THE Carolingian empire in this period was not effectively ruled by a single government, but it was still ruled by members of the same royal house. There was still an emperor with power real in some portion of the empire and titular in the rest, and the Frankish ‘culture’ still prevailed from beyond the Pyrenees to Moravia, and from Hamburg to Benevento. There was more than one administrative palace, but government was carried on as before by palace, dukes, counts and marquesses, and in learning and art Frankish scholars lived on a tradition Greco-Roman in origin but now rather Latin than Byzantine. The question of territorial partition among Charlemagne’s descendants was rivalled in importance only by the raids of Saracens, Slavs, and above all, the northmen.
Lothar I, from 843 till his death in 855, still used the imperial title, but the only imperial prerogative which he made effective was his protectorate of the holy see. In the recent civil wars the papacy had sought to escape from Frankish tutelage; when Gregory IV died in 844, Sergius II was consecrated without notification of an imperial missus or the taking of the promised oath of fidelity. Lothar however sent his son, Louis, to Italy as king; he came to Rome, and the pope made formal excuses for the recent procedure at the election, made the Romans take the oath to the missus, and crowned the prince as Louis II. After this assertion of imperial rights, Louis received the homage of Siconolf, prince of Salerno, now claiming the whole duchy of Benevento: war was already threatened among the claimants to the small Lombard states in south Italy. In another effort to assert imperial authority, Lothar asked pope Sergius to make his half-brother, Drogo, bishop of Metz, papal vicar for all the transalpine lands of the Franks, but the west Frankish bishops objected, and at the synod of Ver asked king Charles the Bald to provide to the see of Reims, still unfilled since the deposition of Ebbo. In consequence, Hincmar, a learned monk of Saint-Denis, was elected, and was to prove himself not only a good administrator of the west Frankish church, but a great supporter of west Frankish independence against the imperial pretensions of Lothar: and also of his own rights as a metropolitan against the holy see. He was, in short, a great servant of west Francia, against any claims to superior power, spiritual or secular.
Lothar’s activities were mainly exercised in Italy, to build up the royal position there. He confirmed the patriarch of Aquileia in his position in 845, to strengthen him against the patriarch of Grado, now allied to Byzantine interests. He tried also to defend the Tyrrhenian coasts against the raids of the Saracens: in the south, Naples also was trying to organize a defence with Gaëta, Amalfi and Sorrento. The raids however got worse: in 846 the Saracens pushed northward up the coast and raided Rome herself, profaning St Peter’s basilica and carrying off rich plunder: Christians shuddered at the sacrilege and the prospect of future danger; Lothar was much disturbed. Attack was needed in the south, where the Saracens already held Benevento, and Louis II in 847 led an expedition south and recaptured it. To end the weakness of the duchy, divided between the adherents of the two claimants, Siconolf and Radelchis, Louis awarded Salerno to Siconolf and the duchy of Benevento to Radelchis: but both proved useless as defenders of south Italy against the Saracens. In 852 Louis himself tried to take Bari, the chief Saracen base, but his expedition failed.
The next pope proved himself a better leader against the Saracens. Sergius II had died in 847, and Leo IV been consecrated without waiting for imperial confirmation. He proceeded to have Rome on the right bank of the river, including St Peter’s, defended by a wall, for defence against the Saracens: the enclosed area thus became known as the Leonine city. His efforts were justified, for in 849 a raid by a Saracen fleet was beaten off. But in Provence the Saracens plundered Arles in 850. Frisia too between 845 and 852 suffered continuous raids, in her case from the northmen. Lothar found it expedient to grant a great Danish duchy, at the mouths of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, to Rurik and his nephew, Godefrid the Yngling, king of Denmark, and for a time relative peace followed.
In 850 Lothar raised Louis II to the imperial dignity, and the pope had him acclaimed emperor in Rome, and crowned him. The young emperor’s rule was effective only in Italy; when Leo IV died and Benedict III was elected, he sought and received confirmation from the imperial missi before consecration.
Meanwhile Neustria suffered even worse disorders from raiders and from rebels against Charles the Bald, who had very little authority in Aquitaine, Brittany or the Breton March. A selfish and uncontrolled vassalage sought to retain church lands, use their private churches as sources of revenue, and increase their estates at the expense of their neighbours. Charles the Bald, to whom their fidelity was owed, was not a prince without valour or initiative, as the events of his troubled reign were to show; he had imbibed learning at his father’s learned court, he had an almost Byzantine interest in theological problems and a dogged persistence in the face of misfortune; but his resources were too small to support his position and his claims. He was no general, and it took him nearly twenty years to realize that a new strategy was needed against the attacks of the northmen. At the beginning of his reign his other enemies seemed more dangerous. In 843 he led a campaign against Nominoë, and a more successful one into Aquitaine in 844: he besieged Toulouse, captured Bernard, marquess of Septimania, and had him executed. But in the Breton March he was defeated. In 845 things went worse; Charles had to allow Pepin II the effective rule of Aquitaine, receiving him as his vassal: and Nominoë defeated him. He had to acknowledge Nominoë as independent ruler of Brittany in 846.
Meanwhile, the raids of the Nortmanni had wrecked Quentovic and Paris (see p. 443) and only the payment of a large ‘geld’ procured their departure. In Brittany, Nominoë chased off four bishops as pro-Frankish, invaded the March, took Nantes, and asserted Breton independence of the mother church of Tours. When he died in 851, Charles tried to claim fealty from his son, Erispoë, without success; he had to recognize him as king and cede to him the Breton March in return for an oath of fidelity unlikely to be observed. The year 850 was one of ill omen for defence against the Danish raids, for in that year a Danish partition was arranged between the claimants to that kingdom, and this for a few years ended the Danish civil wars, leaving many adventurers free to fight elsewhere. External raiding, rather than maritime commerce, now became the main occupation of the Scandinavian peoples, and the Frankish lands were plundered from three chief Scandinavian bases. From their headquarters in the Gironde, the Danes sacked Bordeaux in 855; they fortified an island in the Seine which was vainly besieged in 852 by both Lothar and Louis: they abandoned it for a heavy price in 853, burned Nantes in 854, ravaged the district of Perche in 855 and reoccupied their headquarters on the Seine. They held similarly an island in the Loire and in 853 issued from it and sacked St Martin’s city of Tours, holier than any place in Gaul. No effective measures were taken against them, though at Servais in 853 a capitulary tried to protect refugees: ‘concerning strangers who have taken refuge in these parts of our kingdom through the oppression of the northmen or the Bretons, it has been ordained that they suffer no harm from any public servant, but be allowed safe passage until they can return to their homes’.
The kingdom of Louis the German was, from its inland character, less troubled by Danish raids: Louis’ military energies were directed to keeping his eastern frontier against incursions of the Slavs and the Bulgars. Bohemia was nominally subject to him, but it needed expeditions between 846 and 855 to secure this submission: missionaries from Passau had little success in converting the Bohemians. In Moravia, to the south of Bohemia, Louis’ authority was also weak, but in 846 he replaced duke Moimir with the more well-disposed Rastislav, who was ready to support the Christian teachers from Passau; in 855 Louis found it necessary however to march against him too. German colonization and mission work from Salzburg prospered better in Pannonia; in lower Pannonia the Slav prince Priwina was converted and set about converting his subjects. Peace on the eastern frontier was only disturbed when Charles the Bald stirred up the Bulgars to invade Pannonia in order to hinder Louis the German from invading Aquitaine. Towards the north of Louis’ frontier, expeditions were needed against the Obodrites in 844, and the Sorbs in 851; but against the Danes Liudolf, count of the east mark of the Saxons and the mark set up against the Danes, kept the frontier for Louis, till king Rurik burned Hamburg in 845. There was another Danish raid up the Elbe in 851 and Bremen was sacked in 858; but as these were the only raids of the northmen in more than thirty years, the east Franks were fortunate as compared with the subjects of Charles the Bald.
The emperor Lothar I died at the monastery of Prüm in 855, leaving his territories divided between his three sons: Louis II, Lothar (II) and Charles. Louis II kept Italy, with the imperial crown, Lothar II had Frisia and Francia, Charles (still a child, and an epileptic) Provence and the Rhone counties. Not only was Lothar I’s corridor separated from Italy, but the northern part of the corridor, the future Lorraine, was separated from the southern; further subdivision was to follow. Aix was no longer an imperial capital: Lothar II, by title emperor and king, ruled Francia media, middle France, but scarcely a middle kingdom, so ill-defined and shifting were its frontiers: the region was geographically nameless, and hence designated Lotharii regnum or Lothariense regnum: in short, Lorraine.
The period between the death of the emperor Lothar I, in 855, and that of the emperor Louis II in 875 was one of internal confusion and external danger. Two of the sons of Louis the Pious remained alive in 855, ruling the old empire with their three nephews; though the Alps made a satisfactory northern frontier to Italy, there were no satisfactory natural frontiers between the kingdoms of Charles the Bald and Louis the German, and both might fairly hope to despoil their young nephews to their own advantage. A special opportunity offered itself over Lothar II’s desire to divorce his wife Theutberga; if he failed in this, he would probably die childless, and the regnum Lothariense might be divided between the kings of the west or east Franks, or absorbed by either of them. The Lorraine divorce involved a serious issue in canon law, but it was even more important in the sphere of Frankish politics. Acute difficulties over the divorce did not however arise till 860.
The first five years of Lothar II’s reign brought further troubles to the kingdom of Charles the Bald, and further fighting in south Italy. To balance the support Pepin II was receiving in Aquitaine, Charles the Bald betrothed his son Louis the Stammerer to Erispoë’s daughter; but when Erispoë was assassinated in 857, Solomon his heir expelled Louis from the province of Maine. Moreover, the Nortmanni burned Paris in 856, and Bayeux and Chartres in 858: while Danes from the isle of Noirmoutier burned Orleans in 856, and in 857 Tours and Blois. In 859 other northmen ravaged Noyon, Amiens and the mouth of the Scheldt, while those of the Loire sailed round Spain and attacked Septimania and Provence. Count Gerard, who ruled this region for Charles the Bald, however, defeated them; it was becoming clear that defence against the raiders depended on the energy and ability of the local count or marquess, rather than on the king: for in Neustria and the Rhine mouth, where the local vassals made no preparations against the raiders, there was no successful resistance. In 858 Charles the Bald met Lothar of Lorraine at St Quentin to concert defence, and an attempt was made to block the Seine to the invaders by fortifying the island of Oissel near Rouen, but no more than this beginning could be made, for this summer Charles was all but pushed from his throne. The Aquitanian supporters of Pepin II joined with the Burgundians in inviting Louis the German to invade his brother’s dominions. Louis’ own position was secure at the time, for his lands were sheltered from the raiders, his son Carloman proving an effective commander in Pannonia and Carinthia, and the northern Slavs prepared for defence rather than attack. Louis led his army against Charles, whose lay vassals mainly abandoned him and fled. His throne was saved for him by the fidelity of the west Frankish clergy, and particularly by archbishop Hincmar of Reims. When Louis convoked a synod of clergy to Reims, hoping to be crowned there king of the west as well as of the east Franks, Hincmar boldly withstood him; the lay vassals came to doubt his ultimate success and abandoned his cause; Louis had to recross the Rhine in January 859. Peace was made between Louis and Charles at the conference of Coblentz, summoned by Lothar II in June 860. The territorial status quo was maintained, but Louis the German had lost prestige and Charles the Bald correspondingly gained; Hincmar, who had saved his crown for Charles, and also west Frankish independence of Louis, now held a very strong position.
Meanwhile, in south Italy, there was fighting between Salerno and Benevento, between Salerno and Capua, and also between the duke of Benevento and Louis II himself: the Saracens profited by these internal wars. They sacked Naples in 856, ravaged Capua and the Campagna, and put Monte Cassino to ransom; in 860 a fleet of northmen sailed from Provence and sacked Pisa. Though Louis II could do little for the defence of south Italy he strengthened the Frankish position at the head of the Adriatic by making a useful alliance with the Venetians, and he maintained Frankish authority in Rome. When Benedict III died in 858, Louis secured the election and consecration in his own presence of Nicholas I, who was to prove a greater pope than any since Hadrian I.
After the year 860, Frankish politics centred on the repudiation of Theutberga by Lothar II (of Lorraine). Theutberga had had no child and Lothar believed her sterile; on the other hand, he had had children by Waldrada, his mistress, before he married Theutberga, and he now alleged that he had actually concluded a marriage with her before the ceremony with Theutberga, which was therefore no marriage. He summoned a synod to Aix in 860, and when this synod refused to accept his plea, he summoned a second, to meet on 15 February 860, using all his efforts to have the marriage with Theutberga declared invalid. The archbishops of Trier and Cologne refused to be pushed the whole way: they forbade future relations with Theutberga, but did not declare the marriage null and void. Archbishop Hincmar, however, wrote and vehemently defended Theutberga and the marriage: he had good moral and canonical grounds for his action, but these coincided with the interests of his master, Charles the Bald, who was strongly opposed to Lothar’s ‘divorce’, and wished to see him die still married to Theutberga and still childless: he or his heirs might then hope to annex Lorraine. Theutberga in 860 fled to Hincmar and Charles for protection, and obtained their support for the petition she addressed to pope Nicholas I. Lothar sought to counterbalance this move by making an agreement with Louis the German at Coblenz for present support in return for a promise of the succession in Alsace, after which he summoned a third synod to Aix (862) and obtained from it the decision that Theutberga’s marriage was invalid and that he was free to marry again. He at once married Waldrada and had her crowned queen.
Pope Nicholas, however, had been apprised of the decision of Aix, 862, and at once sent off two Italian bishops as his legates to convene a great synod and inquire into the matter of Lothar’s marriage, thus asserting his jurisdiction at the same time over the Frankish clergy (in disagreement over a matter of canon law) and a Frankish king. A synod of Lotharingian clergy met at Metz: and the legates, who presided over it, were bought over by Lothar and concurred in the verdict that Waldrada had been married to Lothar before his irregular union with Theutberga, which was in fact no marriage. But when news of the verdict, and his legates’ conduct, was brought to Nicholas, he quashed the proceedings of the synod of Metz: summoned a Lateran synod: deprived the two archbishops who had borne him news of the synod of their sees, and forbade Lothar’s further relations with Waldrada. Even when Louis II appeared in Rome with an army in 864, Nicholas would not yield in the respect of Lothar’s marriage, and his firmness seemed victorious when in that year Lothar, in great difficulties with the northmen in Frisia, heard the papal decision and sent to Nicholas signifying his submission. He hoped, however, that such submission need be temporary only, and to weaken Theutberga’s support by her brother Hubert, who commanded an Alpine region between his own southern lands and the Rhone counties of his brother Charles, he gave the ducatus (still a military office) of the region to a vassal who had abandoned Charles the Bald for his own service. This vassal became Conrad II, and Theutberga’s brother died soon after. In 863 the epileptic Charles of Provence died, and Lothar and Louis shared his kingdom, Louis taking Provence and part of Burgundy and Lothar the duchy of Lyons, adjoining his own southern lands. Charles the Bald got nothing: and the prospect that, through the energetic action of pope Nicholas, Lothar’s now considerable kingdom would have no inheritor, induced him to make overtures to his old enemy, Louis the German. The two kings met and conferred at Tusey in February 865, and called upon Lothar to accept the papal pronouncement; at the same time, in some disquiet at Nicholas’ claim to final jurisdiction, they forbade their bishops to attend the general council at Rome which Nicholas was summoning to hear the disputes about Lothar’s marriage. Lothar in alarm, sent messengers to Nicholas protesting his submission and asking papal protection from his uncles.
The strength of Nicholas’ position appeared in the mission, headed by his legate Arsenius, bishop of Orta, which he sent to the western Franks, with command to compel Lothar to take back Theutberga as his wife, to warn Charles and Louis to forbear to attack Lothar, now submissive, and to replace Rothad, bishop of Soissons, in his see: Hincmar, Rothad’s archbishop, with Charles’s support, had deposed him. By such action Nicholas challenged the authority of metropolitans to depose their provincial bishops on any grounds, without recourse to the holy see, and upheld Rothad, who had appealed to him. Rothad, to support his claim, had brought to Rome the important collection of decretals, largely unauthentic (see p. 538), now known as the Pseudo-Isidorian or False Decretals, though it is not proved that Nicholas had taken cognizance of them when he ordered Rothad’s reinstatement to his see of Soissons. Charles the Bald was humiliated over the matter, as was Hincmar, who had striven vigorously to show that the deposition of Rothad in a synod presided over by his metropolitan had followed all the rules of canonical procedure. Hincmar had earlier done good service to Charles the Bald, but Charles, in deference to apostolic authority, now withdrew his favour from him, and in 867, in spite of Hincmar’s opposition, also had the papally appointed clerk Vulfad ordained priest and appointed to the see of Bourges. When Nicholas I died in 867, his decisions stood unchallenged: he had vindicated his claim to the control of the metropolitans by the papacy, and to the subjection of the emperor himself on a moral issue.
In their desire to partition Lotharingia at Lothar’s death, Charles and Louis the German had paid too little attention to the raids of the northmen and other external enemies. In the eastern kingdom, Louis’ son Carloman had rebelled in 861, and sought to rule the valley of the Inn in alliance with the Moravians; he was replaced as ruler of the eastern frontier lands in 863 by Gundachar, made marquess of Carinthia. The Obodrites attacked the more northern frontier in 862, and at the same time Hungarian horsemen, migrants from the steppes and more recently from the banks of the Dnieper, swept for the first time against the eastern frontiers of Bavaria. The eastern frontier of Louis stood always in need of defence, and he was too suspicious of his brother’s intention to concert with him any serious defence against the northmen. Moreover, he feared the mutual jealousy of his own sons, and arranged in 865 a partition of his own kingdom to become effective after his death: Carloman was to inherit Bavaria, the Danubian marches and the eastern lands peopled mainly by the Slavs: Louis, Franconia and Saxony: and Charles, Rhaetia and Suabia.
Charles the Bald, however, made a beginning in the defence of his lands against the northmen. Since it was clear the host could not reach the raiders in time to force them to give battle, it was now realized that the blocking of the great rivers by some fortification of an island or bridge offered the best hope of defence. There was difficulty in bridging rivers like the Seine or the Loire anywhere near their mouth, but the strategy was sound and the pirates had already pointed the way to such defence by fortifying their own base camps on the rivers. They would make, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was to write later, a ‘wearc’. Charles the Bald and his Neustrians were now to try the expedient of making a bridge or a similar ‘wearc’ to hold the Seine, an attempt on the same lines as the fortifying of Oissel in 858. Assemblies were held at Pitres on the Seine farther up river, near Mantes, in 862 and 864, measures taken for the building of a bridge at Pitres, and a long, miscellaneous edict issued at Pitres, in 864 referring in some clauses to the harm done by the northmen and Charles’s other enemies, and the need of preparations against them. No man, it was decreed, must, without the royal permission, sell or give his armour (brogne, Anglo-Saxon byrnie, brunia) or weapons to a stranger, either for a price or in ransom to the north-men; all the Frankish pagenses who had horses or who could obtain them, must ride with the count against the enemy (this is not the summons to the host, but the sudden call to repel raiders): freemen who remained at home when they were needed for the defence of the patria must be brought before the inquest of the must: freemen must come without excuse for the fortifying of new towns and the making of bridges and causeways across the marsh; counts and bishops must protect refugees from ‘the persecution of the northmen’. Moreover, those who in times like these have made without royal permission forts and entrenchments and hedges (castella et firmitates et haias), these (i.e. the northmen or the king’s enemies like the Bretons) must by the first of August pull them down again, ‘for they inflict plunder and harm on the villages and dwellers near by’.
The fortifications begun after the edict of Pitres were not at once successful in stopping the northmen. In 865 these burned Poitiers and Orleans on the Loire: but count Robert the Strong fought them and prevented their pressing into Neustria. Even on the Seine, raiders got by and plundered the environs of Saint-Denis. In 866 the Neustrians again fought these raiders of the Seine, without driving them away: Charles the Bald had to buy them off; at which they sailed for England. The same year the northmen of the Loire killed count Robert the Strong and the count of Poitiers. The eastern Frank, Hugh, in this extremity was made duke of the region between Seine and Loire and also lay abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours and of Noirmoutier; all the resources of the countryside were placed at his disposal, but even so he could scarcely defend Neustria from the raiders of the two rivers. In such circumstances, Charles had to make peace with the Bretons, yielding them the county of Coutances, but though their king Solomon gained this advantage over Charles, he could not persuade pope Nicholas to confirm his own erection of Dol to be the archdiocese for Brittany.
Charles the Bald’s difficulties with pope Nicholas had already led to his agreement with Louis the German at Tusey; in 867 he met him again at Metz and confirmed their agreement to partition Lotharingia on Lothar’s death, which occurred in August 868, in Italy. At the moment, Louis the German’s attention was engaged by a rising of his son Louis and dangers from the Slavs on the eastern frontier: he himself was at Ratisbon, a sick man. Charles, on the contrary, was momentarily in a strong position: abbot Hugh, by means of the new fortifications, was holding his own against the northmen of the Loire: Charles hoped to gain all Lotharingia, in spite of the pledges for partition which he had given at Metz. In 869 he marched into Lotharingia, was supported by Rurik the Northman, duke of Frisia, and on 9 September had himself crowned king of Lotharingia by Hincmar, at Metz. But Louis the German could not be ousted from his share of Lotharingia by a mere diplomatic move: he warned Charles that he would not accept such a disposition of his brother’s lands, and Charles preferred negotiation to fighting. On 8 August 870 a partition treaty was signed at Meersen, and Lotharingia was divided; Charles received Frisia and the lands west of the Meuse, Moselle, Marne, Saône and the Jura, Louis the eastern parts of Lotharingia. Charles was strong enough to take the duchy of Lyons from count Gerard and confer it on his supporter, count Boso, and to hold his share of Lotharingia against the remonstrances of Nicholas’ successor, pope Hadrian, who denounced the violation of the emperor Louis II’s right to succeed in Lotharingia.
The emperor Louis II was, however, in 870, nearing the end of his reign. He had had to contend in south Italy with the Saracens, the internal struggles of Salerno, Benevento and Capua, and finally, with the Greeks. Louis had made a great effort against the Saracens in 867, using a fleet lent by the Venetians: by 867 the Saracens were holding only Bari and Taranto. Bari was besieged in 869, with the help of a Byzantine squadron which blockaded it by sea: the siege was long, but Bari surrendered to the Franks in 871. The Greeks, however, expected to keep the city which had once been their headquarters on the Adriatic, and the allies quarrelled so sharply that the emperor Basil I would address Louis II only as rex, not as imperator augustus: Louis fiercely asserted his right to the imperial title. Whereas Basil had asserted that Louis was not emperor, since he did not rule all the Frankish lands, Louis asserted that he did so rule, ‘for we may be said to rule those territories which are held by those of the same flesh and blood as ourselves’: Louis’ words, that is, asserted the indivisibility of the Carolingian empire, though his actual power extended no further than the Alps. Louis further besieged Saracen Taranto, but the duke of Benevento captured him, denied his right to operate in Beneventan territory, and allowed the Saracens to keep their city rather than let Louis take it.
Another long-term blow to the unity of the Frankish dominions on the eastern frontier was the introduction of Greek missionaries into Moravia; up till this time the conversion of the Moravian Slavs had been carried out by Bavarian clergy, and with conversion went German colonization; Rastislav, prince of Greater Moravia, however, was hostile to the Bavarian clergy, and applied for missionaries to the Byzantine emperor, Michael III, who sent him Cyril and Methodius (see p. 497). Rastislav, however, was defeated by the Franks between 867 and 870 and the Frankish clergy returned with the victors.
Moravia and Bulgaria indeed contended successively for leadership of the Slav tribes and the setting up of a third, a Slav, empire in the Balkans, to hold a position midway between east and west: their aspirations for leadership helped to dictate the form of Christianity they adopted, eastern or western. Eventually, Moravia fell into the orbit of the Franks and Latin Christianity: Bulgaria to Byzantium and the Greek church. But though the Franks retained their supremacy in Moravia, in the last years of the emperor Louis II, in Italy and on the eastern frontier they suffered misfortunes. Louis himself died near Brescia on 12 August 875, and without a male heir; he bore the imperial title but his effective rule had extended only to Italy.
Charles the Bald and Louis the German had for some years both hoped to succeed to the empire; but Louis’ position was temporarily weak. He had had to repel a Danish raid in east Frisia in 873, and fight the northern Sorbs: but the situation in the southern part of his eastern frontier was more dangerous. His son Carloman now ruled Moravia, the Ostmark of Bavaria and upper Pannonia, while lower Pannonia, the country between Drava and Sava, and Carinthia were under the rule of Arnulf, Carloman’s bastard son. The Moravians however had revolted in 873 and were now merely tributary, inspiring the Czechs of Bohemia with aspirations to independence; in both the Moravian and Pannonian churches German influence had been excluded in favour of that of Methodius with his more favourable attitude to the use of Slav as a liturgical language. Louis the German was ill-placed at the moment to contend for the imperial succession.
Charles the Bald, on the other hand, was relatively unhindered. The northmen of the Loire had in 873 been driven from Angers; a Breton war of succession followed on Solomon’s death in 874 and removed danger from that quarter; in Aquitaine, Bernard, count of the Auvergne, Bernard, marquis of Gothia (now separated from Septimania), and count Boso, were loyal. Charles’s reconciliation with Hincmar strengthened him as against pope John VIII who, though an astute diplomatist, was less outstanding a statesman than Nicholas I. On the news of the emperor’s death Charles set out for Italy with papal approbation. The Saracen fleets held command of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas, and even raided papal territories; south Italy was in a state of war and confusion, and it was even hoped that Charles the Bald, who had been so helpless against his own pirate enemies, might bring salvation to Italy. On Christmas Day, 875, pope John had Charles acclaimed at Rome and crowned him emperor: he then named the bishop of Sens, Ansegis, papal vicar for Gaul and Germany, and received from Charles a renunciation of his right to keep an imperial missus in Rome, together with a generous confirmation of all earlier privileges made to the holy see. This Franco-papal alliance struck, Charles went to Pavia, had himself elected king of Italy, entrusted to count Boso the government of the Italian kingdom, and recrossed the Alps. He had done nothing for the peace or security of Italy. He secured for his own rule the part of Provence which had belonged to Louis II, and on the strength of his Italian successes, convened an assembly at Ponthion for June 876, and received from his nobles fresh oaths of fidelity, made to him as emperor. Fifty bishops from Francia and Lotharingia attended the assembly at Ponthion, both to swear fidelity and to hear the papal letters of admonition read to the assembly by the two papal legates: Charles’s accession to the empire and the kingdom of Italy were solemnly recited, as ushering in a new era of imperial peace and splendour for the Franks; at the end of the session Charles presided, clad in the ceremonial garments of a Byzantine emperor. Nevertheless, the representatives of the east Franks and Louis the German were confined to a single bishop and two counts, and those sent, not to share in the deliberations of the assembly, but to protest on Louis’ behalf at the annexation of the late Louis II’s lands by the king of the western Franks. Moreover, through the influence of Hincmar, the bishops were not ready to accept Ansegis as papal vicar, protesting rather their acceptance of the rights reserved to metropolitans by the sacred canons. The papal vicariat remained a dead letter.
About a month after the assembly at Ponthion, on 26 August 876, Louis the German died at Frankfurt. Charles, now emperor, immediately possessed himself of the left bank of the Rhine, hoping that the jealousies of Louis’ three sons, and the campaign against the Moravians on which Carloman was engaged, would allow him to gain power over the east Franks. One of the three brothers, Louis the Young, however, defeated him at Andernach, and forced him to abandon his hopes of German rule: by a partition made in the Reissgau, the three sons shared out Louis the German’s kingdom: Carloman took Bavaria, Pannonia, Carinthia and the suzerainty of the tributary Slav lands; Louis had Franconia, Saxony and Thuringia and Charles Suabia. Lorraine remained undivided.
In Italy, pope John VIII proved himself a loyal ally of Charles and an able administrator and even strategist. He reclaimed parts of the patrimony from the encroachments of the nobles and had his measures ratified in 877 by a synod of Ravenna. He ranged the south Italian princes against the Saracens, drew the Italian seaports from entangling alliances with the Muslims and achieved a limited success, for the Saracens still raided at times even up to the walls of Rome. In north Italy he had little help from Charles or his officers; count Boso abandoned his rule of Italy to Berengar, count of Friuli, and went off to marry Louis II’s daughter; but in the south, the emperor Basil I in 876 put a Greek garrison in Bari, and was recognized as emperor by the Dalmatians.
In 877, at John VIII’s urgent invitation, the emperor Charles decided to return to Italy. A fleet of Nortmanni had again entered the Seine and Charles bought them off with a large sum. He then took measures at an assembly held at his villa of Quierzy in June 877 to secure stable government during his Italian visit, and these measures were of lasting importance in the history of vassalage and feudal society (see p. 558). The contract initiated by the vassal’s oath had been terminable at death, or indeed, in some circumstances, even before; a vassal’s sons did not automatically become vassals of the same lord or king, and the vassal’s office (palace office or county) did not pass to his son. The vassalage at Quierzy, however, feared that Charles’s son, Louis the Stammerer, whom he proposed to leave as his regent in his absence, might disregard the traditional practice by which honours‘ or benefices did pass to a vassal’s son on his father’s death; several clauses of the capitulary passed at Quierzy therefore were intended as safeguards against such usurpation or interference by the regent. It was laid down that, if a count died while the emperor was in Italy, his son could not be thrust from his father’s office or benefice till the emperor’s return. The presumption was established that the vassal’s son inherited his father’s position and lands. Charles made his second Italian expedition in August, and it brought his reign to an inglorious end. He learned at Pavia that Carloman was marching against him, and that the counts on whose loyalty he had reason to count, abbot Hugh whom he had appointed to guard west Francia from the Vikings, and count Boso and the two Bernards, had revolted against him. Charles recrossed the Alps, and died on the road from the Mont-Cenis on 6 October 877.
The worst period of internal confusion and external attack in the history of the Carolingians followed on the death of Charles the Bald and lasted till the deposition of Charles the Fat (877 till 887). It was also a period of extreme misery for England, for the northmen used the Channel as a waterway and pressed their attacks now on one side, now on another. Succession to Charles the Bald’s kingdom and empire was, in 877, very uncertain. His eldest son, Louis the Stammerer, swore to respect the rights of the clergy and nobles, and was crowned king at Compiègne on 8 December 877. The warlike lay abbot, Hugh, advised negotiations with his German cousins, especially Louis the Young, and a peace of mutual acceptance of the other’s rights was made; Louis the Stammerer could now attend to the threatened revolts of Bernard of Gothia and other Frankish counts. Louis the Young was left free to negotiate with Carloman for the partition of Lotharingia: Carloman had been accepted as king of Italy, and was willing to relinquish his share of Lotharingia to Louis, even though it meant the relinquishing of the palace of Aix, the focus of Carolingian prestige. Louis, king of Italy, was sick, and returned to Bavaria at the end of 877.
He left a situation in Italy very dangerous for the pope, for Frankish counts in the north and the rulers of the small Lombard states in south Italy were quite without control. Marquess Lambert of Spoleto and Adalbert, marquess of Tuscany, entered Rome in Carloman’s name in 878, restored certain of John VIII’s enemies, whom he had banished, and, instead of introducing strong rule in Rome, left the city in anarchy. In the south, the Saracens fought and intrigued successfully; they bought over Sergius, ruler of Naples, and when the pope paid Amalfi to protect his southern territories against them, the city took the money but gave no protection. The pope had to agree to pay the Saracens an annual tribute of 25,000 ‘mangons’ (Arabic coins) almost as a rent for his own territories. In May 878, therefore, pope John VIII set off to get help from the Franks; he reached Arles by sea, and made his way to Troyes, where he had invited Louis the Stammerer and the Fankish bishops to meet him. Memories of the successful Frankish visits of Stephen II and Stephen IV inspired him, and, like them, he recrowned the Frankish king: but neither Louis the Stammerer nor the Frankish bishops could bring him help. In this strait, he offered to make Boso, count of Provence, king of Italy: but though Boso accompanied him back to Pavia, he found the hostility of the Italian counts and bishops too strong and went back across the Alps. John VIII’s position in Italy remained for some years unprotected and precarious.
When Louis the Stammerer died on 10 April 879 he left two sons, Louis III and Carloman. The great Frankish nobles, abbot Hugh, Bernard and Boso, had them both acclaimed as kings: but a section of the Frankish nobles, led by the Paris abbots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Denis, and Conrad, count of Paris, offered the west Frankish crown to the German king, Louis the Young. The latter did indeed advance into western Francia, but used his claim to the crown as a bargaining counter to obtain that part of Lotharingia which Charles the Bald had obtained by partition in 870. The two young west Frankish kings went off to fight the northmen of the Loire: Louis the Young in 880 possessed himself of the whole of Lotharingia, while the two young west Frankish kings partitioned their territories, Louis III taking Francia and Neustria, Carloman, Burgundy and Aquitaine.
Meanwhile, it was a misfortune for the Franks that king Alfred fought so well against the northmen in England, that between the years 871 and 878 he had confined them to a Danelaw consisting of northern England and East Anglia; some of the ‘Danes’ settled with their fighting men to exploit the English ‘harrowers and plowers’, but a large band of professional fighting men sailed for further plunder to the Scheldt and the Rhine mouth. A great host of northmen landed in Flanders in 879, burned Térouanne and Saint-Bertin and fixed their base at Ghent; in 880 they plundered Tournai. The same spring another band of northmen plundered Hamburg and wiped out a Saxon army: the Danish mark, beyond the Elbe was lost. Sorbs and Czechs, encouraged by this Saxon defeat, raided Thuringia. Yet another Danish fleet sailed up the Waal and took Nymwegen, once a Carolingian palace; when Louis the Young besieged them there, they burned the place and sailed away.
While such misfortunes befell the Franks of the Baltic and the Rhine mouth, an adventurer not of Carolingian stock for the first time set himself up as independent ruler in Aquitaine. In October 879 Boso, duke of Provence, had himself elected king by lay nobles and clergy at the council of Mantaille; the bishops present crowned him king of a territory including the basin of the Rhone, from Arles to Lyons. Such revolt against rule that was at least Carolingian, however much divided in exercise, could not be passed over; the lay abbot Hugh, moreover, threatened to be as dangerous as Boso. In June 880 Louis III, Carloman, and Charles of Suabia (only surnamed Charles the Fat in the thirteenth century) took the field against their rebellious nobles: Louis the Young sent a detachment to help. They crushed lay abbot Hugh, took part of his kingdom from Boso, but failed to take Vienne. In 882, however, Carloman sent them further reinforcements from Italy, and Boso’s new kingdom was overthrown; Boso was limited to a small territory round Vienne, Charles the Fat and Carloman divided the rest.
In Italy, John VIII was so hard pressed by the Saracens, that he invited Charles the Fat, whose Suabian territories opened on to the Lombard plain, to come to his help. In 879 Charles came to Italy: had himself recognized king of Italy, as the heir of his brother, without any intervention from John VIII, and returned to Suabia having done nothing to aid the pope. So necessary was some aid to John, that he approached the emperor Basil in 879 for help: the Byzantines took Taranto in 880, their fleet beat the Saracens in the Tyrrhenian sea, but no military aid was forthcoming to defend John against his immediate enemies. Again John appealed to Charles the Fat: who came to Rome in February 881, was crowned emperor, and again departed without any measures of defence for the holy see. Louis the Young died at Frankfurt in 882, and Charles the Fat was more interested in trying to get his own authority recognized in Germany.
In south Italy, however, the wars against the Saracens took a turn for the better: Naples, Salerno and Capua laid aside their quarrels and made common cause against them. They drove the Saracens back into defended positions, from which, however, they continued to send plundering raids, and it was while they were keeping Rome in a state of demi-siege, that John VIII himself was murdered by conspirators within the Lateran.
In Francia, the raids of the northmen were at their worst. The great Danish army within its fortifications at Ghent stood a siege by the abbot Gozelin, and in 880 burned the country between the Scheldt and the Somme. Arras and Cambrai went up in flames; in 881 Amiens and Corbie were destroyed by fire: but in August Louis III won a victory in the field that sent the invaders back to the Meuse. The scene of devastation was merely shifted farther east: Maastricht and Liége, on the Meuse, were burned: so were Cologne and Bonn on the Rhine, together with the palace of Aix, Stavelot, Malmedy, Prüm, Trier and Metz. The northmen of the Loire were no less active: here, Louis III fought them and drove them to leave his lands, for a time, for the coasts of Britain; but in August 882 an accident led to the young king’s death at Saint-Denis. His brother Carloman succeeded Louis III, and Hincmar addressed to him his treatise De Ordine Palatii as a memorandum for orderly government.
As to the great Danish army of the Rhine mouth: Charles the Fat marched against it once again in 882, but instead of carrying through the siege of Asselt, he preferred to rid himself of the danger by paying a heavy geld and granting Godefrid, one of their leaders, a great benefice in Frisia, in return for Godefrid’s baptism. Nevertheless, the Danish raids continued: Deventer and Duisberg were taken, and it was left for count Henry of Lorraine and the bishop of Hamburg, Rimbert, to struggle against the marauders in the north-east; while the great army itself moved to the Scheldt, in 882 sacked the valley of the Somme, Laon and Reims, and chased before it the aged prelate Hincmar, who died in December at Épernay. Lay abbot Hugh and Carloman won a few victories over the Danes, but could not prevent the great army from taking up winter quarters at Amiens; in 884 Carloman’s vassals refused to fight the Danes and he had to buy them off, shortly before his own death in December of that year. Charles the Fat was accepted by the west Frankish nobles as his successor in 885, and theoretically Carolingian unity was re-established; but in western Francia Charles the Fat’s authority was shadowy, and his rule (in so far as it existed) exercised by lay abbot Hugh and Bernard Plantevelue.
The reign of Charles the Fat saw failure after failure against the northmen. They moved from Amiens to Louvain, and an expedition of west Franks in 885 failed to expel them. A certain Hugh the Bastard concerted with the Dane Godefrid a rising in Lorraine in the same year; Charles the Fat succeeded in arresting Hugh and having his eyes put out, while the assassination of Godefrid was successfully arranged by count Henry: all of which brought about the end of Godefrid’s Danish duchy of Frisia. But the same summer of 885 the great Danish army moved to the Seine and besieged Paris, which was defended by abbot Gozelin, now its bishop. Gozelin had been abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the basilica with the sacred relics of Germanus, bishop of Paris; the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés had been twice before sacked by the Danes, but the relics of St Germain had been hastily removed beforehand. This siege of Paris was the greatest of the Danish attacks: the city stood a year’s siege and was defended by count Eudes of Paris, later to be king, and by abbot Gozelin, who died upon the walls in the midst of the siege. Messages calling for aid were sent to Charles the Fat, who made his way to the Seine: but all he could do was to promise the Danes a large geld, and permission to pass through the city and up the head waters of the Seine in order to plunder the upper Rhone and Burgundy. The citizens of Paris, however, refused the Danes passage up-river on either side of the Ile de la Cité, and the Danes had to drag their boats overland along the river bank. The glory of successful resistance fell to count Eudes and Saint-Germain: not to the emperor. Charles made count Eudes duke of Paris and gave him the abbeys of lay abbot Hugh, lately dead: he then withdrew and left the Danes to ravage the valley of the Oise and in the winter, Burgundy. In this winter of desolation, Dijon held out, and Tours: their fortifications stood them in good stead.
The incompetence and inertia of Charles the Fat, whose great bulk seems to have been due to disease, were no less apparent in his German and Italian dominions than in Frisia, the Rhine mouth and western Francia. The east Frankish counts and dukes disregarded the royal authority and settled their own quarrels by force of arms; a specially dangerous struggle occurred in Bavaria and its eastern mark between rival claimants for local rule, and beyond the east mark the Moravians pillaged the Frankish frontier lands and Pannonia. In Moravia Methodius continued to teach his converts under great difficulties, and after his death in 885 his followers were expelled from Moravia. Moravia was out of Frankish, or Roman, control. Similarly, in Italy imperial authority was at a discount. Pope Marinus I (882–884) appealed to Charles for help against count Guy of Spoleto, and Charles came to Italy, declared Guy’s estates confiscated, and made a treaty with Venice. But the sentence against Guy could not be executed, even by the faithful Berengar of Friuli, and in 885 Charles had to pardon him. The papacy remained unaided through the short pontificate of Hadrian III (884–885), though an imperial missus had been reestablished in Rome, and the next pope, Stephen V (885–891) relinquished all hope of help from the Carolingians, and adopted a policy of relying on the small, south Italian states for help against the Saracens, and of an alliance with Byzantium. The Saracens burned Monte Cassino and other Italian monasteries in 883, and Stephen called for help upon Basil I, whose Greek troops chased the Muslims from Calabria, and in south-west Italy established his authority over Naples and Salerno. Meanwhile Stephen made a firm peace with Guy of Spoleto by ‘adopting’ him, and encouraging him to attack the Saracens and conquer Capua and Benevento, all of which he did. These local forces in Italy proved much more useful to the holy see than the distant Carolingians.
One offence against Carolingian unity ceased when Boso of Vienne died in January 887. His son Louis did homage to Charles the Fat and the emperor, reverting to the old Greco-Roman expedient, ‘adopted’ him: Provence was restored in appearance to Carolingian rule. Charles’s incapacity and deterioration, physical, mental and moral, was now, however, apparent to all: his authority was openly set at nought. In July 887 he was forced to disgrace his counsellor and arch-chancellor, Liutward; in the autumn his nephew, Arnold of Carinthia, the son of Carloman rose and, a month or two later, proclaimed himself king at Frankfurt; Charles the Fat found himself bereft of all support, renounced the imperial dignity and died on 13 January 888. Carolingian unity had finally been dissolved. Count Eudes and Guy of Spoleto both in 888 claimed the title of king of Francia Occidentalism and Eudes easily maintained himself against his rival.
Guy went off to dispute for the crown of Italy with Berengar of Friuli: and another claim to kingship was put forward by a Welf, Rudolf of Burgundy, who claimed the corridor kingdom of Lothar II Louis seized power in Provence. The claimants for local power had long, in fact, divided the empire of Charlemagne, but they had all been Carolingian by family. From 888 even this phantasmal Carolingian unity disappeared: the new local rulers were of other stock.