The Carolingian Realms

By the mid-eighth century, Frankish rulers held lands across western and central Europe, chiefly in what is now France and Germany, and their campaigns reached into Italy and the middle Danube region. Pepin became king in 751 after his family’s mayors of the palace had come to direct government and military affairs under Merovingian kings. His son Charlemagne added Lombard Italy, Saxony in present-day northern Germany, Bavaria in southern Germany and lands toward the Danube to Frankish rule. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome in 800. The new title outlasted the unity of the territories: Louis the Pious and his sons repeatedly renegotiated who would rule each region.

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From palace office to kingship

Pepin’s rise rested on a transfer of power that had begun generations earlier. The mayor of the palace, the senior officer of the royal household, directed government and military affairs under the Merovingian kings. Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard, writing for the ruling court, describes the final Merovingian king Childeric III as retaining the royal name while the mayor exercised authority. Pepin held that office before he took the throne. In 751 Childeric was deposed and Pepin became king; the shift made a ruling family’s existing political and military power explicit in the royal title.

The alliance with the papacy gave the new dynasty recognition and created reciprocal obligations. Pope Stephen II travelled to the Frankish kingdom in 754 and anointed Pepin and his sons Charles and Carloman. Pepin promised to protect the Roman Church against Lombard pressure in Italy. His first expedition into northern Italy followed in late 754 or early 755; a second came in 756, after the Lombard king Aistulf broke his promises and besieged Rome. Both campaigns forced the Lombards to surrender territory that Pepin assigned to the pope. The arrangement made the Frankish king a military protector in Italy and gave the pope land and political authority.

When Pepin died in 768, his sons Charles and Carloman each received a kingdom. Carloman’s death in 771 allowed Charles to take over his brother’s lands, with the support of leading Franks from that kingdom. Charles later became known as Charlemagne. His takeover avoided another division at that moment, but inheritance remained a recurring question because kings expected to provide rule and resources for their sons.

Conquest and the work of holding territory

Charlemagne’s campaign in Lombard Italy began in 773 after Pope Hadrian I asked for help. The Franks besieged Pavia; after its surrender in 774, Charlemagne took the Lombard royal title. In 781, Charlemagne installed his son Pepin as king over Italy, assigning a member of his dynasty to rule this conquered kingdom. Subsequent interventions and grants to Rome continued the papal relationship that had supported Pepin.

In Saxony, in present-day Germany, conquest was a long process. Frankish campaigns began in 772 and continued through 804. Einhard describes Saxon leaders submitting after campaigns, giving hostages and accepting royal officers, followed by renewed resistance. The king also demanded Christian conversion. In 804, according to Einhard, Frankish forces deported ten thousand Saxons with their families from the Elbe region and resettled them in other parts of Gaul, the lands of present-day France, and Germany.

In Bavaria, in present-day southern Germany, Duke Tassilo III had accepted Charlemagne’s authority and given hostages, including his son. In 788 he was summoned before a royal assembly, judged for alleged disloyalty and removed; the king replaced ducal rule with counts who administered Bavarian districts. Against the Avars, whose power centred on the middle Danube, Charlemagne’s forces campaigned from 791. After his first campaign, his son Pepin and regional governors directed the remaining operations. The seven-year war ended in the 790s, when the Franks seized the Avar ruler’s accumulated gold, silver and other treasure, enriching the court.

By contrast, the expedition into Iberia, the lands of present-day Spain and Portugal, in 778 failed to establish durable control south of the Pyrenees. On the return march, local Basques ambushed the Frankish rear guard at Roncesvalles, killing prominent officers.

The imperial coronation at Rome

After Pope Leo III was attacked in Rome in April 799, he traveled to Charlemagne’s court at Paderborn in July. In November, Leo returned to Rome escorted by Frankish bishops and counts, who restored him to the Lateran. Charlemagne set out for Italy with an army in August 800 and reached Rome in late November. On Christmas Day, during Mass at St Peter’s, Leo placed an imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head and the Roman people acclaimed him emperor of the Romans.

The coronation added Roman imperial dignity to the titles Charlemagne already held as king of the Franks and Lombards. The Annals of Lorsch linked the new title to the extent of his rule across Italy, Gaul and Germany and to the need for a Christian emperor in the West. The ceremony also strengthened the pope’s position as the person who crowned an emperor. Charlemagne’s relationship with the eastern Roman emperors continued through diplomacy after 800. His successors inherited the title, but not a settled rule for pairing imperial authority with the kingdoms assigned to other members of the family.

Louis the Pious and the succession problem

Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious succeeded him in 814. At a general assembly in Aachen, in present-day Germany, in 817, Louis crowned his eldest son Lothar co-emperor. The written Ordinatio imperii designated Lothar as successor and assigned Louis’s other sons, Pepin and Louis, kingdoms in Aquitaine, in southwestern France, and Bavaria under Lothar’s senior authority. The plan sought to preserve one empire while giving younger sons royal status and territories; it required the brothers to consult on affairs of the whole realm.

The plan changed as Louis’s family changed. His second wife Judith gave birth to a son, Charles, in 823. Louis then tried to provide Charles with a share of the inheritance, unsettling earlier allocations. Rebellions in 830–31 and 833–34 drew in the emperor’s adult sons, their supporters and powerful churchmen. At Soissons in 833, while Louis was in the hands of his opponents, an assembly deposed him through a public act of penance. He regained power the next year. These conflicts were about the distribution of royal lands and offices as much as a personal dispute: granting a son a kingdom also gave his followers access to patronage and authority.

When Louis died in 840, Lothar claimed the senior imperial position, but Charles the Bald and Louis the German resisted. After fighting, Charles and Louis swore their alliance at Strasbourg in 842, each speaking in the language of the other brother’s kingdom before their armies swore in their own languages. The arrangement they reached with Lothar at Verdun in August 843 assigned the western kingdom to Charles, the eastern kingdom to Louis and a long middle territory from the North Sea through the Rhine lands and Burgundy to Italy to Lothar, who retained the imperial title. His realm joined Italy, Burgundy and Provence with the northern corridor later called Lotharingia.

Later partitions and successor kingdoms

The settlement at Verdun did not end the distribution of Carolingian lands. When Lothar I died in 855, his sons divided his kingdom into Italy, Provence and Burgundy, and the northern realm later called Lotharingia. After Lothar II died in 869 without a legitimate heir, his uncles Charles the Bald and Louis the German divided Lotharingia in the Treaty of Meersen in 870. Charles briefly held the imperial title after campaigning in Italy in 875; his brother’s son, Charles the Fat, later united much of the Frankish empire under one ruler from 884 to 887 before being deposed. In 911 the Carolingian line in East Francia ended, and the nobles chose a new king.

By about 900, rulers in West Francia, East Francia and Italy had separate courts and successor politics, though their kings still drew on Carolingian forms of rule and claims to inheritance. Otto I, an East Frankish and Saxon king, was crowned emperor in Rome in 962, taking up an imperial tradition associated with Charlemagne.

For the wider setting, see History of the Frankish Realms.