Charlemagne’s Successors, 814–911

Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), took his role as leader of the Christian empire even more seriously than his father did. In 817, he imposed on all the monasteries of the empire a uniform way of life, based on the Benedictine rule. Although some monasteries opposed this legislation, and in the years to come the king was unable to impose his will directly, this moment marked the effective adoption of the Benedictine rule as the monastic standard in Europe.

In a new development of the coronation ritual, Louis’s first wife, Ermengard, was crowned empress by the pope in 816. In 817, their firstborn son, Lothar, was named emperor and made co-ruler with Louis. Their other sons, Pippin and Louis (later called Louis the German), were made subkings under imperial rule. Louis the Pious hoped in this way to ensure the unity of the empire while satisfying the claims of all his sons. Should any son die, only his firstborn could succeed him, a measure intended to prevent further splintering. But Louis’s hopes were thwarted by events. Ermengard died, and Louis married Judith, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. In 823, she and Louis had a son, Charles (later known as Charles the Bald, to whose court Dhuoda’s son William was sent). The sons of Ermengard, bitter over the birth of another royal heir, rebelled against their father and fought one another for more than a decade.

Finally, after Louis the Pious died in 840, the Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the empire among his three remaining sons (Pippin had died in 838). The arrangement roughly defined the future political contours of western Europe (see the inset in Map 9.3) The western third, bequeathed to Charles the Bald (r. 843–877), would eventually become France, and the eastern third, handed to Louis the German (r. 843–876), became Germany. The “Middle Kingdom,” which was given to Lothar (r. 840–855) along with the imperial title, had a different fate: parts of it were absorbed by France and Germany, and the rest eventually formed what became the modern states of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy.

Thus, by 843, the European-wide empire of Charlemagne had dissolved. Forged by conquest, it had been supported by a small group of privileged aristocrats with lands and offices stretching across its entire expanse. Their loyalty—based on shared values, friendship, expectations of gain, and sometimes formal ties of vassalage and oaths of fealty (faithfulness)—was crucial to the success of the Carolingians. The empire had also been supported by an ideal, shared by educated laymen and churchmen alike, of conquest and Christian belief working together to bring good order to the earthly state.

But powerful forces operated against the Carolingian Empire. Once the empire’s borders were fixed and conquests ceased, the aristocrats could not hope for new lands and offices. They put down roots in particular regions and began to gather their own followings. Powerful local traditions such as different languages also undermined imperial unity.

Finally, as Dhuoda revealed in the handbook she wrote for her son, some people disagreed with the imperial ideal. By asking her son to put his father before the emperor, Dhuoda demonstrated her belief in the primacy of the family and the personal ties that bound it together. Her ideal represented a new sensibility that saw real value in the breaking apart of Charlemagne’s empire into smaller, more intimate local units.