. Named after its most illustrious member, Charles (Lat. Carolus) the Great, or Charlemagne (742–814), the Carolingian family originated in the intermarriage of the Austrasian noble families of Pepin I of Landen (d. 640) and Arnulf of Metz (d. ca. 645). By the 9th century, their descendants ruled an area en compassing portions of modern East Europe and most of the western part of the Continent. From Pepin III’s coronation in 751 until the early 10th century, there was always at least one Carolingian on a western throne.
Carolingian fortunes were initially advanced by the Merovingian king Clotar II (r. 584–629), who named Pepin of Landen mayor of the palace (major domus) of Austrasia for his help in uniting the Frankish kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria. Under Pepin I, the post of mayor developed into the most powerful office in the Frankish regions. Such was the position’s importance that when Pepin’s son, Grimoald, became mayor on his father’s death, he had his own son adopted by the reigning Merovingian king in order to place him in line for the throne. This was a maneuver that other Frankish nobles could not tolerate, however, and it led to Grimoald’s murder in 656.
Despite this temporary setback for the Carolingians, Pepin I’s grandson and duke of Austrasia, Pepin II of Heristal, managed to gain the mayoralty of both Austrasia and Neustria in 687. In contrast to Grimoald, he did not then seek access to the throne but limited himself to the office of major domus, a vantage point from which he was able to expand his hold on Frankish territories. His death in 714 precipitated a period of friction within the kingdom, as a power struggle opposed his sole surviving yet illegitimate son, Charles (later Martel), to Pepin’s widow, Plectrude. It was only after defeating the forces of Plectrude and other opponents that Charles attained the political authority of his father.
Charles Martel proved a forceful leader of the Franks, strengthening their territorial claims through victories over other Germanic groups as well as over Muslims from Spain. Above all, his military prowess is epitomized by his defeat of a Muslim advance near Poitiers, in October 732. Although scholars debate the significance of that episode—subsequent engagements were necessary in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Muslim raids into the Frankish realm ended—it came to be viewed among western writers as the turning point in the West’s struggle against Islam. This was the battle for which Charles received the nickname Martel (“the Hammer”) in the 9th century.
The rudimentary administrative machine available to Charles allowed him to maintain only a loose control of the Frankish territories, and it was largely to preserve his grip on them that, as had Pepin II, he lent his support to the church and to its missionary work in the eastern regions. Like his father, Charles considered the church an instrument to further his own ends. He secularized ecclesiastical property to remunerate his supporters, appointed laymen to head abbeys and sees, and otherwise exercised his power, as he saw it, to name and to depose bishops. Such measures made for an incoherence in ecclesiastical organization that would be rectified only through the reforms of Charles’s successors.
Upon Charles’s death in 741, the kingdom was divided between his legitimate sons, Carloman (d. 754), the eldest, and Pepin III. The two brothers cooperated closely in governing the area left to them. In 743, they placed another Merovingian, Childeric III, on the royal throne, vacant since 737, as a measure to suppress rebellious sentiment among noble factions. In 747, Carloman felt called to the religious life and abdicated in Pepin’s favor, leaving him mayor of a reunited realm. By 751, Pepin had asked Pope Zachary I to support his decision to depose Childeric and take the crown for himself, a move accomplished in November of that year. The new king, his wife, and sons, the first-born Charles (later Charlemagne) and a second Carloman, were anointed by Pope Stephen II in 754, who acclaimed Pepin and his sons “patricians of the Romans” in recognition of their special role in protecting Rome, and, at the same time, of the Holy See’s new political orientation away from the East and toward northwestern Europe.
As mayor of the palace and king, Pepin supported, if only to a limited extent, Boniface’s program to reform the Frankish church along Roman lines, which included efforts to improve clerical discipline and training. This was of fundamental importance to the surge in cultural and intellectual activity after Pepin’s death, the Carolingian renaissance.
When Pepin III died in 768, his kingdom was shared between Charles and Carloman; the territories of the former encircled those of the latter. Friction existed between the two brothers, but Carloman died in 771, leaving Charles the sole monarch. Charlemagne’s reign, first as king and from 800 as emperor in the West, witnessed a dramatic increase in the lands under Frankish control, the evolution of an administrative machine to govern this territory, and the cultural and intellectual developments that marked the Carolingian renaissance. During the first thirty years of his rule, Charles was involved in almost constant warfare: in 774, he defeated the Lombards; in 787, Duke Tassilo of Bavaria was overcome, though not decisively; campaigns in the 790s brought the conquest of the Avars; reprisals were launched against the rebellious Bretons during the later 8th century; in the early 9th century, engagements with Muslims led to the formation of the Spanish March along the Pyrénées. Above all, Charles faced the hostility of the Saxons to the east, whom he struggled to subdue from 772 until 804—through forced conversions, mass executions, and deportations as well as through battle. By the time these wars of conquest ceased in the early 9th century, the Carolingian territories extended from the English Channel to southern Italy, and from the Atlantic into eastern Germany.
Under Charlemagne, the basic units in the governance of so vast a realm were the counties, each headed by a member of the upper aristocracy given the title of count. The count maintained the peace, promulgated and enforced the laws, administered justice, and levied taxes. Government operated primarily at this local level, and ultimately the court had only limited control over the counts. The chief link between them and the central administration were the missi dominici, noble laymen, bishops, and occasionally abbots chosen to be the king’s representatives, who undertook tours of inspection for him throughout the realm. They investigated charges of misconduct by local officials, assisted in certain judicial proceedings, heard new oaths of loyalty to the sovereign, and published new laws. The laws that the missi circulated and royal directives to
them were often recorded in documents known as capitularies, among them such important works from Charlemagne’s reign as the Capitulary of Heristal (779) and the Admonitio generalis (789). Yet then, as previously among the Franks, the foundation of legislative action was the king’s spoken word. The capitularies from Charlemagne’s court were merely records of what he had orally decreed and carried no legislative weight in their own right. This legislative and administrative activity was matched by the cultural and intellectual revival of the same period, forwarded by the artists and scholars—Alcuin, Theodulf of Orléans, Paul the Deacon, Paulinus of Aquileia, and others—who gathered around Charlemagne.
All of these developments cast light on the motivations for Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor of the West by Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, 800, in St. Peter’s, Rome. Whether the idea for the move came from the papal or the Carolingian court—a point debated by scholars—it suited both parties’ interests. Even before 800, Carolingian writers had been evolving a concept of Charlemagne as the successor to Constantine I and the leader of a new Christian-Roman empire in the West. For the papacy, on the other hand, the coronation underscored Charles’s special role as protector of western Christendom, at a time when papal authority was particularly threatened.
It is uncertain whether Charlemagne initially viewed the imperial title as a personal honor or one to be passed on to an heir. No arrangement was made concerning it in the Divisio regnorum of 806, which decreed that after his death the empire be partitioned among his legitimate sons, Charles the Younger (d. 811), Pepin (d. 810), and Louis (778–840; later known as “the Pious”); but the inheritance of the imperial crown may have been something that even then Charlemagne intended to settle later. By 813, Charles the Younger and Pepin were dead, however, and in September Louis was crowned co-emperor. He became sole emperor upon his father’s death in January 814.
The reign of Louis the Pious witnessed probably the peak of the Carolingian renaissance in arts and letters as well as the implementation of important religious and administrative reforms; but it also saw the political crises emerge that led to the empire’s dissolution. The political turmoil of the 830s stemmed partly from the disaffection of aristocratic groups over Louis’s ecclesiastical reforms and partly from problems caused by his plans for the succession.
The terms of the inheritance were first outlined in the Ordinatio imperii of 817. Whereas Charlemagne had arranged the imperial succession only a year before his death, Louis the Pious made this from the start a basic element of his plans. The Ordinatio stipulated that each of his sons—Lothair I (795–855), Pepin of Aquitaine (800–838), and Louis (804–876; later known as “the German”)—receive a portion of the empire to govern, while Italy remained under Louis the Pious’s nephew, Bernard. But the imperial crown was bestowed immediately on Lothair I alone, who was to rule the empire’s most important territories, including Aixla-Chapelle and Rome, and to exercise supremacy over his brothers and Bernard. Although Louis the German and Pepin were too young to react to these plans, the Ordinatio
provoked Bernard to revolt in 817. The rebellion was crushed and its instigator blinded, a punishment from which he died.
Difficulties for Louis the Pious increased with the birth in 823 of Charles (later known as “the Bald”) to his second wife, Judith. (The three older sons were by his first spouse, Irmengarde.) A revised scheme of inheritance gave to Charles lands previously intended for his older brothers. Coming on top of existing tensions between Louis and Lothair I, this drove Lothair and his supporters to revolt in 830. Over the next several years, conflicts between the aging emperor and one or more of his sons plagued the empire. Although Louis managed to regain political control in 834 and confined Lothair to Italy, strife among Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald flared after their father’s death in 840. The written records that were made of one attempted accord between Louis the German and Charles, the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842, provide unique evidence of the French and German vernaculars of the day; but the agreement failed to achieve a lasting peace. In 843, the Treaty of Verdun ended the ideal of a united empire by dividing it into separate kingdoms for Louis the Pious’s surviving sons: to Charles went the western regions, to Louis the German the eastern territories, and to Lothair the middle section. Yet this only temporarily ended the conflict. The tensions among the brothers, along with such external threats as Viking raids, undermined the authority of the Carolingian monarchs and encouraged the rise of aristocratic factions. The church’s authority in secular affairs also grew, as it increasingly claimed a right to intervene in political issues.
After Lothair I’s death in 855, his kingdom was shared among his three sons. Italy was given to the eldest, Louis II (d. 875), who had received the imperial crown in 850, while Lothair II (d. 869) obtained the kingdom of Lorraine and Charles (d. 863) the kingdom of Provence. Charles of Provence’s realm was partitioned after his death between his two brothers. When Lothair II died, however, Louis II was too busy battling the Muslims in southern Italy to be a serious contender for his lands, and the Treaty of Meerssen (870) split them between Louis the German and Charles the Bald. The boundaries thus formed are the basis for those between France and Germany today.
Emperor Louis II died in 875, leaving no male heirs, and Charles the Bald gained the title of emperor and the realm of Italy. Since Louis II’s brothers also had lacked sons who could inherit (the church had thwarted Lothair II’s attempt to divorce his wife and marry a mistress who had borne him a son), the rule of Lothair I’s line ceased.
The political chaos of the decades after 840 was offset, in Charles the Bald’s kingdom, by the continued flourishing of artistic and intellectual activity. Charles’s court rivaled those of his father and grandfather in the renown of the theologians it attracted, among them Hincmar of Reims and Johannes Scottus Eriugena, and in the impressive artwork associated with his reign, but this was the last great center of learning and art linked with the Carolingian dynasty. Toward the end of the 9th century, continued Viking raids and the rising power of local aristocracy speeded the disintegration of the central administrations in the eastern and western kingdoms. When the death of the West Frankish king in 884 left only an infant as heir, the great clerics and laymen of that realm turned to the emperor Charles the Fat, king of the East Franks, who thereby reunited virtually the entire area of Charlemagne’s empire, but when Charles the Fat was deposed in 887 the West Frankish nobility gave the crown to a non-Carolingian. The Carolingians returned to power in the western territory with the enthronement there of Charles the Simple (r. 898–922) and later with the reigns of Louis IV d’Outremer (r. 936–54), his son Lothair (r. 954–86), and his grandson Louis V (r. 986–87). Louis V was the last ruler of the line, and after his death the kingdom passed to Hugh Capet.
In the East Frankish realm, Charles the Fat was succeeded in 887 by Arnulf of Carinthia (r. 887–99), the illegitimate son of Charles’s older brother, Carloman, and then by Louis the Child (r. 899–911), Arnulf’s son and a minor when he came to the throne. When Louis died, the nobles elected Conrad of Franconia.
