Gone Medieval - The Destruction of Charlemagne's Legacy

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

What happens when one of the greatest empires in history begins to unravel? Matt Lewis explores the turbulent era of the Carolingian Empire's rise and fall with Matthew Gabriel and David Perry. The Carolingian Civil War saw kings fighting kings, brother facing off against brother, and sons challenging their fathers. Together they delve into the succession disputes among the Frankish rulers, the violent conflicts that shaped medieval Europe, and the myth-making that justified Carolingian rule.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis.

Charlemagne is a name familiar to many. Charles the Great, who resurrected the idea of the Roman Empire, is remembered as one of the most significant figures of the early medieval period in Europe. What he built wouldn't last long after his death before it began to fracture, caught between the swords of competing siblings. This period gave birth to the idea of a Frankish people and defined identities for generations. In their new book, Oathbreakers, The War of Brothers that shattered an empire and made medieval Europe,

Matthew Gabriel and David Perry explore the succession dispute that descended into bloody violence and the ways in which it broke but created so much. Welcome to God Medieval, David and Matt. It's fantastic to have you here. So happy to be here. It's such a pleasure. Wonderful.

The book is called Oath Breakers, which is a fantastic title for a book. Absolutely incredible. I wonder if you could just start off by telling us where in history and who are we talking about here. Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we're in the middle of the 9th century, well, really kind of the earlier part of the 9th century. And the way that we set our scene is the rise of a group of people known as the Franks. They're one of the Germanic peoples had interacted with for a very long time with the Roman Empire. in what's the period in unislaid antiquity, and then they kind of established their own kingdom.

And in the midst of a kind of bloody coup in the 8th century, they take power from the previous dynasty, and they establish themselves under their great leader, Charlemagne, who most people have probably heard of. Even in the United States, they tend to hear of Charlemagne. And they establish an empire that spans most of Western Europe, you know, even beyond the Rhine and into, it's known a Saxony, into the Pasadena, been into the Balkans a little bit, and down into Italy. And then it all falls apart within two generations. Like as quickly as they rise, they fall apart. And so we set our scene by that dissolution of the empire and kind of the long threads since the rise of the empire that led to its downfall.

Yeah, we need to be very careful that we're talking about something very specific when we say Franks during this period, aren't there? There's a danger of assuming that means French people, which is kind of what they will eventually become, but we're a long way off from that. French people don't really exist at this point. And the Franks mean something very specific, doesn't it? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, Franks is a European-wide term. It's really interesting, actually, is that the conquered peoples, these various groups called the Lombards, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, they oftentimes assume the name of Frankish, you know, in order to associate themselves with the empire, but it's not confined to a geographical area that we know of as French. There's long, complicated reasons why that

becomes kind of France later on, but that's maybe for the next book. So. And then there's also part of who the Franks are are people who tell themselves, stories about being the Franks, and we talk about that a lot. They have this narrative of themselves really as a new chosen people, as the new Israelites. That's a very different way of constructing a people than we might say today. But when we think about who the Franks were, we think that's really central. It's the people who tell themselves the stories about being Franks, which may sound a little tautological, but is, we think, critical here. Yeah. And how do they rise during 8th century, 9th century? How do they rise to become a continent?

power. They're really good at killing people. I mean, that's the really short answer. But, you know, they gain their power through military victory, but also by conquering peoples and then allowing them a way in. You know, like we were telling about, and like David just kind of mentioned, about telling stories about themselves that were compelling to other people that made other people want to be associated with them. You know, it's one thing to kind of have the biggest stick on the block, but it's another thing in order to kind of keep that loyalty, you know, across generations. And the Franks were very good about doing that. So that even, you know, in some of my other research, this is in the book itself, in Earth Breaker's itself, but in some of my other research I talk about, like, even down

to the 11th, 12th, 13th century, lots of people still thought of themselves as Franks, even after the empire has kind of dissolved. The other thing, too, is that, you know, the family was very, the Carolingians, this dynasty that set itself up was very good about including others. And what I mean by that is that they created a narrative that it wasn't just about the dynasty themselves, though, like in our book, the dynasty is kind of some of the most of the main characters. It was an identity that was open to all. So the higher aristocracy, even down to the most lowly freemen, they could participate in this narrative that David was talking about,

about chosenness. And it made them want to participate in ways that I think are really particularly interesting, in ways that we don't think about the construction of early medieval societies oftentimes. Yeah, it sounds like they're taking a little bit of a lesson from the old Roman Empire there in the sense that you conquer people, but then you allow them to become part of the society. You give them, as you said, you give them ways in to become a functioning part of it rather than being just a ruled people. And I think that's something that you see really from successful conquerors throughout history, conquerors who don't just conquer a place and then rule it for a lifetime of people

who build something afterwards that that is really a critical part of it. And yeah, the Franks before the Carolingians were very good at it. And in this transition of power to the Carolingians, those doors. doors remained open. One of the things that comes to clearly in the book and that you've already kind of alluded to is this idea that in the ninth century, the Carolingians were really keen to sort of curate their own history, to present a very particular version of their rise, their history. What does that tell us about what they think of themselves in the present?

Because they're sort of constructing a past to justify or bolster their present. You know, one of the things, there's a bunch of different pieces of that, but one that's really important to the oath breaker story is that they're telling themselves a tale about a lie, really, about stability. So chosenness by God, but also stability and sort of smooth generational turnover and family where the father is trusted and loved by his children and then hands off power to his children, and it all goes very well and very smoothly. So that's part of what it means to be a Carolingian is to be part of this narrative, again, this lie, this empire of lies is one of the phrases that we like to talk about because it was never that way. It isn't that way from literally

the first generation. It's not just two or three generations in. It gets messy. That's also true because there's just more of them over time because people keep having children and get and, you know, and expanding the family. But from the first moment, it is not stable. But there's a real pressure to claim that it is. And in that tension, we think there's kind of a crack in the foundation of the Carolingian Empire that expands suddenly in the 840s. And I think, You know, one of the things that we found particularly interesting, you know, doing this research and writing this book was that, you know, as David said, I mean, this is an empire built on a foundation of lies. But it's particularly interesting that if people know anything about the Carolinges, they know, they may have heard of Charlemagne. They know about kind of the European one empire, if they've heard of it at all.

But it's really portrayed as kind of a failed launch in some ways. Like, we almost got to modern Europe through Charlemagne. Like he had kind of bureaucratic forms and, you know, governmental organization that would kind of pre-examine. the pre-figure in some ways the modern nation state. But the reality is, is like, these guys knew and they had anxiety from the very beginning about how tenuous their hold on power was. As strong as their armies were, it only took a few nobles to maybe bring the whole thing crashing down. And you see that again and again, as David was saying, and that's something true from the very beginning of the Carolingians is it is a story of coups. It is stories of sons betraying fathers and fathers betraying nephews and all sorts of things like that. Yeah, they seem to do that very kind of crafty thing of telling a story about their past and how they arrived at where they were that makes the present feel somehow inevitable. They were always meant to be in power. This is the way the world was designed to operate. And it was always going to end this way.

You know, they just, this is just the story of how they arrived there. Yeah, it's written teleologically. Like, it is a story that has begun at a certain moment in which you inevitably, as you said, kind of end up at the rise of the Carolingians. the rise of the Frank and the empire that they held. And then we want to talk about how quickly that can fall apart. And for reasons that may be obvious, Matt and I, and we think lots of people are thinking about what it's like to live in a society that tells a story about stability and inevitability, but maybe it's a little more fragile than we thought it was.

That was definitely on our mind as we decided to write this book and frustratingly and stressfully it stayed on our mind now as the book comes to publication. I don't know what you're talking about, David. Who could possibly imagine what David is talking about? I think maybe we should probably leave that alone, though. We're fine with 9th century politics. I'm just saying that these are things on our mind that society's empires or states say it's inevitable and stable, but what if it isn't? Well, we can definitely say that in the 9th century, it wasn't.

Yeah, I mean, I was just about to ask, you know, did this careful curation of their own story work? Did it offer them any security in the present? or did it fall apart? No. I mean, that's really the short answer is, no, not really. You know, well, I may think of the longer answer is a little bit more complicated than that. But I think the audience that found the argument most compelling was actually modern historians. And that's really something that we really work hard to kind of dig through and get back to the primary sources in order to tell this really rich, interesting story, is that that anxiety, which we were talking about earlier that the Carolingians felt that Franks felt.

about the nature of their empire was readily apparent. And I think it was apparent in the surety that they presented themselves in that, you know, because, for example, like the Royal Frankishandals, one of our kind of core sources, it was probably composed very close to the court of Charlamagne himself, if not at the direction of the emperor himself. You know, that was begun in the early 9th century, probably the late 8th and then the early ninth century. And then the empire's gone within 30 years.

Like, it didn't tell us compelling story, even to the next generation that would stop, you know, people having real problems with the way that the empire was being ordered. But in the 19th century, like, people tended to buy that, you know, and I think that's one of the reasons that we wanted to tell this story is to dig back through that historiography. You know, we end the book, you know, spoiler alert, talking about the only monument that exists, at least that we know about, to the Battle of Fontenwa, which is kind of the great central battle of the Civil War. And it was erected in the 19th century, and it told a really different story than the reality of the 9th century itself, but it was done in service of the 19th century French imperial state.

Like, almost explicitly, it was done that way. And so the historiography, the scholarship around it really needs to be kind of pushed to the side, or at least interpreted in a different way, in order for us to understand what was really going through the minds of people who lived through this period. Yeah, I think one of the things I am probably guilty of banging on about fairly regularly is the ways in which we are still kind of trapped by 19th century versions of history. In Britain, it's this kind of whiggish idea that empire, much like the Carolingians were saying, the British Empire was inevitable. All of the good things in history were the things that moved us closer to empire. The things that were bad were the things that contributed nothing to the

emergence of the British Empire. And we're still, I think, when we think about who was a good king and a bad king of England, we still often fall into that trap of, it's the ones who conquer and who fight and who make Britain great that we still consider to be good king. we're almost still trapped in that 19th century mindset that's something that moves towards empire is good and it sounds like the interpretation of the Carolingians and as he said, almost that foundation of modern Europe sort of fell into that trap for a while.

Matt and I get angry about the 19th century a lot. The anger at the 19th century really informs a lot of our writing both in our previous book and in our journalism and in oathbreakers because we just think it set up ways of looking at the past that are fundamentally wrong. And that it's not that the actual stories don't have inspiring and formative narratives to them and as well as terrible. I mean, history is very messy, of course, but that we are particularly angry at 19th century narratives about medieval Europe. And sitting together, we get mad at the 19th century.

And I'm mad at the 19th century right now talking to you. So there we are. But unfortunately, for gone medieval, that's far in the distant future. And we don't worry about all of that too much. So we'll silently seed about the 19th century historians who have corrupted our view of what happened in the medieval world, I think. If we could just take a couple of steps through the existence of the Carolingian Empire, I wondered whether you felt Charlemagne had created something that was almost doomed. It's an empire that kind of explodes.

It becomes really big, really quickly. Does it maybe lack the structures to survive in the way that, say, the Roman Empire did? Was the Carolingian Empire always doomed? I don't think so in the sense that every generation they could have had a quick civil war with a resolution and continued that process. Or people could have been. I mean, Charlemagne becomes the sole heir to his father somewhat by accident because the right people die, but also then is very careful to make sure that other people who could be rivals are removed from the scene. His son, Louis does the same thing. It's not that hard for us. And there are these moments in the book where we pause briefly to imagine, well, what if Lothar was a little bit. more aggressive or what if, you know, Charles and Louis didn't talk to each other. There's one or two battles that could have gone a different way. It's not hard to imagine another generation and even another generation, but only if there's enough violence to keep the number

of eligible Carolingians relatively small generation after generation. And that is not what happened. That's something we're really trying to convey when we get even to the height of the action, like in the midst of the Civil War. You know, and as David was saying, like, if somebody had done something just a little bit different. There's really no guarantee that Lothar, who is the eldest son and the co-emperor with his father, Louis the Pius, or Charlemagne's grandson, couldn't have ended the civil war right there and reinstalled himself as emperor, destroyed the armies and the kind of the ambitions of his younger brothers.

It was really possible. In fact, it seemed almost inevitable throughout most of it until that moment when it wasn't. You know, Louis the German makes a very strategic decision. The guy who's supposed to stop Louis the German, Lothar's younger brother, you know, makes a really bad decision. and Louis the German wins that battle. And then when we get to Fontenwa in June of 841, you know, it could have turned out very differently.

It seems like the sources were actually saying that it was going a very different way. And then Lothar ends up losing he has to retreat and go in a different direction. And even then he's not cowed. And there's lots still more to the Civil War, you know, it drags on for at least another couple of years and really for much longer after that. So I don't think there's anything particularly about this empire, which seems kind of doomed to fail. it could have gone on just like it was going on.

The thing was, though, is that our assumptions about what an empire should be like are too often colored, like as you were saying, by the 19th century expectations. And so, yeah, it wasn't a 19th century empire, no, it wasn't Rome, but it was its own thing and it did a thing for a really long time. Yeah, yeah. And after Charlemagne's death, he succeeded by his son, Louis the Pius. Was Louis considered a good ruler? Hence by whom, right?

But go ahead, Matt, you start that one. I mean, that's kind of the million-dollar question because, you know, our story, although it's kind of about Oathrakers is really about kind of the Civil War, which takes place ever through Louis the Pius' death, it's a lot of the decade before that, too, you know, because you see the same actors on the same stage doing the same things that were happening under Louis the Pius' reign. I think Louis did the best he could. I think, you know, his epithet, the pious kind of blinds us sometimes to how ruthless I think he was, or at least he could be at times. But then he wasn't ruthless enough at other times. There were moments in which, so there's two coup attempts

against Louis, one in 830 and 1 in 833. Both are partially successful. There's no reason why they couldn't have been ultimately successful, removed from the throne permanently. And then after 830, he just kind of forgives everybody or tries to, you know, reintegrate the empire and then those same guys revolted in 833. Like, there should be consequences if there are insurrections if people want to hold on to power. And he just doesn't do that. And there's reasons he doesn't do that. But, But it's really compelling to think about, like, again, what if he had just acted a little bit differently? He certainly thought about empire differently than his father, and that created its own problems. But I don't think that necessarily he was the cause of the downfall of the empire or anything like that.

And there were certainly decades in which things were going very well for him, and it looked like he could have done some really interesting different things. And then one of the things we try to do is unearth criticism of him at the time through kind of comprehensive. complicated stories, right? So is he considered a good ruler? Well, by the people who, you know, were obeying him at any given moment. But there is always, it's clear to us, kind of a backdrop of criticism of how he's ruling or blaming him, blaming the ruler when things are generally going wrong. He has a later marriage and then another son who he names Charles after his dad. And then Judith is his queen. And there's sort of a reorientation of the court around Judith and this guy named Bernard of Septimania, who is sort of our bad penny that keeps turning up again and again. And then this new baby son, Charles, who, you know, that's a dangerous name for a son, our grandson of Charlemagne. So there's criticism from people on the out. But you can't necessarily, or at least the sources don't survive of sort of blunt criticism. So it's often framed through, for example, there's this wonderful text about a demon, a possession. The demon's name is Wiggo, which is one of my favorite things ever. And it's a young

girl ranting in Latin. And of course, the young girl does not speak Latin. And so, and it's describing how bad things are going. Or there's another and it's not, it's not an accident that it's a woman. There's the poor woman of Leone who has a vision of hell and sees various things there that tell her how bad stuff is going. That's how you criticize an emperor, right? You don't say the emperor is terrible. You say, I met this person who was possessed by a demon and the demon said it was terrible. So don't get mad at me. But there's enough of that that we do think there was a ground swell. in various points of real dissent and discontent and worry, concern, like, what's going to happen next if we don't get our act together? Yeah, and I guess in terms of what does happen next, what happens when Louis dies?

Well, almost, almost, yeah. Wiggo the demon was right, yeah. The unsung hero of our story, Wiggo the Demon. So almost immediately after he dies, it's not really clear what's going to happen. And what I mean by that is that after the revolt against Louis in 830 and 833, at least the last one definitely led by his eldest son Lothar, who is also his co-emperor, he's crowned co-emperor with his father earlier on. Louis and Lothar are kind of reconciled by that point.

So it seems like maybe Lothar is just going to step into his father's shoes and he's going to be the emperor and his brothers, Lothar's brothers, Charles the Balb, and Lleu, the German, are just going to be kind of subordinate kings in their own kingdoms under the emperor. And then it all kind of goes sideways from there in which Lothar tries to gain the submission of his younger brothers and fails for various reasons. And then they decide that they're going to get their armies together and then they're going to march out against one another. And, you know, it all ends in a very bloody battle. So we do end up with sort of breaking up of the empire in the sense that there are now kind of three different regions with three different kings. And am I right

that Charles kind of gets given Aquitaine as well, like the young Charles gets given Aquitaine just to kind of give him something, I guess, to keep him quiet. So you've almost got this four-way split of the empire. And is it using too much hindsight to say that that sounds like a fairly dodgy compromise? It's not a recipe for stability. We have to end our books somewhere. And we do end it with the treaty that as far as anyone knew was just a temporary cessation of hostilities. It turned out to be a more permanent cessation of hostilities. But they didn't come up with this agreement and go home and think, all right, well, it's all done now. Now we can just sort of go on our way. everyone was still thinking about what was going to happen next,

and there's a bunch of reasons why that war didn't restart. But in the next set of generations, there continued to be just echo after echo after echo of this conflict in a way that with hindsight, it's very clear, there was not going to be a reversion to the empire of Louis the Pius, let alone of Charlemagne. There's too many Carolingians who have too many reasonable claims on power and have armies.

And so that's a tricky situation. Yeah, yeah. The Battle of Fontenoy that you sort of mentioned a couple of times in 841, sort of looms fairly large over the book. It's sort of a starting point, and it looms large over the whole story. Can you tell us a little bit about why that battle happened and what happened at the battle? So I'll start with that, and then maybe Matt you can talk about how people felt about it, which was not good. Spoiler. So in June of 841, it's a Saturday morning, right? It's one of these, often in the middle ages, it's sort of hard to tell exactly when and where, but we know pretty much where this was. We know it was a Saturday morning. I like to imagine it was a sunny

French Saturday because no one mentions any rain, right? I would like $100 million and a cast of 10,000 to stage this or to have Peter Jackson staged it or something. I can imagine it, right? I can see it in my mind. There are sort of three major armies, but in some ways there are six divisions lined up with Lothar, the emperor commanding one. His nephew, Hepin the second, the guy who thinks he should have Aquitaine commanding another, and then a third one commanded by a noble. Then we have Louis the German with his allied with Charles. Charles is 18 at this moment, right? Louis and Lothar are in their 30s. Lothar might even be 40, I'd have to check. But they're in their 30s right there.

They're well-grown men, whereas Charles is only 18. And then again, a third wing. So we have these six divisions moving at each other over a couple mile radius. And then we have a lot of silences or tropes showing us. up in text. And what I mean by that is some of the sources just say, and then there was a battle, period. That's it. And other ones say, and then there was a battle, and they describe scenes from the Aeneid or from the Iliad or from other sort of classical texts. And we can't believe either of them, but we can start to piece together what actually happened. And what I think actually happened

is that the middle of Lothar's army, the one commanded by Pepin, broke. And either they broke because they were scared and ran away, or they broke. One of the main strategies of armies at this time is pretend to retreat and then not actually retreat at all, lure the other side in. But sometimes when you pretend to retreat, it's very easy for that to turn into a real retreat. Or, so three possibilities, and I wish I could just give a solid, this is what happened to answer, but that's just not the way that the history works. Or Pepin was aware that Lothar's wing was in danger.

and so was trying to move to rally to them to recombine, but couldn't get there in time. And in any ways, that broke. The center of the army broke. Lothar's wing broke, and they started to retreat. And one of the things about battles at this moment is that people imagine, you know, sort of mass carnage in medieval battles, but that's really not, I mean, not that it was healthy to be on a medieval battlefield, but we don't get the kind of fields and woods covered with corpses.

It's when one side is running away. if the other side is chasing after them, that is when it turns very bad. And often the other side doesn't chase after them. The other side says, hey, we won. Now we can enter negotiations with the upper hand. But in this case, the armies pursue and pursue and pursue and there is a mass slaughter. Yeah, and that seems to be very clear from the sources because the sources seem to try to cover up or to exculpate the fact that there was a pursuit. And we have to remember, too, that at this moment, when the Civil War breaks out, we have brothers fighting brothers, literally, uncles fighting nephews. Like this is a familial battle in which they're, you know, much like the American Civil War, for example, like you have families divided on either side of this battle. And more than that, like you have a very tight knit for the previous two generations, a very tightnate aristocracy that these people had campaigned together. across generations. They'd intermarried with one another. They were friends with one another. And this civil war kind of split them apart. So you really have not that the fact that this turned into a massacre is not just

significant because it's a massacre, but it's significant because of who these people are killing. And when the kind of cold light of the Sunday morning dawns on them, when the pursuit is ended and the Lothar's tents are plundered by the victorious army of Charles de Bald and Louis the German, they have to reckon with that. And that's what most of our sources that we have about the battle are written in the immediate aftermath of that, in which they are just absolutely kind of horrified about what has happened, kind of shocked to their core, that this massacre had occurred within the chosen people of God. Because it's not the Franks who thought of themselves as chosen across several generations during Charlemagne and Louis the Pius, fighting external enemies, be they kind of polytheistic,

or non-Christian, or other kind of, quote-unquote, Christian, but they didn't consider them really Christian, in like Lombards or, you know, Aquitans or, you know, something like that. Like, these were Franks killing Franks, and they knew it, and everybody knew it. And so there had to be some sort of justification for it. So one of the things that happens almost immediately is that bishops gather on the battlefield and say a mass. This wasn't like super uncommon, but the fact that they have to kind of call a council and determine what God meant by having this battle and by Charles and Louis coming to their

victory really says something about their mindset. And it's one of shocking kind of horror. It even, I think, becomes more problematic intellectually for them when it doesn't end the war. Lothar retreats back to Akin. He recombines his forces, and he's a very astute politician. He mobilizes Saxons in Saxony to attack Louis the Germany and mobilizes Bretons in Charles de Bald's land to attack Charles de Bald. And the war continues for another couple of years. And they have to reckon with the fact that this mass slaughter was not actually the end of the civil war, even as horrifying as it was, but really just the beginning.

getting. Yeah, I find quite often when you see writers reaching for those tropes from antiquity, they're almost looking for a way to make sense of something that they know is massive. This is, you know, defining, this is really important. And given that how many sources are written about the battle almost in the immediate aftermath, there must have been a real sense at the time that this is big and not in a good way. You know, we open our book and then we come back to him number of times with this nobleman named Anglbert, a good Frankish name, in the camp of Lothar.

So he is, as far as we know, and Matt, you can correct me if I get it's wrong, but he's a secular noble, as far as we know, but well-educated. We talk a lot about the Carolingian Renaissance, right? So that's a phrase that people may know.

There definitely is intensification and standardization of learning across the aristocracy within the Carolingian Empire. That's really important. And Engelbert, right, this Frankish noble, is a product of that.

So he's, we think essentially immediately, he may still be in his armor, his sword may still have, he may have just cleaned his weapons as he's finished his headlong retreat away from this defeat. He sits down and what does he do? He writes a poem, which is like the thing to do immediately after battle, but not unfamiliar, I think, to people who can think about, you know, the World War I poem, you know, those so powerful, at least I had to read them in school. I think about those poems all the time as I counter Engelbert and he writes, You know, the woods tremble, the fields tremble, right?

He's drawing from biblical examples to try to make sense of it. And it's clear that he's shook not just because he lost a battle, but because of the familial nature that then results in such a huge slaughter. Yeah, yeah, in that sense that the Franks are turning in on themselves for sort of the first time. So does the Battle of Fontenoy and the trouble that follows it, does this fundamentally change and redefine the relationship between all of that? those Frankish lands. Yeah, I think it does. And, you know, here's the irony, too, is that although as horrified as the Franks were in the immediate aftermath of the battle, they've been doing this for generations, just on a much smaller scale. And that's what's so interesting, and that's one of the themes we try to pull out, is like, Fontenois was a shock. And it really did kind of change the

course of how the empire would think of itself and the Franks would think of themselves. But at the same time. Like, Franks had, in reality, been killing each other for a really long time, you know, and for lots less reasons than the fate of the empire, you know, and so there was something different about the way that this was conceptualized. It might have had to do with, you know, as we, I think, kind of suggest, with the scale of the slaughter, the fact that there was a pursuit and people were cut down kind of as they ran. But it could also do with the realization, I should say, that this was something you just don't come back from. You know, people have grudges in the Frankish world. It animated the coups of the 830s, and then you see those same guys

as players in the 840s as well. They just didn't like other people, and it became really apparent that after blood was shed, it would really change the way that people would relate. And maybe that unified empire was only a dream then. And I guess it sort of unravels that whole Carolingian effort to present themselves as the people destined to rule. You know, it's sort of pulls the veil away from that illusion that they've carefully crafted over many, many years, all of a sudden, in the blood of a field at Fontenoy, all of that is just torn apart. Absolutely. And they try to restitch that together, right? That's what the bishops are doing on the field. One of the most important sources we have is a chronicle by a guy named Nittard,

who was a noble, ultimately in Charles's camp. Nuttard was at Fontenoy and says, and then it happened, and we won, and my book's done. I'm not going to write anymore. that's book two of four, because then immediately he starts writing books, I mean, not immediately, sometime later he starts writing book three, saying, okay, all of you are way out of line with how you're interpreting what happened to Fontenois, and he tries to tell a better story, but he can't quite do it. And so we see these attempts to stitch it back together that are so interesting in part because they fail. They absolutely fail. And they fail because there are just too many dead people on the field. There's too much death, I think. Whereas before there was death, but it would be, you know,

an assassination or in prison or mall set of executions or some of the people we open with this attempted coup against Charlemagne where some of the people are executed and some of the people are exiled but eventually allowed back and some of the people are imprisoned, right? But it's just not on the same scale. So knitting it back together becomes impossible. I mean, one of the tricky things, though, about telling a story about yourself, you believe yourselves to be the chosen people of God, is that it becomes kind of a reflexive answer to everything. You know, things are going well. It's because God's on your side, beating your enemies. Things are growing poorly. It's because of your sin.

It's not that God has abandoned you because once you've achieved that status as a chosen people, like, you can't lose it. And the Franks, again, like, told themselves very good stories about themselves. They told themselves stories so well that they forgot that they had made them up themselves. But I think what Fontenois kind of does is it kind of removes, and this is in some of the sources that come after. For example, there's a poem by a guy named Flores of Lyon that is written just shortly after the Battle of Fontenois, and he kind of puts it, it's a very long poem, it's called

the Lament on the Division of the Empire, but he basically places it into God's hand. It's almost out of the hands of the Franks in order to put the Empire back together, whereas, you know, if there was a certain type of political reform, if the emperor acted in a certain different way, if the nobles behave themselves more, then everything would be fixed. And now it's almost out of their hands. After Fontenwa, it's like, it's up to God now. God has met at us, the Franks, for a very good reason, and we don't necessarily know why, and we can only just hope and pray, he'll forgive us at some point.

And then we get sort of a couple of years after Fontenoy, we get the Treaty of Verdun in 863, and this is, as you mentioned earlier, this is sort of what carves up the land and sort of distributes it. And I was going to ask whether people at the time would have viewed that as an end of trouble, the beginning of more trouble, or just a continuation of the same trouble. And I get the impression from what you said earlier

that you very much don't see it as an end of anything. There are a lot of agreements. There are a lot of moments where the combatants, particularly in the Civil War, kind of get together and make an agreement about what's going to happen next. And sometimes it does happen and sometimes it doesn't. There are some reasons to think this was a bigger one. They spent more time. They actually sent out nobles to sort of this. They want to divide the empire up. Well, first you have to know how big the empire is. Right. This is sort of the domesday book problem as well, or not problem, but for people who know who know that story. Right. You can't chop it by thirds until you know how big it is. So they go out. There's a ceasefire. There's an agreement. They will have a treaty, but before they can do it, they send it up. So there's a lot of effort put into this. But there's just no reason for people at the time to think this is the end of the story. And we can see, and this is what we talk about in oathbreakers, that, you know, the Franks are not alone in the world. So we have the Vikings doing things. We have the Islamic powers of North Africa and Iberia moving. We have the Byzantine world in motion. And for various reasons, mostly involving either diplomatic, missions or invasions, it becomes increasingly clear to the Franks that they are divided and they could be conquered if they don't at least have a more significant ceasefire for a little while. But the other thing about the Treaty of Verdun, and it ties back into this 19th century, is that it becomes the story of the creation of France and Germany. I very vividly remember as a undergraduate student learning about the Treaty of Verdun

and learning things about it that are just not true, by which I mean learning that there are multiple versions of the Treaty of Verdun and one is in Latin and one is in French and one is in German. I remember being told that in a class and maybe some of the listeners do too. That is true. We actually have no text to the Treaty of Verdun. It doesn't exist. There are a set of oaths between Louis and Charles that take place months, it might be a year, but I think months and months before that. There we have a record that some of it was in German and some of it was in French. So there is a kind of history there. But this idea that, you know, we think about the Treaty of Versailles, well, that's, as far as I know, that's actually a document that exists. You can

look it up. The Treaty of Verdun does not. It does not exist in the modern world. There must have been something. We don't have it. So it's this really interesting kind of legacy of this thing that there was an agreement, but we don't know what was in it exactly. We don't have it written down. We don't have signed charters. We don't have anything. It's annoying when people just don't care about future historians. Just write the thing down. Yeah. It is very annoying. I'm almost as angry about that as I am about the 19th century. And just to end on, I wondered what you thought was the main kind of legacy of the oathbreakers, of the crumbling of Charlemagne's empire, of the fracturing of the Frankish world.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's impossible to talk about medieval Europe without talking about the Carolingians because the Carolingians and their legacy looms so large in the memory and the imaginations of people throughout most of the Middle Ages, you know, everywhere from Iberia to what's now France and what's now Germany, you know, the law countries, blah, blah, blah, all the way down through Italy. And the nation states that would eventually form, like, yeah, you can kind of draw that line back to the treaty overdone and especially kind of what happens immediately afterwards. The idea that, you know, we know in retrospect that the empire wasn't ever going to be stitched

back together. But the thing that I think that we're trying to say is that it could have been otherwise. There were lots of moments in which people made decisions and they could have made other decisions if one thing just kind of fell in a different direction and it's that kind of messiness. that becomes really interesting, I think, when we're talking about the past. You know, because, like, one of the sources that we talk about kind of at the end is a letter by this woman, Duoda, a noble woman who wrote to her son, who is being held hostage by Charles the Bald.

She's married to Bernard of Septimania, that same bad penny that we mentioned earlier. And she's writing in, like, 843, 842, 843, you know, a good 12, 15, 12 to 14 years after the first appearance of Barnard of Septimania on the scene. And it's still the same guys. And this is after the Treaty of Redun that Bernard is killed by Charles the Bald and then her son revolts against Charles the Bald and allies with Pepin II, who we mentioned at Fontenois. These same guys are still on the scene, still killing each other, still dividing up land, still plotting against one another for generations afterwards. It didn't have to be that and it could have been otherwise. Charles debald declares himself emperor right at the end of his life. And it seems like maybe he's the one who's going to

succeed, his father, where Lothar had failed. And it just doesn't turn out that way because of, you know, decisions that they made. And we can know about those decisions because we have really interesting sources that tell us. Yeah. And it's fascinating. I was fascinated by how many sources you are able to draw on for a time that people will often refer to as the Dark Ages. You know, a notoriously unrecorded period in history, but there does seem to be plenty of sources and material and paperwork around the Carolingian Empire, which is perhaps a testament to what a an efficient machine it was becoming. One of the things we'd like to say is that the European Middle Ages is knowable, right?

That it's complicated, it's messy. The sources are rarely exactly what we want them to be. I've complained plenty about that over this conversation. But they exist and they say things and you can do the work and you can know things about this period and then go from there. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure to dig into the emergence and then the destruction, I guess, of Charlemagne's empire.

It's been fascinating to get to know some of the figures a little bit better and to put some pins in Battle of Fontenoy and the Treaty of Verdun as key moments. And I think really fascinating to think about the Frankish as a people who kind of crafted a history for themselves that justified their existence and the dangers maybe of doing something like that. It was absolutely fascinating to be into it. So thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. That's been great. Thank you. Matthew and David's book, Oath Breakers, the War of Brothers that shattered an empire and made medieval Europe is out now if you'd like to understand this critical juncture in European history in more depth. You can find an episode on Charlemagne himself amongst our back catalogue

if you'd like to get background on the emergence of the Carolingian Empire too. There are new installments have gone medieval every Tuesday and Friday so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Anyway, I better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.