Carolingians in crisis: the medieval civil war that shaped Europe

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Carolingians in Crisis – The Medieval Civil War That Shaped Europe"

Hosted by Daniel Kramer Arden | Released on January 29, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine, host Daniel Kramer Arden engages in an insightful conversation with historians Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry, authors of the acclaimed book Oath Breakers. The discussion delves deep into the tumultuous period of the Carolingian Empire, focusing on the civil war that erupted among Charlemagne's grandsons and its profound impact on shaping medieval Europe.

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The Battle of Fontenoy: A Pivotal Moment

Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry explore the circumstances leading up to the Battle of Fontenoy, fought on June 25, 841 AD. This confrontation, occurring near the modest village of Fontenoy in modern-day France, was not just another medieval skirmish but a decisive clash that would ultimately fracture the once-mighty Carolingian Empire.

Matthew Gabriel (01:34): "The Battle of Fontenoy was horrifying for everybody involved. It shook the empire to its core and had reverberations that would last for generations."

David M. Perry elaborates on the scale of the battle, suggesting that while medieval battles often involved thousands rather than tens of thousands, Fontenoy was extraordinary in its magnitude and the diversity of forces engaged from across the vast empire.

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Contextualizing the Carolingian Empire

To understand the gravity of Fontenoy, David M. Perry provides a historical backdrop of the Carolingian Empire's rise and rapid decline. From its zenith under Charlemagne, spanning Western to Central Europe, the empire began to unravel within two generations due to internal strife and contested succession.

David M. Perry (05:19): "The Franks constructed a myth of unity, but the reality was built on a foundation of lies about their place in the world and the empire's organization."

Matthew Gabriel adds that Charlemagne's attempt to establish a cohesive empire was undermined by numerous coups and internal conflicts, setting the stage for the eventual civil war among his heirs.

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Succession Struggles After Charlemagne

Following Charlemagne's death in 814 AD, his son Louis the Pious ascended to the throne. His reign was marred by efforts to consolidate power and manage the loyalty of powerful nobles, often through both persuasion and coercion. The lack of a clear succession plan and mounting tensions among Louis's sons—Lothar, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald—led to increasing instability.

Matthew Gabriel (06:44): "Louis the Pious tried to build loyalty, but his methods, including violence and torture, created deep-seated tensions that undermined his reign."

David M. Perry counters the common perception that Louis was solely responsible for the empire's instability, highlighting that even Charlemagne faced significant governance challenges and multiple coup attempts.

David M. Perry (09:13): "Charlemagne suffered several coup attempts, showing that the need to balance power among nobles was a persistent issue."

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Outbreak of Civil War

The death of Louis the Pious in 840 AD plunged the empire into chaos as his sons vied for control. The ensuing civil war was less about the elimination of one another and more about defining the structure and unity of the empire.

Matthew Gabriel (09:31): "They're arguing about what it means to be an Emperor and what power entails within the empire."

The grandsons—Lothar hoping to maintain a unified empire, and Charles the Bald along with Louis the German advocating for more autonomous kingdoms—mobilized their forces, culminating in the Battle of Fontenoy.

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The Battle Unfolded

David M. Perry recounts the strategic deployment and the ferocity of the battle, noting how Lothar's initial advantage was overturned by the resilient and battle-hardened forces of Charles and Louis.

David M. Perry (14:18): "Louis the German brought vengeance to the battlefield, which was pivotal in turning the tide against Lothar."

Despite Lothar's formidable army, the combined might and determination of his brothers led to a decisive victory for Charles and Louis, effectively diminishing Lothar's influence and setting the stage for the empire's fragmentation.

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Aftermath and the Treaty of Verdun

The immediate aftermath of Fontenoy saw Lothar fleeing with the imperial treasury, only to later engage in further conflicts. The protracted struggle culminated in the Treaty of Verdun in 843 AD, which formally divided the Carolingian Empire into three separate kingdoms.

Matthew Gabriel (21:12): "We don't have a concrete document like the Treaty of Versailles. The division was more a result of subsequent actions rather than a clear-cut agreement."

David M. Perry emphasizes that the Treaty of Verdun's divisions were less about precise territorial agreements and more about the shifting alliances and power dynamics that emerged post-battle.

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The Role of the Church and the Pope

The Church, particularly bishops and the Pope, played a nuanced role during the civil war. While the Pope maintained moral authority, his direct influence was limited compared to other high clerics who were deeply intertwined with the empire's political fabric.

Matthew Gabriel (25:59): "The Pope has superior moral claims but can't unilaterally dictate the empire's affairs."

The bishops' involvement in legitimizing the outcomes of battles, such as holding a mass and council post-Fontenoy to interpret the battle's divine significance, underscored the Church's role in shaping public perception and political legitimacy.

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Legacy and the Making of Medieval Europe

In the book's coda, Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry reflect on the long-term consequences of the civil war. While the immediate division of the empire did not directly create modern nation-states like France and Germany, the fragmentation laid the groundwork for Europe's evolving political landscape.

David M. Perry (34:08): "19th-century nationalistic interpretations of Fontenoy are modern constructs that do not align with the medieval reality."

Matthew Gabriel critiques the later nationalistic narratives that retroactively attributed the battle to the formation of distinct French and German identities, arguing that such interpretations are anachronistic and overlook the complex, multilingual nature of the Carolingian Empire.

Matthew Gabriel (34:08): "The Treaty of Verdun map with bright lines is a simplification. The reality was much messier."

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Relevance to the Present Day

The historians draw parallels between the instability of the Carolingian Empire and contemporary societal tensions, suggesting that the rapid disintegration of a seemingly stable empire serves as a cautionary tale about political fragility and the undercurrents of discontent that can disrupt even the most formidable states.

Matthew Gabriel (36:35): "Cracks in a seemingly stable society can lead to rapid unraveling, much like what happened in the Carolingian Empire."

David M. Perry underscores the importance of understanding these historical dynamics to appreciate the intricate roots of modern European states and their identities.

David M. Perry (36:35): "The way the empire broke down set the stage for the formation of modern Europe."

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Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive exploration of a critical juncture in European history, illustrating how familial rivalries and political maneuvering among the Carolingians led to the empire's demise and the subsequent shaping of medieval Europe. Gabriel and Perry's insights challenge conventional narratives, urging listeners to reconsider the simplistic attribution of modern national identities to medieval events.

For those eager to delve deeper into the Carolingian era and its intricate politics, Oath Breakers by Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry is a must-read, offering a nuanced perspective on one of history's most fascinating power struggles.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements and non-content segments from the original podcast transcript to focus solely on the substantive discussions and analyses presented by the historians.

Transcript

[David Musgrove]

At New Balance, we believe if you.

[Matthew Gabriel]

Run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it.

[David M. Perry]

Because when you're not worried about doing.

[Matthew Gabriel]

Things the right way, you're free to discover your way.

[David M. Perry]

And that's what running's all about. Run your [e-mail] Running.

[Daniel Kramer Arden]

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. History is full of dysfunctional families, but few more so than the Carolingians. Their empire was at the height of its power under renowned ruler Charlemagne. But only two generations later, in the year 841 AD, Charlemagne's grandsons were locked in a vicious contest for power and control. This jockeying culminated in the bloody pitched battle of Fontenoy, a key moment in a civil war that shattered an empire and reshaped Europe. Professor Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry are the authors of a new book on this Oath Breakers. David Musgrove spoke to them to find out more about the shocking aftermath of this crisis. The first voice you'll hear from is Matthew Gabriel explaining what happened at the Battle of Fontenoy.

[David M. Perry]

So we start off with the Battle of Fontenoy, which is just a little bit southwest of the city of Auxerre in modern France. It's a small little village, you know, nowadays, and Even in the 840s, it wasn't anything particularly significant. We talk a little bit about maybe why the battle took place there. It was pretty close to Auxerre itself, very important monastery, important bishopric. But basically what happened is it's a civil war. A civil war erupts among the grandsons of Charlemagne. You know, about the fate of the empire. And after the death of their father, Louis the Pious, the emperor Louis the Pious, the three kind of sons, remaining sons, Lothar, who's the eldest, who's the co emperor, who's trying to kind of stitch the empire back together. In the wake of his father's death. And his younger brothers, Louis the German and Charles the Bald, gather on the field of battle and they're joined by their nephew Pepin II of Aquitaine, who's the son of another son of Louis the Pious. And they're trying to figure out what to do with the empire. And the argument is basically about what form does this empire take? Is it kind of coherent and unified? Or are Charles and Louis able to kind of function as independent kings in their own domain? Not necessarily that they would be independent in a real sense, but that they would be able to kind of be out from under the yoke of their brothers oppressive rule as they would say, this is complicated by the fact that there have been several coups in the 830s before then in which various players, all of these guys, had been involved against their father. And it erupts into kind of a massive, bloody battle on June 25, 8:41, on a Saturday. We know it's specifically. It's a Saturday because they talk about it. It's one of those weird things where with most medieval battles, we have kind of a sense of where it might have been and when it might have been. But here they're very specific about the day, the time of the day that the battle starts and the location. And that's because we think, and as we argue, as we start off the book, it was horrifying. It was horrifying for everybody involved. It kind of shook the empire to its core and its participants and had reverberations that would last for generations.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, so it was a pretty big battle. Right. Have we got any idea about the size of the conflict here?

[Matthew Gabriel]

You know, it's always tricky to estimate. We have one Source that says 40,000 died on one side. I think that's our only number. And that's not really a credible number. Right. Because that would be a lot of people just in death, but tens of thousands seems entirely possible. Certainly many, many thousands on all sides. Right. But there are a lot of people in the Carolingian Empire, and because the whole empire is engaged in the civil war, and you have centers of power in every quadrant. So we have Pepin in the southwest in Aquitaine. We have Charles the Bald in the northwest. We have Lothar with Italy. He's got. We know we have lots of troops coming up across. Across the Alps into Italy. We have Louis the German, who is, unsurprisingly, has his power coming out of Germany or Bavaria in particular, and then lots of interchangeable complexities in the Frankish heartland. Right. So they're drawing in fighters from everywhere, just everywhere in the empire. And they don't really know there's going to be a battle until a couple of weeks before. But there's an idea, as the spring comes in, 841, that they know, like, this is it. And I think people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about medieval battles, which, of course we do, may think it's always tens of thousands of people, but usually, actually, these medieval battles we run across are a couple thousand on either side. That's a pretty big battle. This is on another scale entirely.

[David Musgrove]

I like talking to people who think a lot about medieval battles now let's just take a pause for a second before we dive back into the battle and just contextualize a little bit. So we talked about Carolingian Empire. We've talked about Frankia and Frankish. We've talked. We talked about Charlemagne. Let's just try and position this for our listeners a little bit more.

[David M. Perry]

So, basically, the Franks rise to power very early on, like in the 5th and 6th century, as a group that had been interacting with Romans for a long time, but they established their own kingdom. Then you have a dynasty called the Merovingians, who rule for several centuries, and they're supplanted in coup d'etat, you know, by high nobles who eventually take the name of the dynasty of the Carolingians, after which of their progenitors, a guy named Charles Carolus in Latin, hence Carolingians. Charlemagne is kind of the apex of that empire in the sense that he expands when he takes power in 768 and he dies in 814, so rules for a substantial amount of time. He expands the Frankish empire to encompass most of Europe at that time. So, you know, from kind of Denmark in the north, all the way down to central Italy, across the Pyrenees, into Catalonia, around Barcelona in the southwest, and then into Saxony in the northeast as well. So most of what is now Western Europe and even Central Europe as well. But what's really interesting to us especially is how quickly it falls apart within just two generations, this myth of unity that the Franks construct for themselves. This great empire that Charlemagne had built was kind of built, as we say in the book, kind of on a foundation of lies. It was lies that the Franks told to other people, but it was lies that they told themselves about their place in the world and kind of the way that the empire was organized. And that's what we find so interesting is not just kind of the things that happened, but the stories they told themselves about it and why they happened.

[David Musgrove]

And then. So after Charlemagne, Louis the Pious comes to the throne, as you talked about. Is his reign sort of pretty difficult then? I imagine lots of tension.

[Matthew Gabriel]

Charlemagne has a lot of sons, and Louis is the one who happens to survive. But it's not like there's a plan, right? It's not that sort of from the jump, Charlemagne is saying, this son is going to inherit everything, and let's build loyalty and let's build a system. And interestingly enough, Louis actually does try to do that with his son Lothar, but then there's a whole bunch of coups, and we can get into that. So Louis takes power. He's the only legitimate son alive. He has a lot of work to do to build loyalty across his dad's empire. It's not just sort of handed to him. And some of that work is done through persuasion and through gifts, but some of it is done through violence and through torture and through, in particular, the blinding of his nephew, who then dies. And then there's upset about that. There's an upheaval in the court. He tries to kick out the old guard and bring in the new guard. Well, it turns out the old guard are still very powerful nobles and are not super thrilled about being kicked out. So there are these tensions built in right from the start. And then he gets remarried to a younger woman, and the old guard aren't thrilled with that either, because she brings in her own power centers. And so, yeah, it's not a. It's not a stable reign, and it's not a stable reign because of internal problems, but it's also a moment in which the Franks start losing battles on the edges of the empire. And that is a whole nother kind of crisis of legitimacy.

[David M. Perry]

One of the really great things I think, that we try to bring out, though, is that I think that Louis is often contrasted in that way as kind of the stability and greatness of Charlemagne versus kind of the instability and kind of fecklessness of Louis the Pious. But if you look like Charlemagne actually had a real lot of problems govern as well. Like, we talk about the coups of the 830s against Louis the Pious, but Charlemagne himself suffered several coup attempts, very serious coup attempts, one led by his eldest son in 792, Pepin, who we know now as Pepin the Hunchback, but certainly wasn't called that at the time. And, you know, so it seems kind of baked into the way the Carolingians kind of rule their empire is that they have to give power. They have to rely upon these powerful nobles around them. And when the powerful nobles get mad about the loss of status, that's a real problem for the kings. And just because only a few coups are successful doesn't mean there aren't other coups that are plotted and executed along the way.

[David Musgrove]

Let's get back to the battle, then. So, 841, so Louis the Pious, the guy we've just been talking about, he is dead. He's died in the year 840. And this battle is basically the unravelling of the political situation, Right? So it's the three grandsons of Charlemagne having it out. What are they trying to achieve here?

[David M. Perry]

Well, they're trying to decide the fate of the empire. And it can't be more blunt than that, is that when the Battle of Fontenoye starts, and it seems from all our available sources that it's decided that they're actually going to fight. On the night before they exchange emissaries, their armies are camped kind of across a field. The region around Fontenoy is kind of this lovely plateau with, you know, you can kind of see for miles, it's relatively flat. There are some kind of gentle rises, it's very open. There's some woods around it and things like that. But it seems kind of ideal. So these guys are kind of almost literally staring at each other. They can see the massive armies kind of camped across from one another. And this, as David had mentioned earlier, had happened several times before. But here they seem something has kind of changed in this relationship. And they decide they're going to battle, and they agree that at basically 8am the next morning on Saturday, they're going to come out and they're going to fight. So they draw up their divisions and they go out. And it seems like basically is that Lothar is trying to kind of beat his brothers into submission, to restore the empire as it had been ideally under his father and under his grandfather. And Charles and Louis want something different. They want their own kind of functional kingdoms within that. They want to be free from the meddling of the emperor in their lands, trust bald to the the west, Louis the German to the east, and also the right to kind of act as independent Carolingians. They have, as they argue, kind of the same blood that flows through their veins as Lothar does. So they have as much right to rule as everybody else. Looking back, this becomes, especially for 19th century historians, kind of the moment that made France and Germany, that this was the final division of Charlemagne's empire and kind of was the birthplace of kind of the modern civilization state. But it seems clear here that the argument is much more nuanced. Nobody's arguing that Lothar shouldn't be emperor. They're arguing about what his role should be there. And it's an argument that's so important that they're willing to kill each other. You know, brothers are willing to fight against brothers. Armies are divided between cousins and between uncles and nephews on either side. You see people who had intermarried with one another, families that were related by kinship and by blood, killing one another and being willing to do so. About, like, what does it mean to be an Emperor.

[David Musgrove]

And was the hierarchy clear here? Lothar was the emperor. The other two were just kings.

[Matthew Gabriel]

There is a moment sort of a year later in which Charles and Louis write an agreement between each other that writes Lothar out. We think it's just a negotiating position, and they quite quickly bring Lothar back to the table. But as of 841, there's just no hint. Charles is not saying, oh, I should be emperor. Louis is not saying, oh, I should be emperor. We should have no emperor. It's really about, what does power mean? You know, what does it mean when we say you're emperor? Does that mean that we have to listen to you? Does that mean you get to divide up territory? Who controls Aquitaine? Does Lothar get to decide who controls Aquitaine, or does Charles get to decide that he controls Aquitaine? Right. So for Pepin ii, it feels a little more existential because he would like to be king of Aquitaine, but it's really who owes troops to who, who has to listen, who gets to decide who. Which noble family runs this monastery or this mint or whatever it is. So these are, again, as Matt was saying, really important to them. They are willing to literally kill each other over it. But it's sort of striking how angry they seem with each other. And no one ever says, well, let's just get rid of Lothar. Let's kill Lothar. Or Lothar saying, you know, I want to capture my brothers and execute them, or any of these other things. That's just not. It's just not in the text. It's not in the sources. That's not how they're thinking about power.

[David M. Perry]

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[Matthew Gabriel]

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[David Musgrove]

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[David Musgrove]

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[Matthew Gabriel]

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[David M. Perry]

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[David Musgrove]

And if you were like a bookmaker and you landed at the battlefield on 25 June at 8am, where would the smart money have been? Where would all the bets have been laid as to who was going to win this battle?

[David M. Perry]

That's a great question. I would have put my money on Lothar. You know, it seems like from everything that led up to that battle, he had kind of been shifting both of his brothers around their respective kingdoms since Louis the Pious, since their father's death. And he was also, he had just been reinforced. He kind of was delaying during the negotiations before the battle to wait for his nephew to show up with his army. And his nephew does appear. So it seemed like normal service would be resumed, that the emperor would be triumphant, that Charles and Louis would kind of scurry back to their kingdoms and everything would be settled. But then the opposite happens.

[David Musgrove]

So you'd have lost your money, Matt?

[David M. Perry]

Absolutely. That's why I don't gamble. I'm very bad at it. Yeah.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, so let's talk about the outcome of the battle then. So Lothar doesn't win. What happens?

[Matthew Gabriel]

Medieval battles happen either when one side is caught by surprise, which we have several examples of that in our book, or when both sides or all the sides think they have a reasonable chance of fighting, or for some reason think this is our only moment. But medieval Franks are very happy to retreat when they think that they're not in an advantageous position. So I totally agree. I would have put my money on Lothar, but at very close odds, right. That all sides think they're very close. And so this is not some stunning upset. But on the other hand, Lothar has the well equipped army. He has probably slightly larger numbers, what Charles and Louis have. So Charles has a quite large army. He's drawn from all over the Frankish heartland, including the northwest and west. Louis has a smaller army, but it is a battle hardened army. They won an incredible victory. One of these surprise victories in Germany, actually fighting in a meteor crater. It's kind of a stunning. Unlike Fontenois, which is just a field with some woods and trees, the battle in the meteor crater is very much shaped by the terrain. It's really quite a sort of a striking set of events. Louis wins and then they get to loot the other army. So all of his army, they probably have a lot of horses, they definitely have a lot of good weapons, and they're battle hardened. They've been through this before. The army's split up into six divisions, three on a side, and Pepin and Charles meet in the middle, and Louis and Lothar meet, let's say, on the left. And then there's a third division run by major nobles on the right, where actually we know the least about kind of what happens in the battle. And the reasons for this are fuzzy, or there's a fog of war, more or less literally, but in the battle, it's clear that Lothar's forces engage Louis and are beaten back, and then Pepin's forces in the center collapse. So that I can say with real certainty, what's much harder to say is why does Pepin collapse because they're just beaten? Does Pepin collapse because they're trying to fake a retreat and then lure Charles's forces too far exposed and then pounce? That's a very standard kind of Frankish military technique that they use all the time. But when you fake a retreat, it's easy for that to become a real retreat. I kind of think that Pepin is aware of the problems in Lothar's flank and is trying to reinforce them. And there are reasons we go into in the sources why we think that's likely, but it's just really hard to tell. What we know is that Lothar's forces lose and then the center collapses and then the route is on.

[David M. Perry]

The other thing that Charles and Louis have in this battle with their elder brother Lothar, is that really ends up, I think, giving them an edge. As David was saying, like Louis army is battle hardened. Kind of experience is. Charles and Louis have desperation and I think anger at the way that their lot has been cast. Their side feels really aggrieved at the way that things are playing out. As David mentioned, for several years, right before Louis the Pious death, it seems like Louis the German is going to be kind of the favored son of Louis the Pious. And then it all falls apart in part because of Lothar's machinations. And so he's angry. And so the battle that David was describing in the crater was kind of a victory of vengeance in some ways. You can kind of feel the animosity against his enemy that Louis the German is bringing to this battle. And I think that carries over to Fontenoy as well. And why the ferocious attack that pushes Lothar's armies back is so effective and ends up ultimately turning the tide of battle.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, so the battle, as you said, is a big thing, but it doesn't decide the outcome, does it? The decisions of how the empire should be broken up or settled, they don't happen immediately after this battle, do they?

[Matthew Gabriel]

So that's right. So there is a pursuit. There is horrific killing in the pursuit, which everyone writes about. But Lothar gets away. There's definitely. There's a source that says he fought. A lot of military historians think the princes never fought, that they never rode into battle because they're too valuable. Regardless, he gets away. He heads up to Aachen. In Aachen, they have the imperial treasury. He puts it in his pockets. He spends wildly. He launches kind of a rumor campaign that says Charles was wounded and Louis was dead. Neither of those are true. And immediately starts building political support again. This goes on for some time. Eventually, Louis and Charles once again bring their armies together. They have clear military superiority. There is no dividing them up again. And they bring Lothar to a treaty table. But even that, this sort of famous Treaty of Verdun, even that, no one knows in 843 when this treaty is signed, when they come together, that that's the end of things. They just know, okay, we need to have a ceasefire, we need to have a pause, let's write an agreement. And then, you know, maybe in a couple of years we'll start this up again. They don't know that. In fact, this is kind of an endpoint. But that's. That's two years later, and at least a year of it is still spent chasing armies around and having a certain amount of violence take place.

[David M. Perry]

What's really notable, too, is in those two years, it's mostly Lothar chasing Charles and Louis, respectively, around. It seems very clear that when Charles and Louis unite, which they do at Fontenois, and then they kind of break apart for a little while to deal with things on their own side and then come together again. When they're together, they're stronger than Lothar, and Lothar is a little bit worried and doesn't want to confront them. But in the interim, if Lothar can separate them, he spends a lot of time chasing Charles around northwestern France and southwestern France, and then Louis across the Rhine and into Bavaria. And he seems to have the upper hand. It always seems to be that a river intervenes, though, and he can't quite keep up with them or catch up to them. And we joke at one point in the book itself that, you know, Lothar's greatest nemesis throughout the civil War was a river, it was always a river that was flooded, that he couldn't cross and couldn't kind of close the deal and somebody else was able to get away.

[David Musgrove]

But eventually there is a treaty, as you said, this Treaty of Verdun in the year 843. Verdun, a name to conjure within the wider span of history. What do we know about the circumstances of that treaty? Do we have any sort of colour about what actually happened and what went on, or do we just have a rough idea about the outcome?

[Matthew Gabriel]

So I remember very clearly as an undergraduate in my first medieval history class, learning about the Treaty of Verdun and learning a number of things that are, and I want to say this very clearly, are not true, but I probably wrote essays about it in exams. I believe there was a treaty like a document, like the Treaty of Versailles. Right. That there's a document and that it was written in Latin and German and French, and that this is, as Matt was saying, the division of France and Germany in this document. And I don't want to call out my undergraduate medieval history professor, because he's the reason I'm talking to you today. He was a wonderful professor. But I remember learning these things and they're just not true. We have no document. There is absolutely nothing from that meeting in 843 that lays out the division of the empire explicitly. This thing about the French and the German, that's actually a public oath taking between Louis and Charles in the city of Strasbourg the year before. And that's the moment when they come together and really make it clear they're going to stick together until they've got an agreement. They bring Lothar to the treaty table and they agree that they will split up the empire into three parts. And then they have the problem that no one knows how big the empire is exactly. You know, how do you divide it in three until you've taken an accounting? So they send out nobles all over and then maybe it's about nine months later that then they meet in Verdun, really, just because it's kind of a convenient place where the people can come together and these nobles can come together who've done the accounting and then start dividing it up. We can only figure out exactly how it's divided up by sort of looking at what happens next over the next couple years, where they go, which allies, get which bits. Some people, many Frankish nobles have territories all over the Frankish Empire, and then after Verdun, they basically have to be in one camp or another. So a number of Them are quite bitter about it because they've lost some of their lands and kept others, and so they write that down. And so we can start kind of filling in the gaps. But we don't have this treaty that I imagined, again, at a much younger age, actually existed, that you could go to Paris and go to the library and pull it out and read it. And that just isn't true.

[David Musgrove]

I was really struck, actually, by reading in your book about this moment, after Strasbourg and before Verdun, where the people are sent out to understand the empire. And I thought, that's a massive job. That's going to take years. What do we know about that?

[David M. Perry]

On one hand, very little about specifically, because the sources just don't talk about it. There's again, like, as David was saying, we just don't have the documentation about that. But on the other hand, there was a long tradition among the Carolingians in the structure of governance, of sending people out to provinces to investigate things. That was a central feature of kind of how the Carolingians back from Pepin the Short, Charlemagne's father, but especially under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, that's how they governed, and it's how you could move within an empire but not have to be everywhere within an empire and still maintain control. So although that is a massive undertaking, it is something that I think that everybody understood could be done. And I think we tend to think of, like, when we talk about kind of dividing up an empire, like about maps and gis and things like that, what they were looking for, I think, and this is just kind of my best guess, is that they were looking for important sites. Where were the mints, where were the monasteries? What kind of dues did the monasteries, the bishoprics, certain nobles owe to the different kings or emperors and stuff like that. So they were dividing upon value, but even within that, they were always taking into account what historic claims each brother would have. So one of the first things that they agree on, it seems very clear, is Lothar gets Italy because he's always had Italy. Louis the German gets Bavaria because he's always had Bavaria. And Charles the Bald gets Aquitaine because it's really contested and it's really important that he, not Pepin ii, have it, but also these lands in northwestern France, because those were important lands that Louis the Pious had given him. So the squishy bit is the middle bit. Like, how far east does Charles the Bald's land or power extend? How far west is Louis the Germans? And what's that strip in the middle, like, around the imperial heartland or around Aachen, the historical capital. Lothar needs to control that because he's still the Emperor. But, like, where else does he have lands? And sometimes it's natural borders, and sometimes it's just kind of the fuzzy messiness of how far a power expand, extends. When you look up, if you Google Treaty of Verdun map or something like that, you're going to see nice bright lines. And I think it was a lot messier than that.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, yeah. You mentioned monasteries just then, which leads me to think a little bit about the Church. Obviously, the Church and Christianity was very important at this period and still is today for many people. What's the role of the Pope in all this? What was the Church thinking about this fight between the most important members of society?

[Matthew Gabriel]

So before we get to the Pope, though, we'll get to him. The Pope in some ways doesn't matter a lot more than any number of other really high clerics around. Everyone has some bishops, everyone's bishops is telling them that they're doing the right thing. Everyone has put important relatives in one way or another into the major church positions, or at least has. You know, that these are major centers of power. They are not places where people who have intellectual callings go and then absent themselves from the world. These are people deeply connected to the centers of power in Frankish society. And there's lots of different centers. The Pope definitely has some superior moral claims and shows up at interesting moments in this. One of them is one of the coup attempts, the second coup attempt in 833. There's a field that becomes known as the Field of Lies. So, you know, that's fairly dramatic, in which the Pope is playing the go between between Louis the Pious and his two eldest sons, Louis the German and Lothar, on one side with their army. Louis the Pious is on the other side of their army, and the Pope is going back and forth. And at some point in that process, most of Louis the Pious men betray him, hence lies, and go over to the other side. And that's the end of that coup. There isn't a big battle that could have been the big battle that we then focused our book on, but instead there's a betrayal and then a settlement, but then Louis actually takes power again. So the Pope is there. Otherwise, though, the Pope, I actually think mostly as the Pope, as this really important figure in Italy, which means he's more or less firmly in Lothar's camp. But he can't just go in and say, well, I'm the Pope. Everyone listen to me, Lothar's in charge, everyone else go home. That's just not how it works.

[David M. Perry]

One of the really interesting things, though, is that bishops do play a huge role throughout. And there's a couple of really key moments in the civil war. One during the coup attempts that David was talking about in 830 and 833, and then one immediately after the battle of Fontenoy and immediately after the battle of Fontenoy, for example, just to pick one of those is that after the battle, after Lothar's army has fled. It seems very clear from the sources. The sources are extraordinarily clear about this, in fact, is that there's a gathering of bishops on the battlefield itself, meaning that probably upwind, but, you know, as there are people still waiting to be buried on the battlefield. There's a mass that's said. The gathering of bishops in Charles and Louis army come together, they say a mass and they hold a council. And the council, it's so interesting. The council is to decide what God wanted out of that battle and what its meaning was. Because even though Lothar has fled, the idea that Franks had killed Franks, that brother had fought brother, that the empire had descended into this violent civil war, needed some theological justification. And the bishops come together, unsurprisingly, saying that Charles and Louis were right and God had wanted them to win and stuff like that, because they were still on the battlefield and they knew which side their bread was buttered on. But at the same time, like, they needed to do that and the kings needed them to do that. The Franks needed to hear it and the bishops needed to be part of that decision making process about what to do next. And the problem was that, like, nobody's convinced. Like, it's not like Lothar's army cared what those guys thought because he had his own bishops who were telling him very different things.

[David Musgrove]

Now you've got a tremendous coda at the end of the book where you talk about the obelisk that sort of marks the site of the battle and what it says. And obviously that obelisk is put up a lot later than the battle itself. It gives us a chance to talk about the consequences, the outcome of this, and perhaps to reflect on the title of your book, the Shattering of the Empire and Making of Medieval Europe. So how did this battle make medieval Europe? How did this civil war make medieval Europe? And how do you sort of challenge these ideas about the creation of nation states and France and Germany and that sort of thing that may or may not fall out of it.

[David M. Perry]

So I think that the nostalgia for Charlemagne's empire animates the vast majority of continental European history, up through 1400, 1500, something like that. Mostly political history, but I think cultural history as well. And what I mean by that is that kings of France, the emperors in what is now Germany, the rulers of Italy, even Iberian rulers as well, Christian Iberian rulers, try to tie themselves in some ways, and in many ways, it's accurate, tie themselves back to the Carolingians, to some bloodline that emerges there. One of the problems that happens in the 830s and 840s is that there are just too many Carolingians, whereas there was one Charlemagne, and then there was one Louis the Pious, and after that, there are too many legitimate children of Louis the Pious, and then their children, and then their children who are potential to rule, and they're given kind of smaller lands and stuff like that. And that tension, I think, kind of ultimately is part of the problem that leads to the civil war. But then in the centuries thereafter, there's that dream of empire and especially the dream of a sense of election, of being God's chosen people that never leave them for centuries thereafter. And I think they're chasing that. And you see that in many of the actions that they take, and the need for the king of France to expand beyond the Ile de France and to reunite with the Carolingian bloodline. The desire to go on crusade in 1095, for example, the idea that these guys are all Franks and they're reclaiming Charlemagne's claims to Jerusalem, which is another legend that kind of builds up in the 10 and 11th century. You know, that's different, I think, than, as we say, kind of in the coda to what we think of as modern nation states, France and Germany, because those are different things aiming for different ends. They're seeking justification in the European Middle Ages. But, you know, the reality is, I think, something a little bit different.

[David Musgrove]

Sure. Because I've brought in this obelisk. We should say what the obelisk says, because that talks about the creation nation states. Right.

[David M. Perry]

So the obelisk that stands on a little hill just south of the village of Fontenoye, it's really lovely and beautiful. It's just a small kind of stone obelisk. And on it, there's an inscription in Latin and inscription in French. So in Latin, it just says very simply, the Battle of Fontenoy. And then the date 25th of June, 841. But underneath it, in French, it says here on 25th of June 841, the battle of Fontenoy was fought between the children of Louis the Pious. The victory of Charles I Bald separated France from the Western Empire and founded the independence of the French nationality. And so the claim which is made during the reign of Louis Napoleon, the kind of resurrected French empire, is that the origins of this, the French nation, were really tied to the Middle Ages, were specifically to Charles the Bald, who was fighting against kind of the constraints of empire, seeking independence. And really, again, as we argue throughout, that's not at all what was happening in the 840s. They weren't at any point really trying to cut Lothar out. Charles the Bald, in fact, declares himself emperor after the death of Lothar and some of Lothar's sons shortly before his death. So he's seeking to kind of claim empire, but he's in no way trying to distance himself from that legacy of empire. The claims that are often made about Fontenoye by 19th century historians are simply nationalistic ones that were particularly to the 19th century. So Jules Michelet, for example, was very keen on the separation of France and Germany. That's what he wanted to show the independence of France. And Leopold von Ranke, on the other side of the Rhine, was doing the same thing, looking at it from a different perspective, agreeing on the general kind of breakdown of the empire and separating them, but thinking about it from a very different way, that this was important to the formation of the German people. And at no point over the next several centuries did any of these guys think of themselves as anything other, both of them as Franks, because that was the identity that they had. And that story, I think, is important to tell because it could have happened otherwise. There were moments in which the empire could have been stitched back together. And it didn't seem necessarily that Verdun wasn't going to just kind of reorganize the empire in a functional way. And there's lots of reasons why it didn't. But those 19th century claims about this formal distinction that the battle brought are just. They're modern ones that have nothing to do with the Middle Ages.

[Matthew Gabriel]

And I just want to jump back into this Oath of Strasbourg, which is this famous moment where we have. It's a source written in Latin, but we have the French and the German versions of this oath that was being sworn. The whole point was that they all spoke all these languages, right? It's not that there is a French troop and a German troop and there's a division and there's a linguistic divide that has formed and they're different peoples. The whole point is that there are a lot of languages across this huge landmass, and they want to make sure everyone understands everything, but that there's very comfortable, not just bilingualism, but trilingualism or maybe more people are able to speak all these languages. That's just the normal way. It's a complicated big empire and people talk to each other. It's only a thousand years later that this then becomes symbolic of a way of creating a narrative that then stretches the French and German individual nation, state and nationalistic identities back to this moment where these oaths are sworn. And that's really interesting. And looking at what the 19th century does in the Middle Ages is something that Matt and I do a lot. Mostly I shout about it because the 19th century pisses me off. But that may be more about my idiosyncrasies, but we can definitely say that's not what was happening in the 9th century.

[David Musgrove]

Okay. And apologies to all the Victorian fans here, just to be, like, super clear for listeners. And taking away the nation state line of things, does this civil war result in the fracturing of the empire? Conclusively, though, does it end the extent that Charlemagne created of the empire?

[David M. Perry]

I think the short answer is yes, is that the empire is never stitched back together. There are attempts to do so kind of later on, especially in the later 9th century, and even a little bit kind of in the 10th century as well. But the political entities, and I think a lot of that, especially in at least the first and second generation after the Battle of Fontenoy, for example, is that it has to be with the bad blood that's generated there. Not just the bloodiness of the battle itself, the kind of resentments on either side about kind of who deserves what, but the way that the battle itself was pursued, the fact that Louis and Charles's army pursued Lothar's army and cut them down in their pursuit, like, it seems to have been a real massacre that people remembered and held grudges about for generations.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, so last thing, we talked a lot about what happened in the 840s and the run up. Aside from it being like a really good, fascinating story with some great characters, why should we care about the 840s now? Why are they pertinent to our lives today, if at all? Do they need to be?

[Matthew Gabriel]

Well, we are having this conversation in late October. It probably isn't a surprise to your listeners that we have these conversations well before they go on the air. And I am in. We're both in the United States, and I have spent a lot of time in the last few years thinking about how a society that seems very stable, that things can feel like we have a basic consensus about who we are as a people and how fast that can all fall apart. So I don't know if that's an uplifting message, but it definitely has been on my mind as we were writing this book. I was thinking about how fast, how you can think, you're in a good shape, how you can think, yeah, we know who we are. And in fact, the cracks are there and probably have been there a long time.

[David M. Perry]

And I think the other thing, and I want to agree 100% with everything that David was saying, is that empires think of themselves as particularly stable. But are they? Well, if you dig a little deeper, maybe not so much. But the other thing, too, I think, is that and this is true about medieval history generally, but I think it's true about the Carolingians, specifically in the 840s. A it's a period that people don't really think about a whole lot, certainly not in the United States. But it's one that's particularly important to the formation of Europe. Having a sense of itself, like we were saying kind of when we were talking about the obelisk and lots of other places, is like, we do have a France, we do have a Germany, we do have an Italy. And there's reasons for that. And it's not a direct line. It's a really weird kind of long and winding line that connects the formation of those modern states to the Battle of Fontenoy. But you can draw that line. And you should draw that line because the way that the empire breaks down and the way that subsequent machinations of the rulers and the people who were involved, churchmen, nobles, peasants, and things like that afterwards are particularly important. And they set things up that will inevitably lead to, well, not inevitably, but will lead to the formation of kind of modern Europe as we understand it. And it was important to those people and it should be important to us, too.

[Daniel Kramer Arden]

That was Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry speaking to David Musgrove. Their book, O the War of Brothers that Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe, is out now, published by HarperCollins. For more on major moments that rocked the Carolingian world, then check out our episode with Charles west about the marriage scandal that destroyed the reign of Lothar ii. You can find the link to that episode in the description of this one. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.