The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (56 page)

B
Y
813, C
HARLEMAGNE’S IMPERIAL POWER
had been recognized, however grudgingly, by both Byzantium and Baghdad. He claimed to rule lands as far north as Scandinavia, where he had campaigned against the little tribal kingdoms of the Suetidi, known to us as the Swedes; the Dani, or the Danes; and the Hordaland and Rogaland peoples, in the lands that are now Norway. He had extended his empire down into the Spanish Marches, the mountainous land between the Emirate of Cordoba and the Frankish border (
march
comes from the Frankish word for “borderland”). He controlled the northern part of Italy, the old Lombard kingdom, and acted as the protector of the Papal States in the middle of the peninsula; he was the master of the dukes who ruled the Italian territories of Spoleto and Benevento.
¹

He was nearing seventy years old and intended to leave his kingdom divided among his three sons in the traditional Frankish manner. The will he had drawn up in 806 split the kingdom into thirds, giving each son complete independence. His heirs were expected to cooperate only in “the defense of the Church of St. Peter.” He was the emperor of the Romans, but this did not, in his mind, mean that he now ruled a Roman empire that should be passed on whole to his successor. It meant that he had an obligation to defend the pope and to establish God’s kingdom on earth.
²

His plans to divide his lands came to nothing. By 813, only one son was still alive. His third son Pippin, subject king in Italy, died in 810; Charles the Younger, his heir apparent, suffered a fatal stroke the following year. His only remaining heir was his youngest son Louis the Pious, who was thirty-five years old and currently ruling as a sub-king to his father in the Frankish territory of Aquitaine.
*

Charlemagne called the court nobles together and, in their presence, crowned Louis as joint king and co-emperor; the old Germanic tradition of electing a king meant that although he had no intention of giving the noblemen a voice in the succession, they needed to be included in the ritual. The following year, Charlemagne died. “Above all,” writes his chronicler Nithard, “I believe he will be admired for the tempered severity with which he subdued the fierce and iron hearts of Franks and barbarians. Not even Roman might had been able to tame these people, but they dared to do nothing in Charles’s empire except what was in harmony with the public welfare.” As emperor, Charles had done what the ancient rulers had failed to do: he had instilled
civilization
into those who lacked it.
³

Guardian of civilization, defender of the bishop of Rome: these were fine descriptions of the function of the emperor of the Romans, but Louis was not on the throne long before it became clear that the definition of emperor was already changing.

Louis—who earned the nickname “the Pious” for his love of morality and good order—had expected to end up with one share of the Frankish land, not the whole vast thing. Now, as the second emperor of the Romans, he had unexpectedly inherited not a ceremonial title, but a huge and undivided kingdom. He at once adjusted his thinking. Charlemagne had, until the end of his life, referred to himself with the unwieldy formula “Charles, serene Augustus governing the Roman Empire, at the same time king of the Franks and of the Lombards,” which neatly separated out all of the parts of his power. But the year after his accession, Louis began to call himself, simply, “Emperor Augustus.” In his mind, the different realms under his control were already merging together.
⁴

Like his father, Louis crowned his sons. His oldest son Lothair was crowned king of Italy and co-emperor; his second son Louis was coronated in Bavaria, a little Germanic territory to the east that had coalesced out of the remnants of several tribes; the youngest, Pippin, became king of Aquitaine. But they ruled less as kings than as governors, under their father’s hand. Louis had bound all the disparate Frankish lands under him, using the title “emperor” in order to tighten his grasp over the imperial realm.

His sons—who, like their father, had grown up watching their grandfather treat the domains as separate—did not take well to this heavy oversight. Louis the Pious may have thought of his sons as his subjects, and his empire as a single realm, but the kings themselves viewed their kingdoms as peculiarly their own. In 829, the two different points of view clashed and threw the empire into civil war.

The immediate cause of the war was Louis’s clear preference for his newest son. After the death of his first wife, Louis had remarried, and his bride had given birth to another son: Charles, born in 823. Louis had a soft spot for Charles. In 829, he decided that the six-year-old should have a kingdom of his own. He chose Alemannia, the old territory of the Germanic Alemanni, now under Frankish rule.

Unfortunately, Alemannia was part of Lothair’s territory, so when Louis the Pious gave it to little Charles he reduced Lothair’s land. This seemed reasonable to him. He was, after all, the emperor; it was his realm to do with as he pleased. But Lothair was furious over the hostile takeover of part of
his
kingdom.

He suggested to his two younger brothers that their kingdoms would be the next ones impoverished for the sake of the little half-brother. By 830, he had convinced Pippin of Aquitaine and Louis of Bavaria (more commonly known as “Louis the German,” owing to the Germanic flavor of his little patch of land) to declare war on their father.

Vicious infighting between the three kings and their father raged on for three years. Finally, in 833, the brothers gained the upper hand. They trapped Louis the Pious and put both him and young Charles under guard. Lothair claimed the throne as emperor. “He held his father and Charles in free custody,” Nithard tells us, “and ordered monks to keep Charles company; they were to get him used to the monastic life, and urge him to take it up himself.”
⁵

Charles did not take the hint, however. At the same time, the deposed Louis sent a proposal to his two remaining sons, Pippin and Louis the German. He promised that he would make both of their realms larger if they would join together against Lothair and help him get his throne back.

Both sons agreed: “The promise of more land,” Nithard remarks, “made them only too eager to comply.” Louis appeared unexpectedly at a public assembly, and Lothair found himself standing alone against his father and all of his brothers. He was forced to return to Italy and to swear an oath to be content with his own kingdom for the rest of his life.
⁶

Relations between father and sons remained cool. In 838, Pippin died unexpectedly in Aquitaine; Louis the Pious announced that Aquitaine would now go to the half-brother Charles, whose rule over Alemannia had lasted less than a year. But the people of Aquitaine rebelled and instead crowned a king of their own: Pippin’s own son, Pippin II. Louis the Pious had lost his control over Aquitaine, and a chunk of his empire had disappeared.

By now, the Franks had nicknamed young Charles “Charles the Landless” (sometimes translated “Charles the Bald”). Louis the Pious decided to give to his youngest son part of his own central domain, the land of Neustria. When he died in 840, Charles became king of the Franks.

Lothair was still co-emperor and king of Italy; Louis the German still sat on the Bavarian throne; Aquitaine belonged to their nephew Pippin II. Charles the Landless held his father’s throne, but neither of his two older half-brothers was in the mood to see the upstart keep power over their homeland. War began again and went on for another three years, largely driven by Lothair’s resentment over the loss of his land. “Puffed up by the imperial title,” the
Annals of St. Bertin
tell us, “he took up arms against both of his brothers, Louis and Charles, and attacked first one, then the other, engaging them in battle, but with very little success in either case.”
⁷
In 841, an engagement between the brothers and their armies at Fontenoy left forty thousand Franks dead and shocked the Frankish world. “I, Engelbert, fighting alongside the others, saw this crime unfold,” wrote an eyewitness who described the carnage in verse.

While the civil war killed off Frankish warriors and destroyed crops, pirates from Scandinavia and al-Andalus sailed down the Seine and burned Rouen, destroyed trading posts, raided the coast, and generally produced terror across the countryside. Finally the brothers decided that they’d better make peace before the entire country went up in flames: the chronicler Regino of Prum writes that the Frankish kings, “conquerors of the world,” had lost so many men that they were having difficulty protecting their own frontiers.
⁹

They met together in 843 and agreed to divide the empire (including Aquitaine, which had now fallen back into dependence on the larger kingdom) into three parts, more or less along the lines that Charlemagne had indicated in his will almost forty years earlier. The division was laid out in a document known as the Treaty of Verdun, which all three of them signed. Charles the Landless got Neustria and the rest of the old western Frankish kingdom; Louis the German took Bavaria and the eastern Frankish lands, roughly the old territory of Austrasia; and Lothair added the lands between the Rhine and Rhône rivers to his holdings in Italy. Burgundy, where the third mayor of the palace had once ruled, was divided into two; Lothair claimed the larger part of it, the southeastern portion, and Charles the Landless got the dog’s portion to the north.
*

The treaty had permanently divided the lands of the Franks back into separate realms. Once again, the empire was more of an idea than a reality; Lothair, theoretically emperor of the Romans, held no more land than the other two. Separated from the western Frankish kingdom, Louis the German’s eastern lands began to take on a slightly different character than Charles the Landless’s territory in the west. The two halves of the Frankish land, Eastern Francia and Western Francia, would never be reunited.

And Charles the Landless shortly found himself facing a threat that was harder to deal with than his land-hungry brothers: invaders from the north who found the broad Loire river an ideal path into his kingdom.

T
HE INVADERS WERE
V
IKINGS
: young adventurers from the Scandinavian lands, sailing out from the cold towns that could barely support their fathers’ families. They had been venturing out onto the seas for centuries, but a strange shift in the weather had suddenly set them free to sail to lands where they had never been before.

This shift was a phenomenon known as the Medieval Warm Period, or the Medieval Climactic Anomaly. Beginning around 800, temperatures in Europe had begun to rise—just a few degrees, but enough to melt ice away from northern sea routes that previously had been impassable. Sailing on the cold North Sea had always been a risky proposition, possible only during certain months, but by the middle of the ninth century the restless young men looking for wealth and adventure could sail out in search of both year-round.

Vikings had been responsible for burning Rouen and wrecking the towns along the Seine during the civil war, and they had already invaded the kingdoms to Charles’s southwest. A few years earlier, a band of Vikings had targeted Pamplona, a small independent state that had grown up around the fortress Charlemagne had incautiously sacked sixty years before. Pamplona was a Christian kingdom, but it was independent from both the emir of Cordoba and the Franks. The Vikings had kidnapped the son of Pamplona’s king, Inigo I, and had demanded a sizable ransom for his release.

In 844, the year after the Treaty of Verdun, Vikings also descended on the emir of Cordoba, Abd ar-Rahman II. He managed to drive them away (the Vikings were still more inclined to raid than to settle in for a long war) but realized that he might not be able to hold off further raids. So he began to build himself a fleet of ships.

The year after, Viking pirates launched a serious invasion of Charles the Landless’s kingdom. The Franks proved less able to cope with the invaders than either Inigo I or the emir. Within a matter of weeks, Viking ships had pushed almost all the way into Paris, while their crews sacked the surrounding lands. The ships arrived outside the city on Easter Day; Charles the Landless managed to buy off their leader, the pirate Ragnar Lodbrok, with seven thousand pounds of gold, but even after the ships retreated back down the river the raids continued.