Charles The Bald

Janet L. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317899563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This important and long-awaited study is the first full-scale biography of Charlemagne's grandson, King of the West Franks from 843 to 877, and Emperor from 875. Posterity has not been kind to Charles or his age, seeing him as a fatally weak ruler in decadent times, threatened by Viking invaders and overmighty subjects. Janet Nelson, however, reveals an able and resourceful ruler who, under challenging conditions, maintained and enhanced royal authority, and held together the kingdom that, outlasting the Carolingians themselves, in due course became France.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

‘La victoire de Charles-le-Chauve sépara la France de
l’empire d’Occident et fonda l’indépendance de la nation française’.

That was how, in 1860, Frenchmen commemorated the battle of Fontenoy in 841, fought between the grandsons of Charlemagne around a windswept hill in northern Burgundy.¹ The issue was mastery of western Christendom, over which Charlemagne had been crowned emperor on Christmas Day 800. The victory of Charles the Bald (823–877) and his brother Louis over their elder brother the Emperor Lothar resulted in a division of Charlemagne’s inheritance that has proved permanent. Charlemagne himself, at once ‘French’ and ‘German’, has always been a powerful symbol of European domination, a model for both Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Modern Frenchmen and Germans have disputed possession of Charlemagne. Charles the Bald, by contrast, could be appropriated by the French in the nineteenth century: hence the erection of the obelisk at Fontenoy by a group of local patriots. Charles was often to be invoked in the 1860s: Napoleon Ill’s choice of Compiègne for one of his favourite imperial palaces recalled the French nation’s ninth-century ‘founder’. It was an understandable choice in an age of burgeoning national myths. Caesar’s Gaul had been bounded by the ‘natural frontiers’ of the North Sea and the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the Rhine, and France was its direct descendant-via the ‘French’ kingdom of Charles the Bald.

In fact French unity and French nationality were largely post-medieval; and they were unnatural. For Charles’s was a kingdom of manmade frontiers, superimposed on nature. The Carolingians’ heartlands, that is, the area where most of their estates were clustered, and where Franks had been setded for centuries, spanned modern Belgium and the Netherlands, northern France, and western Germany, thus lying athwart the ‘natural’ frontiers of the Ardennes forest, and the rivers Meuse and Rhine. Carolingians also flouted ‘natural’ frontiers when they divided their lands. In 806, for instance, Charlemagne imagined for his second son Pippin a regnum (literally: area ruled over) comprising Italy and Bavaria, which made sense because of historic links be tween the two regions but overrode the Alps. Charles the Bald’s brother Louis, who (though the Frenchmen of 1860 chose to forget it) had fought alongside Charles at Fontenoy, was called rex Germaniae (‘king of Germany’) by con temporaries who knew the classics, because his kingdom was (like Caesar’s Germania) ‘across the Rhine’. But in the ninth century, it was only writers in Charles’s kingdom who labelled Louis thus: in his own kingdom Louis was known as ‘king of the eastern Franks’. In fact that East Frankish kingdom included lands on the west bank of the Rhine, as well as, further east, regions inhabited by Saxons, Bavarians and Alemans. In the eighth century, as the Franks had imposed their domination over those they called ‘subject peoples’, Frankish kings had come to rule over many regna, not only far west as well as east of the Rhine, but beyond the Alps and beyond the Pyrenees.

Regna were artificial things. Carolingian rulers didn’t just receive them as a given: rather, they created, recreated, shaped them for themselves. Aquitaine, for instance, was the name of an old Roman province; but the shape of the Carolingian regnum of that name was a Carolingian creation – which also was quite different from Eleanor’s twelfth-century duchy. There were some striking continuities in terms of the survival of Roman law and custom and language. But it is easier to show that the Aquitanians’ identity as a people was imposed on them rather than felt by them in Carolingian times. The political units of the ninth century were thus very different from those imagined by nineteenth-century patriots. Nowadays, for convenience, modern historians label Charles the Bald’s kingdom West Francia. But no-one used that label in the ninth century; nor did Charles ever call himself king of the West Franks: his own royal title was simply ‘king by the grace of God’. His contemporaries spoke of ‘Charles’s kingdom (regnum)’, and distinguished within it peoples and regna: Francia, Burgundy, Gothia (or Septimania) and Aquitaine. This group of regna had seldom been ruled by the same person before 840; and after 840, continuing or permanent union was not foreseen. Charles the Bald himself divided his kingdom, as his predecessors had done theirs, between some of his sons, recreating regna within his own regnum. Throughout his reign, Charles coexisted with other Carolingians (his brothers and nephews) in territories that had once been ruled as an empire, the regnum Francorum, by Charles’s grandfather Charlemagne and his father Louis the Pious. Thus the same word – regnum – was used for the whole and for both larger and smaller parts. For us this is confusing. Why did mid-ninth-century people see no incongruity there? To pose the question is a form of anachronism. Hindsight makes it possible to distinguish ideal from reality, illusion from conceivable outcome. It takes some imagination to share the contradictions, the unrealised hopes, the might-have-beens, of the past. Who in the ninth century could have foreseen modern France?

In Charles’s generation, rival Carolingians competed for royal resources within a regnum francorum which, however divided, had been, and might again be, one. (The late-twentieth-century history of ‘Germany’ shows that collective memories of unity can outlast a generation of partition.) Hence Carolingian diplomacy was not like modern international relations, where each state recognises the others’ rights to permanent existence and a defined territory. In the ninth-century ‘state-system’, each component was itself unstable. Just as within a family holding, division in each generation was partly offset by not just accident but longer-term strategies (cousin-marriage; the offloading of surplus heirs into the Church) that restored unity, so shifts in the shape of the royal family, unpredictable but generally divisive in the short run, were offset by a longer-term impulsion to re-form a united whole. The ninth century’s ambiguous use of the term regnum, therefore, accurately refleets this historic indeterminacy and open-endedness. It was the kings’ collective identity as a family, clearly marked out by their distinctive names, that gave the Carolingian world a political unity underlying successive partitions. The interest shown by so many ninth-century chroniclers, wherever they were based, in what was going on in other parts of that world, and specifically, in what kings did, reflects a persisting reality.

Charles’s position in the family remained that of younger brother almost throughout his life. Lothar, the eldest of Louis the Pious’s legitimate sons, had acquired the tide of emperor even before Charles was born, and dominated his generation until his death in 855. Thereafter Louis the German was the senior member of the family: some seventeen years older than his half-brother Charles, he lived to the ripe age of seventy. Charles outlived him by hardly more them a year: his life was thus in a sense overshadowed by Louis, constantly subject to fraternal political pressure, his kingdom twice fraternally-invaded, his ultimate imperial plans beset by fraternal rivalry. Louis’s and Charles’s careers were intertwined, therefore; and neither can be fully understood in isolation, still less within the frame of a national history. The recent treatment of Charles the Bald alone, or in a Trench’ context, by several British historians has tended to obscure this broader geographic dimension of Carolingian familial politics.

Nevertheless, two hundred years after Charles’s death, the inhabitants of the lands he had once ruled were identified as Kerlinger, Carlensesr. ‘Charles’s men’;² and in the thirteenth century, when King Louis IX arranged at St-Denis the tombs of the kings who had preceded him, he left two in positions of special honour, the Merovingian Dagobert, greatest of the First Frankish dynasty, and Charles the Bald.³ The pages that follow will help to explain how this could have come about: how Charles, partly by conscious action, but also in spite of himself, played a crucial part in France’s making. That is only a secondary aim of this book, however. My prime aim is to understand Charles in his own times: what he did, what world he moved in, what sort of man he was.

Evocations of Dark Age kingdoms are often a Grimms’ fairy-tale picture of huge dark forests, dwarfing the puny efforts of humankind. For Charles and his contemporaries, the forests were a resource, in part artificially maintained, and certainly systematically exploited.⁴ Cultivation of the land was intensive in some areas; and settlement quite dense. For nearly everyone, the countryside was home, not a wilderness or place of exile. Great rivers functioned, in ninth-century reality and in human imaginations, sometimes as arteries, sometimes as boundaries, and political units (counties, for instance) often straddled them. Take the Loire, for instance. Modern travellers going south from Paris are awestruck by its scale (though they cross, conveniently, by bridge). In the ninth century, one poet praised its beauty, while another drowned in it; salt-traders and vintners plied it as a matter of routine; nobles and religious communities with estates on both sides of it had boats ready for regular crossings and landing-stages where their men could send off surplus produce for sale and unload imports for their masters’ consumption; Vikings contemplated arduous upstream journeys, but quick getaways; Charles the Bald, worried over strategic problems, planned the river’s blocking, and policing, and also exploited the symbolic possibilities of meetings at Orléans, Fleury, Cosne, Meung, Pouilly to which nobles must come from Aquitaine by crossing the river while Charles himself received his visitors on the Frankish side. So, any reading of landscape as evidence needs to take account of the varied meanings as well as uses which people imposed on their environment.

Ecclesiastical geography again shows the ninth-century landscape manmade. The civitates where bishops had their palaces and churches were inherited from Roman times. (I use the Latin term to avoid anachronistic associations: though nearly all civitates have become modern towns and cities, their urban character in the ninth century is problematic.⁵) The distribution of monasteries and cult-centres in the rural landscape reflected the location of royal and noble estates, and lay patrons’ choices of holy men. Religious communities at St-Martin, Tours, or St-Denis near Paris, had grown up at the tombs of martyrs in cemetery sites outside Roman civitates, and by the ninth century housed over a hundred clergy or monks apiece. Other mona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Title
• Table of Contents
• List of Genealogical Tables and Maps
• Editor's Preface
• Author's Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Carolingian Economy and the State
• Chapter 3 The Context of Politics
• Chapter 4 823–840: Youthful Training
• Chapter 5 840–843: Winning A Kingdom
• Chapter 6 843–849: Challenge and Response
• Chapter 7 850–858: Competition and Crisis
• Chapter 8 859–869: Prospects of Power
• Chapter 9 869–877: Glittering Prizes
• Chapter 10 Epilogue
• Appendix I Charles the Bald's Palace Personnel
• Appendix II The Beneficiaries of the Charters of Charles the Bald
• Bibliography
• Genealogical tables
• Map
• Index