in the right direction and united in a shared project. The Moravians frequently managed to hold off East Frankish armies from their fortified cities. As I can attest from personal experience, trying to climb up to Devín castle in what is now Slovakia when the people on top don’t want you to makes for a challenging day out. The Vikings were masters of setting up shop on a strategically located island in a river and refusing to move unless they were paid to go. Perhaps the gold standard here are the fortified cities of the Upper March in al-Andalus, where the Carolingians spent several decades banging their heads against the walls of Zaragoza, Tortosa and Tarragona to limited effect.

This turtling strategy is not without risk. The Franks can be patient if the rewards are high enough. Concentrating all of your resources and political capital in one place is tempting, but leaves you vulnerable to being taken out with the fall of one city. Charlemagne was willing to overwinter and spend eight months besieging King Desiderius of the Lombards (r.757-774) in Pavia because seizing it got him most of northern Italy in one fell swoop.  Likewise, Emperor Louis II of Italy (r.855-875) kept laying siege to Bari until it finally fell in 871 because doing so destroyed the emirate that was based there. Allowing the Carolingians to get too comfy outside your walls is also a problem. Barcelona fell to Louis the Pious in 801 because Louis knew he didn’t have to worry about reinforcements coming from Córdoba and could besiege at his leisure.

But the biggest problem with hunkering down in your fortress is that it leaves your land and people vulnerable to the occupying army. The Franks will loot and pillage the surrounding countryside, partly to get booty, but mostly to put pressure on you to come out and fight. Not only is your resource base being stolen before your eyes, but a king who won’t protect his people is going to get very unpopular very quickly. Being on the defensive all the time is draining, and morale may collapse quite quickly. A case in point is the plight of Duke Liudewit of Lower Pannonia, whose fortification strategy against the armies of Louis the Pious, while not without success, eventually exhausted the patience of his allies, leading to his death in 823 at their hands.

All this suggests that fortifications may be useful, but they need to form part of a wider strategy. If you can’t take on the entire Carolingian host in one go, then you can at least attempt some aggressive countermeasures. Raids and ambushes will go a long way to restoring your morale and reducing theirs. The Basques and Bretons acquired a particular reputation for this sort of irregular warfare, practiced most famously when the former ambushed Charlemagne’s rear-guard at Roncesvalles in 778, leading to the death of Roland. The key to this sort of warfare is mobility, which allows you to pick your fights when and where you want them. No one did this better than the Vikings, who could use their ships to move unexpectedly along the rivers, but were also surprisingly good at moving over land by commandeering horses.

A certain audacity can sometimes be useful: see the example of the Saxons who snuck into a Frankish camp in 775 by pretending to be foragers, causing chaos among the half-asleep soldiers. Dirty tricks may also be necessary. In 871, having promised to bring the rebellious Moravians under East Frankish controls, upon arriving at the Moravian capital, Svatopluk I (r.871-894) changed sides and took by surprise the Bavarian army that had accompanied him.  Be aware that the Franks are by no means novices at irregular warfare themselves, as the unlucky Moravians ambushed by them later the same year learned to their cost. 

I would also suggest launching raids across the border if the Franks have retreated for the end of the campaigning season. Having spent much of 855 being besieged by Louis the German, Rastislav of Moravia tailed the Frankish army when it returned home for winter and began raiding the countryside. While this may feel akin to lobbing pinecones at a bear while it’s walking away, it helps place pressure on the Carolingians to come to the negotiating table. You want to make being at war with you an uncomfortable experience that has wider ramifications. Keep offering them a reasonable face-saving out while making it clear that the alternative is unpleasant. Salomon of Brittany was able to use attacks on Frankish territory to force Charles the Bald to recognise him as King of Brittany in 867. Raids like this also help solidify your position at home, not just by acquiring booty, but by giving your warriors something to feel good about, and helping your wider political community understand that you have a plan for how to win this war that goes beyond letting yourself be punched in the face until the other guy’s hand starts hurting.

While I have strongly counselled against taking the main Carolingian army in the field, smaller detachments are another matter. A classic example of divide and conquer can be observed in 849. The Bohemians, under pressure from a large Frankish army under the command of Ernest, dux of the Bavarian frontier, sent envoys offering peace to one of the army’s captains, Thachulf, dux of the Sorbian March. Thachulf’s arrogance in accepting their terms without consulting the rest of the army annoyed a large chunk of the Franks, who pressed ahead without the others and were defeated by the Bohemians. The military organisation of Carolingian forces into units based on kingdom of origin can be used in your favour, as when a campaign against the Moravians in 872 collapsed because the Thuringians and the Saxons taking part kept feuding with each other.

When it does come to battle, try to pick ground that suits you, and force the Carolingians to fight on your terms. Einhard observed that the Basques at Roncesvalles in 778 were helped by the lightness of their gear and their familiarity with the uneven mountain terrain. Charles the Bald was lured into a marsh at Ballon in 845, allowing the Bretons to exploit their superior knowledge of the ground. At Jengland in 851, the Bretons refused to close with Charles’s men, using their lightly armoured horsemen to harass the Carolingian army with javelins and feinting to draw them out of formation. In 891, King Arnulf (r.888-899) hesitated before engaging and defeating the Vikings at the Battle of the Dyle because his army would be hemmed in by marsh and river and have to fight on foot.  

There are no sure-fire ways of defending yourself against the Carolingians, but following these rules of thumb will give you as much a chance as anyone has.

[The above is an extremely artificial exercise and there are obvious problems with what I’ve just written. Not only have I flattened more than a century of Carolingian history, ignoring dramatic changes in the political structure of the empire, I’ve also homogenised the various peoples and polities unlucky enough to be stuck next to them. This is particularly egregious in the case of the Vikings, who operated very differently to the other examples I discuss.

My central conceit of addressing an early medieval prince also led me to encourage certain types of solutions, suggesting that the political community best equipped to resist the Carolingians is:

1.   Far away

2.   Sufficiently centralised to raise the resources to build and man extensive fortifications, and to remain united under considerable pressure.

While point 1 stands in any circumstances, strictly speaking point 2 can be challenged. Fracturing into small, hard to manage communities and thereby becoming ungovernable will also give the Carolingians a real headache, as Louis II’s misadventures in southern Italy attest. I just couldn’t see this being the sort of option that would appeal to a prince.

The main reason I wrote this post is because I wanted to put myself into the head of someone who was an enemy of the Carolingians. Most of our sources come from the Carolingian world, which shapes our perspective of their wars. Not only do we understand things from their logic, it leads us to sympathise with them. One of my research priorities is to centre these apparently peripheral polities. I want to underline how scary a prospect the Carolingians were in this period (Reuter’s adage that ‘for most of Europe in the eighth and ninth century it was the Franks who were the Vikings’). But I also want to think about their leaders as undertaking strategies and responding to the problems caused by their giant neighbour. This represents one way of thinking about that.]

Brothers-in-Arms: The Treaty of Liège (Feb 854)

One of the enduring fascinations of the medieval world for the present is the way it pitches high politics as family drama. The cosily intimate domestic squabble prosecuted on the battlefield is an inherently gripping story. Notoriously the Carolingians have a great deal to offer for aficionados of familial conflict in the Middle Ages. This is also an interesting period in the study of diplomatic relations. The middle of the ninth century saw three brothers – Lothar I, Louis the German and Charles the Bald – who all ruled separately as independent monarchs over a population of elites that saw themselves as part of a wider shared Frankish and Christian community. Their struggles against each other married dysfunctional family relationships with matters of state in front of an aristocratic audience who could easily change allegiance or refuse to participate. The Treaty of Liège of February 854 serves as a sort of sequel to my previous post on the Treaty of Valenciennes. But it also offers a window into the way the brothers sought to communicate the rightness of their respective causes to each other, and to the watching Frankish nobility.

‘Hlotharii et Karoli Conventus Leodii Habitus’, in MGH Capit. II, no. 207 (pp. 76-8).

The most serene Emperor Lothar:

1. We wish all those who are faithful to us to know that in the past year we have frequently sent invitations to our most beloved brother Louis in order that we might have a common conversation with our faithful and with his concerning the Lord’s will, insomuch as He wishes to send inspiration, and that we might manage and ordain the advantage of God’s holy Church and the common progress, honour and needs of ourselves and our men. But because our aforesaid brother has because of some sort of impediment put off coming until now, as we had hoped, We were unwilling to set it aside in such a way that we did not usefully come together. 
2. Now we want you to be sure of our coming together, because, with Christ propitious, we want to come together indissolubly in thought and deed in accordance with God’s will, for the salvation of the holy Church and for our and your common advantage and needs, so that we may be one in Christ and you may be one with us.
3. Understand that we grant to you a law of the kind which our ancestors, that is, our father and grandfather, conceded to and conserved for your ancestors, and we wish to respect it in every way inviolably and incorruptibly, in both present and future times.

The most glorious king Charles: 

1. Accordingly, we have for this reason delayed having this meeting up until now, because we wished that our aforementioned brother would meet with us as well and attend the same meeting with us. But because he, being hindered by some impediment, neglected to come, we, having heard the disturbance which his son is attempting to cause, wished to ally with each other. Know therefore that we shall be together in prosperity and adversity; nor, with God’s help, will any trifling offence be able to separate us from that love by which we are bound together by fraternal bonds. Rather, wherever we are in need of reciprocal comfort and assistance, as far as the Lord permits, we desire to be supported and sustained by each other, and we wish to bring one another assistance against every earthly enemy.
2. But if our same brother delays coming to us in the manner that we desire and send to him, we are united to each other such that one shall provide such comfort and assistance to the other wherever it is necessary from this time forward, as we have said above, so that each can rest assuredly in the kingdom that has been entrusted to him by God. And if either one outlives his partner, let him who is left keep his nephews under their tuition and protection together with their father’s kingdom, so that they may be so fortified against the machinations of adversaries with the help of God that they can rest assuredly in the kingdom of their father.
3. Therefore, We desire Your Devotedness to know for certain that we truly recognize that we have offended God in many things and have carelessly troubled your minds, so have made a vow to, by Christ’s favour, make every effort to amend all of these things so that we might be able to appease God and give satisfaction to Your Devotedness. When a greater number of our faithful men shall come together, or when our aforesaid brother, as we have commanded him to, shall come, if he wishes to come, We will take care to keep you informed of all things in whatever way will be agreeable to you, such that you might truly know us to want to observe and keep our promise most fully and in every way.
4. In addition, let your skill and the skill of everyone discover it in common, that for this reason we earnestly wished to announce these things to you in this sacred place so that you may know that we will inviolably observe everything which we say, with the favour of the Lord and the support of his saints in whose presence they are announced. 

This is the oath which they swore to one another:

From this day forth, if our brother Louis (or his sons) is breaking or will break the oath he swore to us, regarding that part of the realm which you have received as your share from him, insofar as the Lord give me the power to do so, if you ask it I will offer you help with your defence against him, and against his sons and against all others who wish to take it from you without just or reasonable pretext. And if I should outlive you, I will not take away from your sons that part of the kingdom which you have received as your share from me and my brother but will consent for them to have it. And if they or their faithful men ask for help in defending against our brother, his sons, and anyone, so that they can hold it, I will aid them as far as I can, so long as you and your sons give us the same aid and do not part with us.

Regular readers will remember that when we last left Charles and Lothar in November 853 things were looking pretty good. The situation was stable enough that Charles could concentrate on domestic affairs and the two brothers went through a number of items concerning the church and the law. By February 854 things were considerably less rosy. In late 853, leading Aquitanians had invited the second son of Louis the German, Louis the Younger, to become their king. Charles had only recently won the last war for Aquitaine and had managed to alienate an important kindred of magnates by having an otherwise unknown Gauzbert beheaded in March 853 for similarly mysterious reasons. These rebel Aquitanians received a positive reception from Louis. Alarmed by the alliance between his brothers and annoyed at getting shut out of the question of Lothar’s inheritance, Louis was inclined to support the venture. As news of this development spread, Charles became increasingly concerned that Lothar might decide he was a bad bet and reach out to Louis instead. The result was another meeting between Charles and Lothar, this time at Liège in February 854, where the brothers made their military and political alliance explicit in this treaty.

Some dubious looking brethren assembling in the Stuttgart Psalter, Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Bibl. fol. 23.149v.

This background emerges in the text of the treaty. In order to keep Lothar invested in the alliance, Charles promises to protect his children’s inheritance if Lothar predeceases him (Charles c.2; oath). The treaty is very clearly aimed at Louis, inviting him to join them in their alliance (Lothar cc.1-2; Charles c.1), but warning him that an attack on one will be counted as an attack on the other (Charles cc.1-2; oath). Special reference is made to the ambitions of the younger Louis in Aquitaine, with Louis the German called upon to restrain his son (Charles c.1), and the brothers specifying that their alliance would also apply against Louis’ children (oath). Even as they threatened him, Lothar and Charles were probably sincere in inviting Louis to join them, at least in the short term. Both would benefit from peace as Charles dealt with his problems in Aquitaine and Lothar would get the agreement of both of his brothers for his succession plan.

But there was another audience for the treaty, and that was a Frankish elite that was largely tired of internecine conflict. Family drama is entertaining from a distance, but participants in it need to find ways to make other people care about and adopt their cause as their own. By publicly offering Louis a place at the table, Lothar and Charles were deflecting blame for subsequent fighting while suggesting a means by which the multipolar Carolingian world could be peacefully organised. For anyone watching who felt that the problems besetting the empire had more profound causes, they also promised to discuss ecclesiastical matters and to undertake measures that would win back divine favour (Lothar c.2; Charles c.3). Lothar placed particular emphasis on the laws initiated by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, assuring that the brothers would follow and keep the legal protections accorded to their people (Lothar c.3).

A further, more speculative, point. Liège was an important site in Lothar’s realm, which benefitted Charles in that it meant that the emperor publicly committed to the alliance in front of an assembly of his own people, making it harder to weasel out of it without losing face. I’m struck by the reference to the oath being sworn in a sacred place (Charles c.4), and I wonder if it means that it is being taken in St Lambert’s Cathedral. Liège had been patronised in the early eighth century by the Carolingians as an alternative to Maastricht. Liège was also the centre of Charles Martel’s power in the civil wars that followed the death of Pippin II, and as much the cradle of the Carolingian dynasty as anywhere else. While it is almost certainly a coincidence, I can’t help wondering if there was a deliberate choice made in making this treaty about the need for family unity in a place intimately associated with the beginning of that family, in a cathedral dedicated to a bishop who had been killed as a result of civil conflict (slightly awkwardly by Pippin of Herstal).

Viewed from a distance, this treaty was a success. The alliance between Lothar and Charles held down to the former’s death a little over a year and a half later, at which point Lothar’s sons succeeded as planned. Looked at more closely, this outcome had relatively little to do with the treaty. Lothar had talks with Louis later in the year, forcing Charles to hold another meeting with the emperor, this time at Attigny, to remind him of the agreement, distracting him from affairs in Aquitaine. Undeterred by the alliance, Louis the Younger had travelled to Aquitaine to claim the throne in early 854. Although support for his bid was not as strong as he had been promised, he managed to make trouble until he went home in the autumn.

Charles’ dealing with these problems owed fairly little to the vision of family comity found in the treaty of Liège. There is no evidence that Lothar intervened in the conflict. Rather, Charles neutralised Louis the German by encouraging Slavs and Bulgars to attack the East Frankish kingdom, leaving him unable to support Louis the Younger. He also may have divided the Aquitanians by releasing the imprisoned Pippin II, who immediately gathered many of the people who might have otherwise backed Louis the Younger. The Treaty of Liège may have promised a concert of Carolingian princes working in amity to resolve problems. The reality was altogether messier and depended more on the politics of division than of unity.

Making a Multipolar Carolingian World Work: The Treaty of Valenciennes (Nov 853)

The Treaty of Verdun, 843 – Lothar I’s realm in orange, Louis the German’s in blue and Charles the Bald’s in brown (source)

No student of early medieval history is unfamiliar with a variation of this map showing the division of the Carolingian empire by the sons of Louis the Pious at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. There are problems with it. It is too neat, leaving out Pippin II, who would battle Charles the Bald for possession of Aquitaine for decades to come. It also overstates the finality of the division. The brothers would war against each other repeatedly to try to redraw the map. In the years that followed, the kingdoms would be re-divided and amalgamated in new ways until Charles the Fat inherited the entire lot in 884 (with mixed results). Nonetheless, Verdun did indicate something important. The efforts of Emperor Lothar I to establish overlordship over the empire had been thwarted by the alliance of his younger brothers, Louis the German and Charles the Bald. In consequence, the Carolingian world was to be a multipolar empire in a way that it hadn’t been since 771. The brothers would rule their kingdoms independently, yet their territories were still conceived of as part of a greater whole, with members of the Frankish elite operating across the empire. That is simple enough to say, but making it work in practice was much harder. To get a sense of what that looks like, I’ve translated the Treaty of Valenciennes, an agreement made between Lothar and Charles in November 853:

Lothar I and Charles the Bald, ‘Conventus Valentianas’, in MGH Capit. II, no. 206, pp. 75-6.

 Declaration of Lord Lothar:

1. Concerning the missi sent throughout the kingdom so that the people might have peace and justice. Concerning robbers, plunderers, brigands, and other wrongdoers, and concerning every aspect of justice. 
2. That when missatici [a missi’s areas of responsibility] overlap, the missi should come together, and if someone should flee from one kingdom to another, or from one missaticum to another, they shall capture him together.
3. That proof (OR a notice) is to be sent wherever they flee, so that the count may distrain him either with his hereditary lands, or through whatever means he can, so that he might return there and make amends where he has done wrong.
4. That it should be recommended to the missi that they do justice; and that if they have not, that you ought to pursue it. 
5. That if someone is in need, everyone should be ready to help each other in whatever way you can. 

Declaration of Lord Charles:

1. Concerning episcopal pronouncements and the honour of priests.
2. Concerning rebuilding churches and the ninths and tenths [the rent due from holding a benefice amounting to a fifth of the produce].
3. Concerning the observance of the capitularies of lord Charles [i.e. Charlemagne] and of lord Louis [the Pious] concerning churches.
4. Concerning observance of the peace and avoiding greed for and oppression of the goods of the Church and the poor.
5. That we wish to arrange with the counsel of our fideles how we can live honestly and without want in our court, as our predecessors did. And we admonish our counts and other fideles, that they themselves should order their condition and life in such a way that their neighbours and the poor are not oppressed on account of their needs.
6. Concerning harmony and mutual assistance between the bishop and the count for the doing of justice and the execution of the divine ministry.
7. Concerning the justice to be strived for by our bishops, missi, and counts.
8. Concerning the abduction and marriage of nuns, kinsmen, or others’ betrothed, such that what has been done in the past may be corrected in accordance with the advice and judgment of the bishops; and that every precaution should be taken in the future. 
9. That if out of necessity we have done anything against churches of God, or against any of our fideles, we will most freely make amends for this as soon as we can. And from now on, if any of us should wish to injure his own peer, we wish to restrict this in accordance with the custom of our ancestors.
10. Concerning our assembly and our common assistance against the Northmen and our fraternal discussion.

The big context for this is the development of an alliance between Lothar and Charles, which was a dramatic shift in the political landscape which had previously pitted the Emperor against his younger brothers. Lothar and Charles had met at Saint-Quentin in 852, campaigned together over the winter against a viking army that had entered the Seine (commanded by Godfrid Haraldsson, Lothar’s godson, which must have been awkward), before Lothar became godfather to Charles’ daughter in January 853. These good relations were helped by Lothar’s disavowal of Pippin II, who had been captured by Charles in 852, removing the largest stumbling block to an understanding. Lothar was preparing for his succession. He intended to divide his territories between his three sons, and wanted Charles to support them. 

Some of the text is concerned with the sort of things we expect from diplomatic treaties. Charles c.10 confirms that the two brothers would continue to cooperate against the vikings. Lothar cc.2-3 are effectively a ninth-century extradition treaty, promising that royal officials would aid each other in the pursuit of wrongdoers across their jurisdictions. But the majority of the treaty reads very weirdly if we assume we’re dealing with two sovereign states. Much of Lothar’s declaration is devoted to a commitment to the enforcement of justice and establishment of order (cc.1, 4). That of Charles is even stranger, covering subjects such as the state of the church and the poor (cc.1-2, 4-5, 9), the observation of previous laws (c.3), the abduction of nuns (c.8), the adoption of a simpler lifestyle (c.5), and a promise of redress for wrongs he had previously committed (c.9).

This all becomes more understandable if we think about Charles’ position. The decade after Verdun had not been easy for him, but by 853 he had reason to think that the rolling crises might be abating (he was wrong because ninth-century Carolingians are not allowed to have nice things). With the capture of Pippin, he could hope that he had won the war for Aquitaine. Peace had been achieved with the Bretons. The death of Emir ‘Abd al-Rahman II in 852 offered the prospect of quiet on the Spanish March. For the first time in his reign, Charles had a real opportunity to articulate a domestic agenda, and he seized it with both hands. This was a busy year, involving a synod at Soissons wrapping up the lasting effects of the defrocking of Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, and a statement on predestination at Quierzy. His meeting with Lothar at Valenciennes was followed by an assembly at Servais the same month. The capitulary issued from there covers much of the ground from the Treaty of Valenciennes but in much greater detail.

As a statement of domestic policy, Charles’ half of the treaty makes a lot of sense. Ecclesiastical matters were a major priority for him that year. The text also serves to draw a line under the unpleasantness of civil war. Charles acknowledges that wrongs had been committed, offers a form of redress and restricts future conflict among his magnates. He also makes clear that he intends to return to traditional Carolingian rulership, by emphasising the legislation of his grandfather and father, and that he intends to live in a simple manner like them. The message is that after decades of instability, peace and good governance are back on the table.

Through the Treaty of Valenciennes, Charles effectively got Lothar to endorse his agenda. This mattered to his domestic audience. Happy days are here again is a more convincing message when your most powerful neighbour has confirmed he’s going to stop directly and indirectly undermining you and might start helping you with your viking problem. But it also served as a demonstration that the brothers were committed to making the multipolar Carolingian world work, by articulating shared ideological values and beginning to develop the legal institutions for cooperation. For a Frankish elite that still thought in terms of the entire empire, this was a welcome development, and provides a hint as to how this new adaptation of the empire might work.

Assessing the success of the treaty is a little complicated. Barring a wobble in 854, the alliance between Charles and Lothar lasted until the latter’s death in 855. That this did not lead to a glorious period of peace and stability lies more with the people the treaty left out; Louis the German and the Aquitanians. Louis was unsettled by the prospect of his brothers teaming up and angered by the prospect of being unable to take advantage of Lothar’s succession. The Aquitanians were much less subdued than Charles had thought. The two combined when prominent Aquitanians invited Louis’ second son, Louis the Younger, to become their king in 854. The result was a series of invasions that would push Charles nearly towards the end of destruction. The death of Lothar and Charles’ political woes made the treaty largely irrelevant. Nonetheless, it is fascinating as a window onto how the multipolar Carolingian world would be understood by contemporaries, and as a clue as to how external and internal politics intertwined in the period.