The Rest Is History - 523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

The Frankish king, Charlemagne the Great, is one of the titanic figures of European history, simultaneously renowned and shadowy. His rise to supreme power is a staggering story of warring religious empires, betrayal, battle, blindings and brutal conquest. How, then, did this one time Frankish interloper become the father of Europe, progenitor of a Holy Roman Empire whose descendants would rule right up until the time of Napoleon, and Emperor of the West? It begins in 741 AD when, following the death of the Frankish leader Charles Martel - ‘The Hammer’ - his two sons, Carloman and the pious by ruthless Pepin were forced to look to the Pope in Rome, then a subsidiary to the Byzantine empire, to buttress their authority. The Pope too was increasingly embattled at that time, struggling against invasions by the ferocious Germanic Lombards from the north of Italy. Desperate, he called upon Pepin for aid. So it was that, after his brother’s abdication, Pepin was officially anointed by the Pope as the sole King of the Franks, before crossing the Alps and smashing Lombardy. After his death, he would leave his kingdom the foremost power in Western Europe, and in the hands of to his own two sons: Carloman and Charles, later known as Charlemagne. A terrible power struggle would ensue… Join Tom and Dominic for this next instalment of their mighty series on the Franks and the rise of Charlemagne. How would Charles’ and Carloman’s battle for power play out? _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Editor: Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that goal to be the ultimate soccer parent?

Keep chasing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. The Merovingian dynasty, from which the Franks were accustomed to choose their kings, is thought to have lasted down to King Chilperic III, who was deposed on the order of Stephen II, the Pope of Rome. His hair was cut short and he was shut up in a monastery. Though this dynasty may seem to have come to an end only with Chilperic III, it had really lost all power years before and it no longer possessed anything at all of importance beyond the empty title of King.

The wealth and the power of the kingdom were held tight in the hands of certain leading officials of the court, who were called the Mayors of the Palace, and on them supreme authority devolved. All that was left to the King was that content with his royal title, he should sit on the throne, with his hair long and his beard flowing, and act the part of a ruler. Whenever he needed to travel, he went in a cart which was drawn in rural manner by yoked oxen with a cowherd to drive them. In this fashion he would go to the palace and to the general Assembly of his people,

which was held each year to settle the affairs of the kingdom, and in this fashion he would return home again. That's the opening to the life of Charlemagne by Einhart, the Frankish scholar and courtier, and he wrote that just after Charlemagne's death and he's describing the greatest, the most famous of all Frankish kings, one of the titanic names in all European history. Lots of people, I think Tom, will have heard the name of Charlemagne. But to be completely honest, I think a lot of people have heard the name and have no real sense of who he was.

Was he French? Was he German? Well, obviously he was neither. Well, he's the father of both and yet was neither. Now, Einhart, let's just talk about Einhart for a second because he writes this very extraordinary biography of Charlemagne, doesn't he? Yeah, pretty unique, really. Yeah. And he was very proud of the fact that he had been so familiar personally with Charlemagne,

wasn't he? Yeah. He was also a very short man, Dominic. So like Benjamin Lay. Oh, yes. We love a short man on the rest of history. We do, yes. Well, so the thing that's unusual about this is that it's a biography in a kind of Roman style. It echoes Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars, and that's not a coincidence because Einhardt as a young boy had been sent by his parents to a monastery, not to become a monk,

but kind of rather like being sent to a boarding school or something like that, at a place called Fulda on the east bank of the Rhine. And this monastery had a complete collection of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars. And this included a biography of the greatest of all the Roman emperors, Augustus. And Ironheart read it. And so when he came to write his biography of Charlemagne, he modelled it on Suetonius' life of Augustus. And this is very deliberate because the extraordinary thing about Charlemagne, who is this descendant of barbarian warlords, is that on Christmas AD 800. He had been crowned as a Caesar, as Augustus in Rome by the Pope himself. And you said how Charlemagne is a titanic figure in the history of Europe, simultaneously a kind of dominant but also shadowy, I think. And this is the key moment in his reign. And

again, it's a moment that is simultaneously epical yet also hard to get a sense of exactly why it matters. The kind of the meaning seems to slip as you try to grasp it. Because even the empire that he ends up in a vertical was ruling, the Holy Roman Empire, a lot of people have find it very hard to pin down neither Holy nor Roman nor an empire famously was said about. Actually, I think it was Holy, I think it was Roman and I think it was an empire for reasons that were come to, but you're right. So this is looking back to the age of the Roman Empire, to the age of Augustus, but

it's also looking forward to the medieval empire and the empire that will endure right the way up to the time of Napoleon, who is the guy who abolishes it. So you could say, I mean, I said that, you know, the story of the Franks, it's a kind of hinge moment in European history. This perhaps is the key hinge moment. This is the kind of the middle point in the emergence of Europe from antiquity, from the world of ancient Rome into what will become the Europe of the high middle ages. And it's kind of the ultimate promotion, a Frankish warlord becoming a Caesar.

And so the question is, how had this absolutely jaw-dropping event happened? And this is the story that we will be telling. We'll be starting on it today and completing it in the next two episodes. And we'll be finishing this story, of of course on Christmas Day. So the anniversary of Charlemagne's coronation. Okay, let's get going and let's get a sense of the context. In the last three episodes, we talked about the rise of the Franks, the warlords of the West and we ended with the Battle of Tours. And people who listened to the first episode will remember that Charlemagne

is not in fact the first Frankish warlord to have the title of Augustus. They all remember that three centuries earlier, another Frankish warlord, that is to say Clovis, had been hailed as Augustus, but not in Rome, in Tor in the shrine of St. Martin. He wasn't crowned by the Pope, he was crowned by himself like Napoleon. Yeah. And that reflects the fact that Clovis is very much a kind of self-made man. He has been given the title of a consul by the emperor in Constantinople. But the idea that he's an Augustus, I mean, this is a self-promotion,

and it reflects the fact that he is casting himself simultaneously as the heir of Roman power in Gaul. You know, this is what he's laying claim to, but also that he is a kind of barbarian warlord. So he's not interested in ruling a global empire empire as Augustus had done, as Charlemagne will aspire to do. He's content with being King of the Franks, but I mean, that's still an absolutely massive deal. And to justify his authority, he's casting himself as the equivalent of a Roman governor, but also, you know, he's the descendant of a weird sea creature.

He's got his long hair. He's got all this kind of stuff. He's got his very tight pants over his enormous genitals, all this stuff that marks him out as being simultaneously Roman and Frankish. And that passage that you read, I mean, Einhard mentions some of the things that Clovis had worn and which the Merovician kins have inherited. The long hair, the beard, the carts. The long hair particularly. Yeah. So the reggae's croniti, the long-haired kings, this is what kind of defines them.

But the thing is that by the time of Ainhardt's writing, so he's doing that kind of what, maybe 820, 830, these attributes are cast as kind of grotesque, as rustic, as embarrassing. And it reflects a sense that the Merovingians themselves as the generations have passed, as their power kind of bleeds away, have become mere shadows of Clovis, the founder of their dynasty. They've become kind of phantasms. What French scholars have always called the do-nothing kings, kings who play no role in the functioning of the Frankish state. And the obvious question is why has this happened? How is it that the heirs of Clovis are just ciphers? And Einhard, in that passage you read, I mean again, he gives the answer. He says that they've been put in the

shadow by officials known as mayors of the palace. And these are posts that by the beginning of the eighth century have become, like the kingship of the Merovingians themselves, a hereditary post. And in the previous episode, the episode we did on the Battle of Tor, we met one of those kind of domineering mayors of the palace, and that was Charles Charles, who in Einhard's time would come to be known as Martel the Hammer. So Charles Martel the Hammer. And, Charles Martel the Hammer. And he's the bloke who won the battle at all, of course. He absolutely is.

And this redounds greatly to his reputation. But the thing is that long before he wins that battle, he's already won, even though he named himself as the most formidable warrior, not just in the lands of the Franks, but in the whole of Christendom. He's used his expertise in war to fashion a really quite coherent empire. So he's the master of Austrasia, where his forebears came from, so that's the eastern Frankish kingdom stretching in beyond the Rhine into Germany. He's the master of Neustria, which is the Frankish kingdom that extends along the line

of the channel. He has in the wake of the Battle of Tours, he's moved southwards to start trying to bring Provence and Aquitaine under his rule. So for Charles, the defeat of the invading Aemaiads, the invading Saracens, I mean this is brilliant, it's excellent for his reputation, but the thing he really cares about is fashioning a proper empire out of all the disparate parts of the kind of the Regnum Francorum, the Kingdom of the Franks. And Tor helps him, particularly with subordinating Aquitaine, because Odo, the Duke of Aquitaine, who had been Charles's rival, he had

been smashed up by the invading Saracens. Odo had come to Charles to ask for help. Charles had agreed but Odo had had to submit to him and in 735 actually Odo retires to a monastery. Now his son and his grandson will continue the fight but basically they're on a losing wicket by this point. There's no way that they're going to ultimately be able to hold out against the might that Charles and his heirs can bring to bear on them. And this is also in the long run true of Muslims in the south of Gaul. So Charles targets them as well. So he advances southwards, he drives them out from the great fortresses of Arles, of Avignon. He annihilates a massive seaborne expedition of Umayyad forces outside Narbonne. There's descriptions of the Muslim fugitives trying desperately to swim back to their ships, being pursued by the victorious

Franks, being speared in the shallows and the lagoons like tuna. Fabulous stuff if you're a Frank. And by 741, which is when Charles Martel finally dies, his armies, so the Franks under his leadership, pretty much have the range of lands stretching from the Pyrenees all the way to the Danube, so a vast, vast expanse of territory. So the Frankish lords of southern Gaul and the Ameids, these are people who've been comprehensively hammered by Charles Martel, but they're not alone. So too have a very distinctive class in Frankish society and these are the bishops. And we talked about this in the first episode we did on the age of Clovis. The bishops, almost without exception, are the heirs of the kind of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, the kind of senatorial figures

who had been the wealthy elites of Roman Gaul. And these families still preserve their authority through the institution of the episcopate, through having themselves elected by their local cities as bishops. If you want an example of a class of people who preserve the traditions of the vanished Roman Empire, Frankish bishops are your guys. So they're very learned, they're very scholarly, they're kind of educated in classical poetry as well as in the Bible and all that kind of stuff. They may well play a kind of part on the great national stage, but ultimately their real loyalty isn't to the kind of part on the great national stage, but ultimately, their real loyalty isn't to the kind of the distant Frankish king or, you know, in the case

of Charles Martel, the distant Frankish mayor, but to the local city, the local community that they represent on the stage of Gaul and whose peoples have elected them. And for the vast majority of Franks, it's the bishops who kind of mediate between the mass of Christians and the dimension of the divine. And they're able to do this because they are almost invariably the descendants of saints and bishops whose tombs are in the cathedrals where they sit. So it's a kind of family project. And the effect of this is that all across Gaul, wherever you go, there are these tombs of martyrs, of holy

men, of bishops. I mean, St Martin is the most famous of these, but he's by no means the only one. And it enables the Franks, when they look at their bishops, to feel not just that they have living links with the, you know, the vanished realm of Rome. I mean, they don't really care about this by this point, but they can look at their bishops to feel not just that they have living links with the, you know, the vanished realm of Rome. I mean, they don't really care about this by this point, but they can look at their bishops and feel these are venerable representatives of a very, very ancient Christianity. And it enables them to feel that Gaul is like a kind of Holy Land, a Christian Holy Land. They don't really need, for instance, the sanction of the papacy or whatever. They've got St Martin.

They've got all that stuff. Yeah, essentially they're spiritually self-sufficient and this has been the case ever since the first emergence of the Frankish monarchy. But the thing about Charles Martel, he doesn't like this at all. He won't tolerate an alternative power base, presumably. Yeah, basically. He doesn't like these bishops. They're too independent.

They're too able to defy his will. And so what he wants is to replace them with his own kinsmen, with his own trusted allies. And it doesn't matter to Charles if the bishops he appoints, you know, kind of no Virgil or whatever, he doesn't care about their educational standards or whether they have local links to the cities that they are going to serve as bishops for, or if they have family connections to the saints whose tombs lie in their cathedrals. So that class of person is being elbowed aside and Charles is putting in their place, you know, his own henchmen. And effectively, this is, I think, the final extinction of Roman Gaul.

This is where Gaul, if you like, becomes Frankia. And Frankia is the word that will give us the name of France. So you can see Gaul becoming France at this point under the rule of Charles Martel and Patrick Geary, who's one of the great historians of this process. It's so interesting. So I'll read what he says in full. Charles Martel accomplished what no other secular power had been able to do in the previous of this process. It's so interesting so I'll read what he says in full. lay supporters. He finally succeeded in destroying the religious basis on which had long rested the independent power of the Frankish bishops. Henceforth they would be powerful lords at times rivaling in power dukes, counts and even kings, but they would never again command

that particular power as monopolists of the sacred. This role, along with the lead in cultural life, would pass to monasteries. So this is surely a key moment in the transition from late antiquity to early medieval, right? That a vestige of kind of Roman cultural spiritual life has been smashed, more power has been concentrated in the hands of the warlords who are now making themselves kings. Is that right? Yeah, I think absolutely. And what compounds the impact of this process is that in the south of Gaul, where Roman civilisation had been much more deeply planted, it had been there for much longer, urban civilisation had kind of survived to a degree that it hadn't in northern Gaul.

The cities there have, over the previous decades, have been absolutely smashed to pieces, first by the Arab invaders and then by Charles Martel's invasion south and his attempt to reclaim these cities. So it's not just that the old Roman bishops have been swept aside. It's also that the independence of the cities that had maintained them has also been massively shattered. So people who've been to the south of France, if you think of Nîmes or Arles or whatever, there are still incredibly impressive Roman remains there. But this is the point where they are really starting to crumble away as well, as Roman

cities, kind of in the north, had already done. They start to be cannibalised, they crumble away, they're shattered by wars. And as you say, I think this is really the kind of the end point of late antiquity in Gaul. This is where the kind of, if you want to say, the Middle Ages begin. I mean, this is the kind of the endpoint of late antiquity in Gaul. This is where the kind of, if you want to say the middle ages begin. I mean, this is the kind of the start point. And obviously the bishops, the kind of the Roman old school, the Ossian regime, they hate this.

I mean, they're so resentful. And there's a perfect example of this in the form of the erstwhile bishop of Orléans, who's a man called Eucharius and that's a Roman name and that's really telling because by this point in the 8th century most Roman names are fading away. They're being replaced by Frankish names. Yeah, people are all called Theodawolf or something. Exactly, Childerbert or whatever. But among this kind of class of, you know, descended from senators and so on, they do preserve their Roman name. So you can tell from Eucharius that he's kind of very grand figure, you know, with

lineage going back to the Roman past. Anyway, Charles turns up in Orléans after the Battle of Tours, very chipper, very full of himself, he's beaten the enemy off, and Eucharius is kind of grumpy and grouchy and snobbish towards him. Charles Martel just says piss off don't want you anymore replaces him with one of his own henchmen and Eukarius is furious about this and in due course when Charles Martel dies he reports he reports a vision that he's been shown in a dream by an angel and this angel leads Eucharist down into hell and there he shows him Charles Martel condemned in body and soul to eternal punishment. And Eucharist wakes up absolutely thrilled by this vision, tells everyone absolutely great news.

Charles Martel is in hell and he says, you know, if you want proof for this, let's go to Charles Martel's tomb. Let's open it up and see if the body's there because if it's not there, that will be evidence that the body has been taken away and dunked in the boiling vats of the inferno. So a party got together, they go to Charles' tomb, they open it up and I will quote from a subsequent record of what happens. Therefore, they went to the aforementioned monastery where Charles' body was buried. They opened his tomb and suddenly Dominic, a dragon emerged. And the whole interior of the tomb was found to be blackened

as if it had been burned. And that actually happened. Well, right at the beginning of this series and in the episode we did on Clevis, I promised people that we'd have a dragon. And there it is. And now we have. Comes rushing out. It's obviously been burning the tomb. Charles Martel's body has been taken, dunked in hell. What more proof do you need? Okay, well that's good enough for me. Okay, but not everybody in the church thinks Charles is a bad guy.

And in fact, there are bishops who think, oh he's brilliant. Aren't there? Well, there's one very particular bishop and that is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. So the Pope from Rome, I mean he has no particular dog in the fight, he doesn't mind at all what Charles Martel is doing to the bishops in Gaul. And in fact he's very very keen to cosy up to Charles Martel. So in 739, which is two years before Charles dies, the Pope, who's called Gregory III, sends him the keys of St Peter and a portion of the chains that had bound St Peter when he was held in prison before being executed by the Romans. And this is a pretty clear signal

that the papacy is interested in doing a deal with Charles and with his family. And this is quite timely because everyone knows that Charles isn't long for this life. By 739, he's pretty old. And the assumption is that Charles's two eldest sons, one of whom is called Carloman, one of whom is called Pepin, will succeed him. But they will do so obviously not as kings, but as mayors. I think there's a sense, not just in Rome, but also across most of the Frankish kingdom, that this is ridiculous. I mean, it's mad that you've still got a Merovingian king with his

long hair and he's being wheeled out on his cart and that kind of thing. And this is focused when Charles dies in 741 and sure enough, his roles as mayor are divided up among his sons. So the elder one, Carloman, becomes the mayor of Australia, the Eastern Kingdom and the younger one, Pepin, becomes the mayor of Neustria with his capital now based in Paris. And what makes this even more ridiculous and seem ludicrous to people is that there isn't even at this point a Merovingian King on the throne. They've run out of Merovingians.

They've run out of Merovingians. They haven't got one. So Karlemin and Pepin, it's difficult for them initially to establish their authority. They're not the hammer. So it takes some time to affirm their authority. They think, well, actually, maybe it would be kind of easier for us if we did have a kind of Merovingian king on the throne. So they look around and they find a Merovingian and he's a guy called Chilperic. Inevitably. And they plonk him on the throne and he becomes Chilperic the third. But the obvious solution to this whole problem is for him to be deposed, for the

Merovingian monarchy itself to be abolished and for either Karleman or Pepin or perhaps both to become kings. But there is a problem, which is, you know, how do you do this? Because Clovis, when he'd become king, you know, this is why he'd proclaimed himself Augustus and why he'd boasted about, you know, his long hair and being descended from a weird sea monster. If you're going to be a king, you need a source of legitimacy because you need to demonstrate to your people and be confident in your own heart, in your own soul, that God approves of your elevation to the throne. So you need something or perhaps someone who can provide that legitimacy. Who on earth would that be? We'll find out after the break. What a cliffhanger. Who is this person?

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Let's celebrate love, friendship, and all the joy this holiday brings. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We ended with one of the great cliffhangers, not merely in the history of this podcast, but I think in the history of probably of all human civilization, who or what is the possible source of authority that could bestow kingship on Karlaman and Pepin, these people who are ruling Australia and Neustria in the realm of the Franks? Massive questions. A massive question. And you gave a little spoiler I felt disappointingly. You said our eyes

would be turning to Rome. So tell us who is this person? Well, of course, Rome is the home of the papacy and people who've listened, who've got this far in the series may have noticed we haven't really mentioned the papacy much. And I guess Dominic, lots of people may have the sense that the Pope is the key player in medieval Europe and therefore kind of find it a bit weird. But at this point, the authority and the influence of the papacy are just a shadow of what they will become kind of in due course over the course of the high middle ages. So the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, I mean, he is kind of widely acknowledged by other churchmen

across the West as being the most senior. He's the most senior bishop, but that's about the limit of it. So if the Pope, you know, he writes to kings, you know, he'll get their respect, they'll hear him out, but they won't necessarily obey him. He can offer them advice, but he certainly can't kind of give them orders. And part of that is because he would never think of doing it. I mean, it wouldn't cross his mind that that's his role. But also, even if he did, you know, he lacks the means to do it. As we said, the bishops say in Gaul are very independent. They don't see themselves as being under the thumb of the Bishop of Rome. So the Franks, I think they respect him, the

Pope, but not much more than that. And definitely, you know, the bishops in Gaul, these kind of grand descendants of senators, they don't, they don't feel any sense of cultural cringe towards Rome. You know, they don't need him. They are their own men. They have their own saints. They have their own traditions. They are what they are. And the truth is that just as the Franks aren't particularly interested in the Bishop of Rome, the Bishop of Rome isn't really very interested in the Franks, because in Rome you still have this kind of inheritance of ancient assumptions that anyone north of the Alps is a complete barbarian. I mean, the Franks are, you know, they still

see them as these kind of awful people with enormous moustaches and tight pants and stuff. Yeah, well, they're not entirely wrong to be fair. But it's also because, to be honest, for most of the period that we've been describing, the popes have a lot on their plate, so they have much more pressing things to worry about than, you know, what might be going on in Paris or Toulouse or whatever. And the reason for that is that they are still a part of the Roman Empire that is centered in Constantinople. So the Roman Empire in the West has fallen, but there is still an Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire as it's often called. And back in the sixth century, so that's around the time that

Fredegund and Brunhilde had been born, the great emperor Justinian, not really a friend of the show is he, but his wife Theodora is definitely a friend of the show. Is he? Okay. Theodora definitely a friend of the show. erstwhile star of Love Island, winner of Love Island in fact. Anyway, Justinian had sent a great invasion force to reconquer Rome and that had up to a degree been successful.

Rome had been incorporated back into the Byzantine Empire. And this had been quite humiliating for the Romans because they had been the original imperial capital and the Byzantines acknowledged Rome as the older city, but they also said that compared to Constantinople, it counts as the lesser city. And so the people of Rome who were once the rulers of this great empire are now themselves kind of subjects. And the inferiority of Rome to Constantinople is institutionalized in the wake of its reconquest by Justinian's armies. So you have a Byzantine governor installed not in Rome, but in Ravenna to rule Byzantine Italy. Will Barron Revenna to be fair, had been an imperial capital for a while.

It had, but I mean, it's embarrassing. Rome is not just a provincial capital, it's not even a capital at all. The emperor kind of lavishes Byzantine titles on the Roman aristocracy, Byzantine fashions become all the rage, people speak Greek, there are Greek churches set up in Rome, and Rome becomes essentially a kind of ersatz version of Constantinople. And for the Bishop of Rome, again, there are kind of constant reminders of his inferior status. So every time he celebrates a mass, he prays for his absent master, the emperor in Constantinople. Every time he writes a letter, he's dating it by the regnal year again of the emperor

in Constantinople. And meanwhile, as he sits there in Rome, whether he's kind of wandering through the Forum or going for a walk on the campus marshes, all around him you get in this very memorable phrase by Peter Brown, the great historian of late antiquity, he hears all around him the crash of falling masonry. So ancient Rome is literally falling to pieces around the Pope. But the Pope is not entirely devoid of assets, is he? He's got his spiritual assets. He's still a prestigious person. He's still the preeminent head of any church in the Christian world, right?

He's got a palace that was given to the papacy by Constantine and he's the heir of Saint Peter. So he's not nothing, he's not nobody. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think of all those kind of, you know, those attributes, being the heir of Saint Peter perhaps is the most significant because Saint Peter, the apostle whom Christ himself had named as his rock, he has the keys of heaven. So he has the power supposedly to bind and loose souls everywhere. and the Pope claims to have inherited these powers. So there's a certain level of potency there and what also kind of raises the self-confidence of the papacy, the willingness of the papacy to see itself not merely as a servant of the

Emperor in Constantinople but perhaps his peer, maybe even his rival, is the fact that Constantinople, like Gaul, has been coming under increasing attack from Ameyad forces. And in fact, in 717, so even as Ameyad forces are spilling across Spain in the west, in the east East a great invasion force is advancing on Constantinople and investing it and this is one of the models for Tolkien's portrayal of the siege of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. There's a two year siege. By the end of it, in 718, this siege is finally broken but it's been an unbelievably close-run thing. The Byzantines have had a terrible

fright. And so too in Rome has the Pope because the Emperor in Constantinople is supposed to be the Pope's kind of sword and shield. But of course, when the Imperial capital itself is under threat, you know, the Emperor and his advisors and his military heads, you know, they don't get a toss about Rome. It's a kind of obscure, you know, kind of unimportant frontier town. And the Pope is kind of painfully aware of this. And when in the wake of the siege of Constantinople and the survival of the Byzantine Empire, the emperors in Constantinople try and reassert their authority in Italy, their focus isn't the north, it's the south because there they're being menaced by Aemid forces who are moving up against Sicily and against southern Italy. So that's where Byzantine forces are concentrated and in fact

they're stripped from the northern reaches of Italy and that then leaves the north of Italy open and exposed. And in 751, absolute disaster for the Papacy because Italy is invaded by a people called the Lombards. And this is kind of almost like a flashback to the fifth century, the age of the barbarian invasions, because the Lombards, they're a Germanic people, they're kind of ferocious warriors. And for pretty much two centuries, they've been parked the northern limits of Italy waiting for their opportunity. And the fact that Byzantine troops have been stripped from the north of Italy to go and fight in the south gives them that opportunity and they come sweeping down on the north and Ravenna falls to them and when the news is brought to the Pope in Rome he's

thinking oh goodness you know we might be next and there is really very little prospect that the Emperor in distant Constantinople is going to hear the lamentations and appeals for help from the bishop of Rome. So he has to look around for an alternative saviour. Right. And is this where we get back to the Franks? Because surely, and one very obvious person is one of the sons of Charles Martel and in particular Pepin. We talked about Pepin in the first half. So Pepin is going to step forward as the sword and shield of the papacy, is he? This is certainly the hope of the pope. But before we look at why he might be willing to do this, we should just go back and see what's been happening in Francia while all these events have been happening in Italy. So Pepin, as we said,

is the younger brother of a guy called Carlomanman and Karleman has been ruling as the mayor of Australia, the Eastern region. Pepin is the mayor of Neustria, the kingdom abutting the channel. And as we said in the first half between them, they have installed a kind of Merovingian cipher, Chilprit III on the Frankish throne. And the brothers get on pretty well. They seem to have been fond of each other, kind of quite unusual in the annals of Frankish history. And Karleman is a very distinctive character in that he combines a high level of kind of murderous ruthlessness with a very, very austere level of piety. So his most notorious display of ruthlessness. People who listened to our first episode may have remembered that we talked about a great confederation of Germanic peoples called the Alemanni. And they amazingly

are still on the scene. And Karlemann decides that the fact that they still have this identity is a threat to his own authority. And so he invites them to a kind of conference and assembly at a place called Canstad. and all the leading figures of the Alemanni come here, you know, very excited to hear what Karlemann has to say. And what Karlemann has to say is, you're all doomed. He gives a signal, his servants, his aides, his men step up, slit the throats of all the Alemanni noblemen and that is them wiped out. And the claim is that thousands of them are killed. So Timothy Reutte, the great historian of Frankish Germany, he wrote that Kansnat did for the Alemannic landholding

class what Hastings did for the Anglo-Saxon landholding class, i.e. wipe them out completely. So that's got rid of the Alemanns from the scene. But the other project that Kahlemann has been pushing in the eastern regions of his empire is to sponsor a man from Devon, a guy called Winfrith, to convert all the pagan peoples who line the eastern borders of the Frankish Empire. And Winfrith is a remarkable man. He's, as far as I know, the only Anglo-Saxon missionary ever to have had a power station named after him. Power station in Germany or in England? It's in Dorset. Oh lovely. Winfrith power station. So he comes over to Germany and he's very very effective,

you know with his I bring you the good news of Croist. He's got John Adams' voice, President John Adams. He's from Devon, he's like Rich Nixon. I think we agree that Nixon was from Somerset. Nixon. Right, right. I think we agreed that Nixon was from Somerset. And he does so well that he comes to be called Boniface, so good deeds, and he's hailed as the apostle to the Germans. And actually to this day, he's the patron saint of Europe. He has an amazing impact. He converts huge numbers of people. And Karleman thinks this is brilliant. He's got rid of the Alamans. He's converting all these pagans to Christianity, it's all looking good. But then weirdly, in 747, he goes to Rome

and he prays before the Pope and he says, I don't want to be a king anymore, I want to become a monk. And the king shaves off his hair, you know, the emblem of power among the Franks gives him a tonsure, the tonsure of a monk and Karleman retires to the monastery of Monte Cassino. He's gone mad. He's had a breakdown. Or he's had a religious vision, Dominic. His party has won out against his worldly ambitions. And there is actually, there's one chronicler who suggests that he felt guilt about what he'd done to the Alamans. So he said he felt contrite and because of this,

he abandoned his kingdom. But the truth is we don't know. Wow. We don't know. What a bizarre twist. Yeah, it is a bizarre twist. I mean, people I think felt at the time that it was bizarre. And obviously it's great for Pepin. It's absolutely brilliant for Pepin because he is now the sole master of Franke.

He's got the lot. And he decides because of this, you know, enough is enough. It's mad that I am not the king. But of course, he wants the reassurance that God approves of this. And so he turns to the Pope who's a man called Zachary, he's of Greek descent. So you can see that kind of, you know, evidence for the biting influence of Constantinople in Rome. But this is a key moment because effectively, the Pope is about to turn his gaze from Constantinople northwards to the Kingdom of the Franks.

And Zachary gets his letter from Pepin and in it Pepin asks, is it right or not that the King of the Franks at this time has absolutely no power but nevertheless possesses the royal office? And Zachary replies, no, it is not right. And Pepin says, brilliant. So he's talking about the Merovingian bloke who's still hanging around. He's saying like, let's get rid of him. Give me the crown.

Enough of the Merovingians. Who cares about them? Yes. And effectively Pepin can now feel that God wants him to do what he wants to do, which is to make himself king. Yeah. So in 751, which is the same year that the Lombards invade Italy and capture Ravenna, Pepin finishes off the Merovingian dynasty. So as Einhard described in the opening of this episode,

Chilperic is kind of dragged out of his estate, his hair is cut off, he is tonsured, he is sent off to a monastery and that's the end of him. That's the end of the Merovingians. The Lion of Clovis is extinct, unless of course you're Dan Brown, in which case you think it's continued into the present day, but I think it hasn't happened. So Pepin now faces the challenge of kind of setting himself aside as someone of royal status, someone who is kind of elevated above the common run that the Merovingians had never faced because the Merovingians could claim that they were descended from this kind of weird sea monster. They had their long hair, they had all this kind of stuff. Pepin

doesn't have any of this. So what he does is he turns to the Bible and in the Bible he reads of people who had not been of royal stock being elevated to the throne. Like David. Saul and David being the classic examples. And the mark of their becoming kings is that they are anointed with holy oil. And so this is what Pepin has done to himself. He goes to Soissons in Neustria, northeast of Francia, and there the holy oil is put on his brow by a bishop and he feels it kind of impregnating his skin and he has been elevated to a kind of sacramental level.

And then three years later he goes one better and he gets the Pope himself to come to Frankia to repeat this ceremony. And by this point, Zachary is dead but there is a new Pope called Stephen the Second and he is more than ready to do as Pepin wants, basically to answer the Frankish king's bidding. And the reason for this is that the Lombards are still very much on the scene. So in the autumn of 754, he sets off from Rome northwards towards the Alps and he is the first pope ever to travel to Gaul, to travel beyond the Alps. And there's a very dramatic account of his journey. I mean, it really does read like something out of Lord of the Rings, some kind of fantasy

novel. There's descriptions of him climbing the Alps amid gusts of snow, and he's following a kind of ancient Roman road that's been left all cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair and he travels through a great wilderness of kind of sickening mists and ice and finally he reaches the summit of the pass and this is the gateway of the kingdom of the Franks but below him, so below the road, there is this great frozen lake and beside it that's the ruins of a long abandoned pagan temple. And, you know, for Stephen the Second coming from Rome, this is, you know, he thinks, what am I doing? This is a terrible mistake. But then he continues down the road into the land of the Franks, and he very soon reaches an abbey that had been sacred to an entire legion of Christians

who had been martyred by the Romans back in the days of the Roman Empire. And his hosts tell the Pope that there is no people in the world who are more devoted to the cult of the martyrs, to the cult of the saints than the Franks. And the Pope is told, the bodies of the holy martyrs which the Romans had buried with fire and mutilated by the sword and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts, these bodies they had found and enclosed in gold and precious stones. So it's actually pretty passive aggressive because what they're doing is saying, we don't really need you. We've got our own saints. We are kind of holier than the Romans and you know, you're the bishop of the Romans. So, you know, just remember.

What does the Pope make of this? I don't think the Pope really notices what he's being told because I think he's so relieved that he's managed to get across the Alps. he hasn't fallen into ravine, he hasn't been attacked by the phantoms of pagan gods, that he's just glad to be among civilised Christian people. And so he continues on his way, it takes him six weeks, he gets to Paris and there he meets Pepin and he sees Pepin and he immediately kind of bursts into ostentatious floods of tears and he begs Pepin to come to the

protection of Saint Peter and then he goes with Pepin up to the great abbey of Saint Denis which is where Gilles Martel had been buried, obviously where the dragon had been hanging out and there in Saint Denis he anoints him a second time and just for good measure he salutes not just Pepin as the anointed king of God, but the Franks themselves as the new Israelites. He hails them as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. So essentially the Pope is now lending his prestige to the self-conceit of the Franks that they are something special. Will Do the Franks live up to their side of the bargain? Because obviously he's looking to them to protect him against the Lombards, isn't he?

Will He is. He absolutely lives up to his side of the bargain. So 755, one year after he's been anointed by the Pope, he crosses the Alps, he invades Lombardy, he smashes the Lombard king, gets the Lombard king to submit. Two years later the Lombards are causing trouble again so Pepin returns to northern Italy, inflicts an even more crushing defeat on the Lombards and this time all the territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium are given by Pepin to the Pope or rather to Saint Peter but effectively to the Pope and Pepin then goes down to Rome and he has all the keys of the cities that he's conquered and he lays them on the tomb of Saint Peter, on the tomb of

the Apostle and of course as Saint Peter's caretaker is the Pope so effectively the Pope is now the master of this great swathe of lands that previously had been ruled by the Emperor in Constantinople and then had been purloined by the Lombard King. And the news of this when it reaches Constantinople, I mean, the emperor is actually furious. He says these are mine, but the Pope, you know, he doesn't care. He shifted his loyalty. He's no longer team Constantinople. He's now very much team Frank. And the reason for that is that Pepin and the Franks have, you know, plucked him and the papacy from the absolute jaws of disaster. And God's hand is also evident in the greatness of Pepin in the wake of his anointing, because following Stephen's arrival in Paris and his hailing of the Franks as a holy people, everything goes absolutely brilliantly for them, absolutely amazingly. And in fact, by the time that Pepin dies in 768, he has set the Frankish monarchy and the Frankish empire

on even more solid and impressive foundations than Charles Martel has done. So the taming of the Lombards is only one of Pepin's triumphs. He also effectively clears the Arabs from the south of Frankia, kind of expels them beyond the Pyrenees. Aquitaine is also absolutely and definitively reduced to obedience. So I said that Odo, the great Duke of Aquitaine, who'd fought with Charles Martel at Tor, he's retired to a monastery but his son and his grandson had tried to continue the struggle, Pepin not having any of it. The last duke of Aquitaine, Odo's grandson, gets murdered by his own followers because they think he's such a loser and after that there's no more talk of an independent Aquitaine. The whole while Pepin has continued Charles Martel's devotion to military

discipline, He's recruited more heavy cavalry, he's regooned his infantry so that they're an absolute peak of discipline and fitness and expertise. He continues to sponsor missionary work on the eastern flank of his empire among the pagan Germans and all of which means that when he dies he leaves to his two eldest sons, the elder one is called Charles, the younger one, confusingly, is called Carloman, absolute waves of Carlomans in this episode. But he leaves to them a kingdom that's not just the foremost power in Western Europe, but is obviously absolutely primed to become even more formidable. You know,

everything is ready for even more impressive conquests. But there's an obvious problem, this issue of two sons. So the Franks have a history of dividing up their realms, but to avoid fighting, to divide them up between different brothers. And when you've got two brothers here, Charles and Carloman, is there not an enormous latent potential for a civil war between the two of them? Right, so Pepin and the elder Carloman, they got on well. Carloman, the guy who goes off

and becomes a monk. But the younger Carloman and his elder brother Charles, so the sons of Pepin, they don't like each other at all. And Pepin's lands have been divided up between the two of them. Charles gets this kind of half doughnut and Carloman gets the kind of lump in the middle. They really don't get on well at all and Einhard in his account he blames this on Carloman's advisors so he says that harmony between them was maintained but only with difficulty for many of Carloman's advisors did their best to foster divisions between the two brothers to the degree that some of them were actively maneuvering to precipitate an open conflict. But then in December 771, so that's only three years after the death of Pepin, a dramatic development.

Karleman dies of a nosebleed. Can you die of a nosebleed? I mean, well, clearly you can. I mean, was there foul play? Yeah. That doesn't seem to be in the sources any suspicion of that. And I think most historians accept that it wasn't a nosebleed. I mean, he seems to have died of natural causes. And that means, of course, that Charles is now really the only kid on the block.

And he gets unanimously elected as king of all the lands of the Franks. And so he now has the reins of this vast empire that's been forged by his father and his grandfather. He alone holds the reins in his hands. And the question is, you know, as we said, what's he going to do with it? He's so primed, so ready to go on the offensive. And the question is, how far will he go? And I guess that there's a clue to the answer to that question in the name by which this new young King of the Franks,

Charles, Charles is best known today because he is known by us, not as Charles, not as Charles, not as Charle, but as Charlemagne, Charles the Great. And in the next two episodes, we will be looking at how Charles earns that name. Wonderful. So if you remember the Restless History Club, you can hear the next episode and indeed the third episode in our Charlemagne trilogy right away. If you're not, you can hear them by signing up at therestishistory.com. What better Christmas present to yourself could there be? Literally can't think of any. But if you're Scrooge or The Grinch, then I'm afraid you're going to have to wait till next week, because we'll be back on Monday and then on Christmas Day with the final two episodes

of our mighty series on the life of Charlemagne. Tom, a veritable tour de force. Thank you very much and goodbye. Bye bye. Are you a fan of The Rest is History but yet to dive into the weird and wonderful world of The Rest is History Club, or is there someone dear to you who won't stop banging on about the show? Well, here is a reminder that we at therestishistory.com offer gift memberships. So if you're good at dropping hints, or if you're short on a present for a family member, for a friend or for a partner, Tom and I would like to remind you of the ultimate Christmas

stocking filler. And it is of course a subscription to the Rest is History Club, which is full to the brim with bonus episodes. It's got access to the much loved Discord chat community. It's got newsletters. It's got all kinds of goodies. Simply go to therestishistory.com and look for gifts. Hello everybody, Dominic Sandbrook here. And I'm Tom Holland and we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we Dominic?

We do. So we often say we've got exciting news, but this is genuinely very, very exciting news. We are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year, The Rest is History will be returning to the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday the 4th of May to perform live once again with an orchestra. And we will be bringing you a brand new show and this time discussing two more of history's most extraordinary, fascinating and iconic classical composers. In this case Tchaikovsky and Wagner. And these extraordinary lives will be brought to life thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the celebrated Oliver Zefferman. So that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience and we are hoping

that this too will be an unforgettable night. There'll be great music, we'll be telling great stories, we'll be delving into the history. So you had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can. And these tickets will be available from www.royalalberthall.com on Thursday the 19th of December with a pre-sale for The Rest Is History club members and Royal Albert Hall friends and patrons 24 hours earlier on Wednesday, the 18th of December at 10 a.m. That is the rest is history live with the Philharmonia Orchestra Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It's at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May.

Now the tickets are available for members on Wednesday, the 18th of December and for the general public on Thursday, the 19th of December and for the general public on Thursday the 19th of December and please make sure that you don't miss it. If the history buff in your life is always regaling you with the same old facts about Churchill or Napoleon, why not get him or her, and let's face it you, a present? After all, Christmas is just around the corner and a very happy coincidence, our first official Restes history book is now out as the perfect stocking sized paperback. It is packed to the brim with the most bizarre historical questions you never thought to

ask like what was the most disastrous party in history? Which British politician plotted to feed his lover to an alligator? And why was a Brazilian emperor mistaken for a banana? It's sure to make the festive period much more entertaining for all involved, and it is available in bookshops everywhere now.