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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified haters. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With us today, and I'm very excited about this is Dr. Matthew Gabriel, a professor of Medieval studies at Virginia Tech and a guy who knows a lot about religion, violence, the apocalypse, nostalgia, the Middle Ages. And you might know him from lots of different things, including the Internet, which basically loves him, or his two books with co author David Perry, the Bright Ages and the very newly released Oathbreakers. Congratulations on your new book and welcome to the show.
- [01:04]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Thank you so much. So excited to hate on somebody in the past.
- [01:07]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And I can't imagine why it might be relevant for us to talk about a sort of like, God, Emperor, conquering guy. I don't know why that would be kind of of the moment.
- [01:20]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No. Yeah, it was weird. I was doing a talk actually just the other day and I was talking about, you know, the premise of our new book, Oathbreakers, which is really about the 9th century. It's a 9th century EMP empire, and it's an empire that falls apart really, really quickly because elites kind of stop looking about, looking out for the public welfare and start caring only about their disinterested, disinterested selves and enriching themselves from public coffers. And then I had to pause for a moment and this happened to be up in D.C. and everybody's mouth was just like, ah. They knew exactly what I was I was talking about there.
- [01:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You were like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Yeah, wait a second. Something about this feels familiar to me.
- [01:57]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:59]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And with that in mind, who are we going to be talking about today?
- [02:03]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
So we're going to be talking about this guy named Charlemagne, which is an amalgamation of Charles the Great, you might call him. Carolus Magnus was the Latin initially, and then it got Frenchified and then stuck together later on. Charlemagne himself was an 8th and 9th century ruler. He was from a people called the Franks. The Franks themselves were a Germanic group that was present and interacted with the Roman Empire. Since, you know, 4th 5th century, something like that. Settled peacefully initially in the Roman Empire, but then established a kingdom kind of as the Western Roman Empire kind of fell apart or kind of retreated back into Italy and then eventually over to Constantinople. He's not the first, but he is one of the first rulers of a dynasty by the name of the Carolingians. And under his reign specifically, which went from about 768 to 814, he expanded the empire to compass almost all of Europe at the time, from beyond the Pyrenees into Iberia, all the way up into Denmark into Saxony, beyond the Rhine in the east, and then from Brittany, from the Britain, the Atlantic coast, the English Channel, all the way down into Italy, beyond Rome and across the Danube and stuff like that. And he. He did that by violence. I mean, he did it by conquest, by not only expanding Frankish holdings at the expense of some of his internal rivals, but then conquering other peoples as well. But he's also known for lots of other things, too. This is the period which you may have heard of the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of learning and art, especially centered around his court, which is now the German city of Aachen on the western part of Germany nowadays. And religion forged an alliance with the papacy in order to prop up his reign, but also because he cared very deeply about the proper. According to him, the proper practice of Christianity. So. So he had his fingers kind of in everything, as emperors tend to do, I guess.
- [04:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And he's kind of the first phase of what we know of as like, the Holy Roman Empire. Right. Like, he's like the. In this. This really, really early period sort of.
- [04:12]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
So later on, in the later Middle Ages, he is. He's said to be the kind of progenitor of it. But at the time, he is crowned Roman emperor on Christmas Day in St. Peter's in the year 800. But he's very clear, and contemporaries are very clear. They. There's no holy attached to it. They think of themselves as Roman emperors in the same sense that Caesar was, Augustus was Trajan and Hadrian. And that's really important for their. How they're constructing their own legitimacy, because they are kind of, you know, they're in Italy kind of as Germanic outsiders in some ways. So they need that title to. To. To. To stand up to the Byzantines, but also to kind of project their power outwards. Very quickly on in the 12th century, Frederick Barbarossa, who really starts using the term holy with Roman emp Emperor, he says, like, oh, it's because of my man Charlemagne, who started this whole thing. And so we're in a direct line from him. And then everybody kind of jumps on that, because there are, of course, like, affinities in the way they ruled and stuff like that. But. But at the time, like, yeah, he. He never considered his. What he had kind of the Holy Roman Emperor, which we. We think of today.
- [05:14]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He just considered it to be the Roman Empire. Like, to sort of.
- [05:16]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
The Roman Empire. Yep.
- [05:17]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. So this is also a good moment for me to say that, to be clear, this guy was alive well over a thousand years before the people that I know a lot about.
- [05:25]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
So.
- [05:25]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So in many ways, there's this. Usually on these episodes, I will be like, and then this happened, and then this is crazy. And you won't believe this, but in many ways, this is going to be me learning a lot from you as we go, because I went into this week knowing very little about Charlemagne, and I did do, obviously, some research because it's my job, so I'll hopefully know at least 2% of what is necessary to have a good conversation. But this is also, like, a lot of my knowledge, because I'm not one of these historians who likes to pretend that I know every thing about every period in history, because I think that's actually quite a dangerous thing for a lot of historians to do. But it's also interesting because I'll be going into this with probably a lot of knowledge around the sort of myths surrounding him and the popular narratives surrounding him, rather than the sort of accurate historical narratives. So it'll be nice to kind of have some of my understandings, as we've just seen, be corrected a little bit as we go, too. What I was looking at when I was seeing, when I was reading about this idea of him being crowned this sort of New Roman Emperor, I saw that it was partially kind of an attempt to transfer the Roman Empire status from Byzantine. The Byzantine Empire, so the Eastern Roman Empire over, like, back over towards Western Europe. So there's also kind of, like, a political strategy happening here to, like, move this away from the east and back towards the West. Is that right?
- [06:49]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the. Part. A large part of Charlemagne's reign is defined by kind of rivalries with the rulers in Byzantium in. In Constantinople. Constantinople, of course, or the Byzantine Empire as we know it today, is literally the continuation of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. Like this, the same Roman Empire that Charlemagne himself thought he was kind of resurrecting in the West. But Italy itself was kind of the meeting point between his expanding empire and the Byzantines, because the Byzantines still had a very strong presence, especially in southern Italy, but extending up until Rome as well. And one of the things that happens, one of the reasons he forges this alliance with the papacy is because the papacy or the bishops of Rome kind of get fed up with the Byzantines and need another protector, especially somebody with an army against local threats such as these other groups, one of them called the Lombards, for example, who were in northern Italy. And the Byzantines couldn't provide that. And so the Franks become a convenient scapegoat. But again, those negotiations aren't always on equal footing. The Byzantines themselves, for very understandable reasons, think they're much better than these Germanic pretenders. And so they don't really respect them. There's actually, there's a moment in the late 8th century where Charlemagne is about to marry off one of his children to one of the, the children of the, the Byzantine Empire. And they think they're going to be this grand alliance, but the Byzantine empress at the time breaks it off very suddenly. And so that's kind of a spur for him to do. Just kind of out of spite, he invades southern Italy, Byzantine, southern Italy. And then very shortly afterwards, like engineers, this thing where he's crowned Roman emperor. So it's, it is politics, but it's also personal. And I think in some ways too, just a way of asserting his own kind of legitimacy, which, you know, if you need to do that, like you're a little bit, you know, we've seen recently somebody call themselves a king, for example, and when you have to do that, people, you're actually really unsure about your power.
- [08:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
For context, for everyone listening, because this will come out about a month from now. This is being recorded in mid February and there's a lot of hullabaloo happening around, people sort of declaring themselves kings and talking about their sort of all powerful leadership. And you know, a month from now it might be worse. So maybe this is a better version of the state of affairs for what we're, for what's happening when you're actually listening to this. But yeah, I was also looking at this sort of vast swaths of land and sort of regional power that he develops over time. So like the, has the conquest of Bavaria, Saxony, northern Spain, basically all of Western Europe up to Bohemia, which is like a pretty incredible thing to do at this point in time, like, or to do once again at this point in time.
- [09:39]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, no, absolutely. And all done without the benefits of, you know, modern technology, right. Like no instantaneous communication. You know, there were still Roman roads, but you know, those had not, they weren't kept up properly as well. Like I don't think they had disappeared or anything like that. But all the institutional kind of Roman bureaucracy that propped up an empire that size in the west, you know, in earlier centuries wasn't really there. And Charlemagne had to kind of create that. And he did spend a lot of time creating kind of an institutional bureaucracy about how to govern this far flung empire. But at the same time, like a lot of stuff is going on. It's a huge swath, swath of territory. He can't be everywhere, he's not trying to be everywhere. And so he has to rely upon kind of carrots and sticks to make sure that everybody stays in line. And that's one of the things my new book with David is about kind of how that all falls apart in subsequent generations, like really quickly once Charlemagne is, is gone.
- [10:36]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Well, this sounds like a great moment to switch into talking about the problems you slash, we, we all should have have with him. So let's start with what's your main beef?
- [10:47]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
So my main beef with Charlemagne and, and I will say, let me preface this by saying my entire career has been spent studying Charlemagne. My undergraduate senior thesis was on the legend of Charlemagne. So I've been, I've been living with this dude for a long time. I mean, you're, you're, your listeners can't see me, but there's a lot of gray hair on this head, I'll tell you that. So it's been a few, it's been a minute. So most of my career has been spent with this guy. And the biggest problem with Charlemagne is that he's an agent of empire and in fact a creator of empire. And what I mean by that is that he unleashed horrific violence for his own benefit and for the benefit of his family and those around him. And that left a lot of dead bodies in its wake. This is not to say that other empires are different or anything like that. I think all empires have that kind of unfortunate blood soaked legacy. But his is extraordinarily evident and he is unfortunately seen as kind of a proto modern figure that was really trying to launch Europe into its kind of full becoming world domination mode by historians of the 19th and 20th century. And they just kind of left out all the bad stuff that he did or just kind of erased certain things that he, that, that, that he was a kind of a part of in order to create this kind of grand narrative. So it's in part, I guess, what he did himself, but it's also the part that he is. He's unjustly remembered as being kind of this perfect heroic figure from the past. And I think we. He was. He was not that.
- [12:29]
Dr. Claire Aubin
There's also. It's interesting that you sort of say that this is all built on violence, right? Because I think a big part of his historical narrative or the sort of public perception of him, certainly mine, is that he was famous for this sort of stability and peace that only comes after enormous violence and bloodshed. Like, only comes, for example, the spread of Christianity through. Through Charlemagne only happens through massacres and violence in order to have a sort of peaceful, stable empire like he has. It is built on violence. And so there's a. It's. It is interesting how often, especially as we've recorded these episodes and I've gotten to know a lot more about lots of historical figures that I didn't know as much about previously. It's interesting how often this sort of public, commonly widely held narrative around major historical figures are truly only the good part and the precursors to the good part in quotes, but the precursors to the good part are just objectively sort of something that we would find morally repulsive now.
- [13:35]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Absolutely. And I think that's in the case of Charlemagne, and I'm sure for most other figures as well, it's not even that violence is a precursor and then it kind of ends. It's simply that it's ongoing and it's written out of what's being important about it. So what I mean by that is that, for example, like you were talking about the Christianization, one of the best known, the most prominent even in the contemporary sources, is the Christianization of Saxony, the region of Germany. There were polytheistic groups in that area. They had kind of long had conflict with the Franks, who were Christians, even well before Charlemagne and stuff like that. Charlemagne completes the conquest of Saxony and fully Christianizes that. And he does it like he baptizes that area in blood. There's one thing which is written very approvingly, one text which is written very approvingly about a mass conversion that happens after 4,500 Saxons are put to the sword, just straight up, like, just massacred, because they were intransigent, they were unwilling to convert, they were unwilling to kind of lay down quietly. And the reason you could see kind of in the source, although the Frankish source itself thinks of it as a positive thing, you can see why there is resistance because the Thing that happens is the Saxons are converted and then they are forcibly relocated out of Saxony. Families are sometimes separated, brought into other parts of Frankia, and Frankish families are put into Saxony as a way of control. So their entire way of life was broken down. This was a conquering force that was taking them over. It wasn't willing in any sense of, you know, any. Any sense of the word, but it's happening right at the same time. Like, this is kind of the end process of Christianization. It's not the beginning process of Christianization. Then everything's kind of hunky dory afterwards. It's that there are preachers there and there are armies at the backs of those preachers throughout. And. And too often historians are just more than happy, especially, you know, 19th and early 20th century historians, just more than happy to kind of leave that stuff out.
- [15:29]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And I think it's interesting when we look at stuff like this, because while we don't necessarily want to project our current understanding of, like, civil liberties and, and religious tolerance or whatever backwards, but it shouldn't be, like, taken uncritically that all the people having Christianity thrust upon them were just fine with it. It's the same narrative when we talk about, for example, like, chattel slavery, where we'll say, but there were people who were working against it. There were lots of white people who didn't like it, and abolitionists. But it's like, but what about all the enslaved people who also didn't like it?
- [16:00]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Exactly.
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Dr. Claire Aubin
Those people we can't take uncritically that the people who were experiencing repression or oppression or persecution in whatever format were basically okay with that. And where is their story in this?
- [16:15]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Absolutely. And I think that hits it kind of perfectly. It's just like when we say peace, it's peace for whom, Right? Like, who gets to speak in a historical narrative? And it's that old truism, which is history is written by the victors, which isn't really true, but it is telling that in later narratives, especially the way that Charlemagne is kind of framed because he's so important to nationalistic narratives in France and Germany later on. They just don't want to talk about that. The Saxons don't matter because they're pre Christian polytheistic people who are kind of effaced, and then they become kind of very Frankish in their own right, in part because this Frankish aristocracy is imported. And so the actual Saxons aren't actually Saxons anymore, but they're more than happy to kind of write out these other kind of Narratives just in order to create this triumphalist story that serves their purposes in the modern world.
- [17:07]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's hard to have a sort of mythic figure who also is famous for the brutalization of thousands and thousands of people. It doesn't work. And so very often, often that just gets cut out entirely. And it's obviously not, that's not specific only to Charlemagne, but he's a very good example of that. A thousand years ago that's happening like even very, very rapidly. It seems like right after his death, there's already this stuff happening. And then when we get to sort of later in the Middle Ages, he's really like already become this, this national, international, even sort of European mythic figure.
- [17:44]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think, yeah, I think through the, through the, you know, through the 12th century at least. I mean, he's a pan European kind of hero presiding over a golden age. The one thing I will say though is about the, the medieval myth, which is different than the modern myth, I will say, is that the medieval myth kind of glories in the violence because it. He becomes kind of a proto crusader, right? Like he fought against the non Christians, not just the polytheistic, you know, Saxons, for example. There's another group called the Avars who are polytheistic as well, but especially against the Muslims. And Charlemagne had a very complicated relationship with the Muslims. He did fight against Muslims in Iberia, for example, but he had a political alliance with the Abbasid Caliph Harun al Rashid against the Byzantines. But by the 11th and 12th century, the 10th, 11th and 12th century, he becomes this kind of proto crusader who goes to Jerusalem. He never actually went to Jerusalem, but mythically went to Jerusalem and conquered it for Christianity. And so the Crusaders are recreating Charlemagne's triumphs in some ways when they're marching in the 11th, 12th centuries.
- [18:51]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi there, this is Claire. If you, like me, are a fan of accessible history that's actually made by experts, why not consider investing in it? And by that I mean subscribing to our Patreon. It's only one tier and for less than the price of a smoothie at your weird local health store that you aren't sure if you even like. You'll get access to all of our episodes instead of just the bi weekly free episodes. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get exclusive access to the full episode archive, bonus content, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head to this guy suck.com and join the honorary haters club. I want to get back to this sort of idea of him being having multiple myths over time. So I'll put a pin in that so that we can circle back to it, because I have some more stuff to say about that in terms of the 20th century and how he's remembered in the 20th and 21st century, actually, how he's remembered there. But I want to make sure that we really first get to all the stuff that's happening. Before that, I was reading about the number of biographers who were, like, obsessed with him. There's something like a thousand. Over a thousand legends that have been written or recorded about him in this sort of mythic biographical sense, which even for the most major historical figures, that's an enormous number. And these are being written very, very quickly after his death. Like, there. It's not as though he's sort of rediscovered hundreds and hundreds of years later. He immediately sort of has this status and. And becomes this figure. He's held up as this sort of ideal Christian king. And then I also read about him as being part of this Middle Ages medieval group of men known as the nine Worthies.
- [20:41]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yep, yep.
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Dr. Claire Aubin
What's that? What's happening there?
- [20:46]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No, you're absolutely right. And I mean, you know, so Charlemagne is. It's very easy to hate Charlemagne, but he's also just so. He's so interesting, you know? And I think in some ways, like that's kind of defined my career is I tend to study things that I really hate, you know, kind of down deep in my soul, but, like, I want to understand them because they're so fucking. Excuse me. They're so weird. Okay. Fucking weird. Sorry.
- [21:13]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Eleanor Yannicka said Niece Fucker like, six times in her episode.
- [21:18]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
I know Eleanor. That sounds exactly like her.
- [21:20]
Dr. Claire Aubin
That's great.
- [21:21]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Perfect. Anyway, so with Charlemagne, for example, he is a myth from the moment he dies, which is, I think, in some ways not unique, but really unusual. And what I mean by that is that the first biography, the first actual biography of Charlemagne, is written by a courtier of his. He actually started writing under Charlemagne's son, a guy by the name of Louis the Pious. And so Einhard's biography of Charlemagne, which is supposedly written by someone who knew him, is written immediately afterwards. And it's not like a factual biography. It's not intended to be a factual biography. It's supposed to be kind of a model of kingship for Louis the Pious and for subsequent rulers. And so his legacy is already being embellished all the kind of rough edges starting to be kind of standard off. There's only so much you can do because like people still were alive and remembered him and stuff like that. But he's still really very consciously trying to, you know, smooth over some of those problems. For example, there's several revolts against Charlemagne which are played down, which ended up, which actually were quite serious at the time themselves. But then in the later 9th, 10th, 11th century, then all of a sudden these little snippets of Einhard's biography and other texts start to be kind of expanded on. He could just be associated with what's known as hagiographies, holy biographies of saints or miracle stories about relic translations. Charlemagne himself starts to carry these relics from Jerusalem or from elsewhere, stuff like that. And so, you know, when I was working on my dissertation, which became kind of my first book, like I was trying to collate all these things and they just seemed to be everywhere. Like I was just kind of overwhelmed by the number of references there are to this legendary figure which very vaguely ties back to the person in the 9th century. But by the later Middle Ages, just to get back to your question about kind of the nine worthies, he's become kind of this, this kind of epic figure par excellence. Like as England has King Arthur, France really has Charlemagne. And there's a whole series of romances, medieval romance texts that are known as the Charlemagne romances because he's one of the main figures. Some of those are kind of critiques like kind of plays on. He becomes such a well known figure that he becomes kind of, you can kind of play with him a little bit. He can become little bit buffoonish or kind of inept in some ways because he is such a, such a perfect figure in there. But the nine worthies generally were just like, I mean it's a much later medieval, early modern creation of these nine great figures from history who were rulers, who were kind of the ideal of Christian kingship, everything everybody should aspire to. And I can't remember exactly all nine. I believe Arthur was one of them, Charlemagne was another and stuff like that. But some of them real, some of them kind of fictional, but all believed to have been real. And then habit. For example, like they, they appear, the nine worthies appear in Dante's Paradiso, like inhabiting one of the higher spheres because they were such great rulers and they, they, they offered a bottle of Christian kingship. And that's really what the legend ultimately did is, is again like those 19th century guys, historians I was complaining about earlier, like they're not doing anything that the sources themselves weren't doing. They just, I think from my perspective, they were reading them too credulously. They weren't being critical enough of the stories they were trying to tell because those 19th century historians wanted to be nationalists. But in the later Middle Ages, like they're trying to tell a story with Charlemagne too, because the French monarchy and then the Holy Roman Empire as we were talking about before, they needed Charlemagne in kind of the same way as a holy progenitor to their, their dynasty which legitimized their rule. And so they didn't want to tell the real story, they didn't want to tell the whole story. They weren't trying to, but they wanted to tell something that suited their own contemporary needs.
- [25:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I also want to give a shout out to one of my fellow Multitude collective member shows, Spirits. Spirits is a history and comedy podcast that explores everything, folklore, mythology and the occult, all filtered through queerness, feminism and the trials of modern life. Every week, childhood BFFs Julia and Amanda get together to have a drink and talk through a new story. Everything from urban legends to Wonder Woman to the Chupacabra. I have previously been a guest on Spirits. Check out my episode on Nazi Zombies if you are so inclined and you can find my episode along with more than 400 others wherever you get your podcasts, I highly recommend it. Yeah, that makes sense. And I think general audiences often are not aware, like if this is something that historians think about a lot and this can be where one of the sort of gaps in understanding of history is between general audiences and historians or professional scholars is the general audience tends to not be aware of the idea of legacy building as like an active thing that occurs during and after the life of someone. One of my very good friends wrote her PhD thesis on Reagan's legacy building. And people are always like amazed by the idea that there are people actively when there's particularly a leader or someone in power, there are always people around them who are actively trying to determine what their legacy will be. Or they might be doing it themselves. But immediately afterwards you can have someone who writes a semi mythical biography with the goal of using that person as a parable to teach others how to be a good kind of king. And that that is an active decision being made in terms of how someone's legacy is going to be shaped. And you know, hundreds and hundreds of years down the line you have the issue that you're having right now, which is. Or that historians in general are having right now. Which is being able to parse the difference between the person, like Charlemagne, the person, the things he actually did, and also his actual personal, his actual beliefs, his actual relationships from these mythical mythologized versions of him that are wildly popular and have sort of been dispersed throughout the population and are seen as credible, but that are built off of purposeful legacy building efforts that begin immediately after his death. And it makes it really hard.
- [27:13]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one of the kind of exciting things I have to say about actually, like studying the past and, and that's something I think my students always really love, is once you dig past the kind of preconception they often have that history is just kind of this succession of names and dates that they need to memorize and then regurgitate. But just getting them into the sources and saying, okay, what is the source trying to do? What do we know about the author? How can we deconstruct this? And there's always a mystery kind of at the heart of that that they really enjoy. And I think that's one of the things that I've really enjoyed doing, as David and I, David Perry and I, my co author and friend, have been doing with our public. Facing work is like trying to bring that kind of contingency that, that possibility of history, that the unknowability, but also how we can know what we know about the past to wider publics.
- [28:02]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also something to the idea that people are sort of preconditioned to believe that, like medieval sources, for example, or medieval biographers are not citing their sources because. Because there's no Chicago style footnote. And so therefore there's no way to check the sort of credibility. But that's not actually true. Like, you can go and see where someone got their information from. They will often say, I got this from this place. I know this because this person told me, or I read it in this book or whatever. Like, you can check these sources. You can say, hold on. This biography of Charlemagne doesn't seem to have any references to anything else written about him. There's. I have no reason to believe that this is more than a story or anything other than a story being made up to teach something else. And when you get your students to look at things and ask themselves, like, where is this coming from and why would we believe this? It really changes the way that they interact with the text, that they interact with the information that they're. That they're learning. When you say, but why do you believe that it can sometimes be this like, you know, mind exploding moment.
- [29:11]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yep. Like, wait a minute. I gotta think in this class.
- [29:14]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Wait a minute. This could be serving this thing that I'm reading. Could be serving a purpose other than the stated purpose.
- [29:22]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah.
- [29:22]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Someone could be trying to do something with this for some reason other than what they say they're doing. Huh. That's crazy. I mean, even with the sort of nine worthies things. So I read a little bit about this. So there are, there are three of each. So there's three pagans, three Jews and three Christians, but they're all supposed to be Christian kings. So while this is happening, what it's doing is, it's also kind of doing this. It's casting like pagans and Jews as having proto Christian values that then Charlemagne helps to. You know, there's a. It's almost. They're already doing this sort of like the thing that happens a little bit later where everything is cast as an, as an evolution out of paganism through Judaism and into Christianity with the remaining three, the Christian worthies, Charlemagne being one of them, being the sort of like final evolution of what a. Of what a Christian king is. And it's. I just found it so interesting that there was already this like, active myth making happening around not just him, but Christianity at the same. Like him as this figure in Christianity.
- [30:31]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, medieval Christian historiography is very structured as supersessionist. Right. Is that everything inevitably will lead to the present moment, which is the kind of the highest moment so far in Christian history until we get kind of to the second coming, which. The inevitable end of Christian sacred history. And the Franks themselves were, you know, Charlemagne himself, like you were talking about kind of conscious myth making. Like Charlemagne himself had court historians who were specifically writing his version of events for his own benefit in the specific goal of legacy making. And, you know, with the things like the nine worthies, like. And then it becomes, it becomes even more explicit. Like in Dante, I think it's one of the. Trajan, for example, winds up in. In heaven and he kind of mentions, or I can't remember if it's a footnote or if Dante specifically mentions it, but there's a legend that develops that, what was it? Jesus specifically brought Trajan back for the dead for about an hour so that he could be baptized so that he could get into heaven. So you, you even have like, complicated ways of thinking about it in late medieval legends just to justify, you know, why these guys are actually okay, even though you might think of them as, you know, pagans or Jews or something like that.
- [31:44]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's the opposite of the crypto Jew thing. It's like Trajan is a crypto Christian.
- [31:48]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
That's right.
- [31:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
These people are secretly actually Christians. They just didn't have the vocabulary yet. They hadn't met the guy yet in order to be able to be the Christian that they're supposed to be.
- [31:57]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah.
- [32:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of the other things I found interesting in this is that Charlemagne becomes known as the Father of Europe. And this can hopefully transition us towards what I want to talk about in terms of his current memory or memories post the medieval period. But he becomes known as the Father of Europe because he essentially shaped what we now know to be Europe, this continental divide between Western Eastern Europe and even sort of Europe and Asia. And all this stuff is happening in part because he determines what counts as Western Europe and what he counts as as Europe. What do you think about that?
- [32:38]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
I mean, father of Europe. Yeah, No, I mean, he's not the Father of Europe. He had no conception of kind of what Europe meant. I mean, he was concerned about being a Frank and controlling his own empire and securing a legacy for his family to continue the dynasty that he ruled, as well as kind of his quote, unquote, people, you know, that. That he ruled over. But, yeah, but I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, he is considered that. I mean, like, there's a. The European Union gives out a Charlemagne Prize every year to the person who's done the most to unite Europe. And it's centered at Aachen and there's a big ceremony and stuff like that. So, yeah, so that he's still kind of, you know, he's still seen as that, because. And I think what it is, is it goes into kind of the stuff that historians always. We as historians always worry about and warn about, but the popular imagination sometimes latches onto, which is that people want a simple story. And the simple story of Charlemagne as Father of Europe is, look at the map, you can shade it all one color, and that's mostly Europe. Therefore, Charlemagne was the Father of Europe. The complicated problem was, is that even during Charlemagne's reign, that kind of neat little tidy map that you might draw that said, like, this is all. Charlemagne's empire was incredibly subdivided regionally. Even Charlemagne himself never called himself. He called himself Roman Emperor, but he called himself Roman Emperor because he was also in all of his titles, King of the Franks, King of the Lombards, ruler of the Aquitanians, you know, Duke of the Bavarians and stuff like that. He had a separate title for each region that he ruled because they still thought of themselves, and he still thought of themselves as distinct, distinct entities.
- [34:24]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. German unification doesn't happen for a long, long time after him. So there's no German identity that he' he's like, absolutely not.
- [34:33]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No. Same thing with Italy. Right. Like, and even France. Like, I mean, France is like, incredibly regionally divided until well after. Well, not well after, but certainly to the French Revolution and until after that. Like, I mean, these, these people think of themselves as, you know, maybe kind of connected by some political entity, but not necessarily the same people or anything like that. And that's absolutely true in the 9th century as well. So. So, you know, this is convenient myth making for the purposes of, I think, in some cases, kind of, you know, not terrible ideas of trying to get away from the endemic warfare that Europe suffered throughout most of the 19th and 20th century. But, but, but a myth nonetheless.
- [35:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And it also, it ignores the fact that there's not a belief, sort of like one of the unifying beliefs, or not even beliefs. One of the unifying features of Europe at this point is like, like Christianity or a shared idea of religion, or there might be some linguistic alignments in terms of being able to communicate with one another, but the idea of there being one large geographic alignment or one large geographic fealty that people are feeling to one another by virtue of being. Not needing to get on a boat to see each other is just like, when you think about it in those terms, that is wild. Like, thinking about the idea that and someone from Bavaria would have seen themselves as being someone who's living in Iberia is just not true. Like, that's. It doesn't make sense if you actually think about it that way. And even now that's not the case. But it is more politically convenient and it fits more with the political structures that we have in place now to be able to talk about a singular Europe and Charlemagne as the progenitor of the singular Europe.
- [36:12]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, absolutely. Like, even, like, even today, right? Like, if you go to a European country and you ask somebody their identity, like, they're not gonna. The first thing they're gonna say is not gonna be, I'm European. Like, nobody says that, right? Like, they're gonna have, like, specific. And they're gonna have kind of all sorts of different identities tied to place, tied to language and stuff like that. They might say, like, well, I'm German, but I'm Bavarian, but I belong, you know, I'm a citizen of the city or something like that. And then, you know, European might be in there as well. And medievals were just, Medieval people were just as complicated in that way in that they had kind of these different identities, some of them, like you were saying, like tied to religion, for example, and that it might not even be like, like think of themselves as quote unquote Christian, but like, I belong to this diocese or this archdiocese or this parish, really, probably even more likely something like that. And that Christianity is kind of an umbrella term. But the idea of a unified Christendom might be on just beyond their imagination. Right. Like, yeah, they understood there was a Rome or Constantinople. Absolutely they did. But like, it didn't matter in some ways, especially to somebody who's living, you know, in a, in a rural Bavarian village in the 9th century.
- [37:15]
Dr. Claire Aubin
There's also, I think it's interesting because it sort of creates this reciprocal relationship in terms of identity where Charlemagne as the Father of Europe, like now in current conception, Charlemagne as the Father of Europe props up the idea of a singular unified Europe, which then props up the idea of Charlemagne as the father of a singular unified Europe. And it creates this like feedback loop of the two things feeding into each other over and over and over again, strengthening both. Well, neither of them are particularly even true. Like the eu, for example, there are constantly people trying to get in and out of it. There's also, if you ask someone from Spain what they think about someone from Germany, they. It's not always going to be positive and vice versa.
- [37:58]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
It's not positive always, though, you know.
- [38:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Especially at the moment, if you ask someone from any country in Europe about another country in Europe, they still don't share a singular identity. And you're more likely to have someone described as European, for example, example, by an American talking about someone from Europe, than you are someone from Europe talking about themselves.
- [38:16]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's usually, I mean, when Americans do it, right, it's usually some sort of derogatory term. It's just like, oh, those Europeans, right?
- [38:23]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Like, oh, it's very. She smokes, it's very European. She eats breakfast late. She's. It's very, she's very European. But I think also, and why I think about this a lot is that his image, the idea of his image as the Father of Europe is also very easily co opted by people, depending particularly on whether, for example, in the 20th century, whether they want to see him as a French national figure or a German national figure. Before the 20th century, you have a lot of philosophical and historiographic critique around the idea of him as the father of Europe. Voltaire hates him because Voltaire hates everything medieval, as we've already said. Montesquieu is a fan because he sees him as a sort of proto civil libertarian guy, slash European unifier guy. So my Partner has a PhD in religious studies too, and I was talking to him about this before recording, and he described Charlemagne in a way that I think is really interesting, where he said he's infinitely malleable. So his identity, because of all this mythology around him and because of how manipulable his identity is and his myth is, you can basically, and people have, use him for whatever you want to justify and create a historical basis of justification, whatever belief you're trying to return to now.
- [39:54]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No, I think. Absolutely. I think that's 100% true. There's a really wonderful essay. This is earlier than the 20th century, but by a historian by the name of Keith Baker, who was at Stanford, and he may still be at Stanford. He was a little bit older when I was reading his essay, but anyway. But it was about the use of Charlemagne in the French Revolution, in which he was used specifically both for the monarch, like by monarchists, but also by republicans in exactly that way. Like he was justifying. He was used to justify as the progenitor of the French monarchy. Like, we need to kind of of, you know, be like Charlemagne and use this model of kind of benevolent king who could expand French territory and French greatness and stuff like that. But then also by the republicans, they said, like, yes, he was, but what Charlemagne did in ruling that empire was that he listened to the assemblies of his nobles. And so the parliament, the estates, estates general, like, those are incredibly important things, and those are legacies of Charlemagne as well.
- [40:52]
Dr. Claire Aubin
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- [42:32]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
So he becomes kind of a cipher, right? For whatever kind of contemporary concern people had in that particular period. And I think that absolutely carries on into today. Another scholar by the name of Andrew Elliott, who was at Lincoln University, he calls this, especially when it relates to the Middle Ages, banal medievalism, in which it's a reference to the medieval world that doesn't actually ever touch the medieval world. It just, like you said, it kind of circles back on itself kind of continuously with modern preoccupations that people think are medieval but actually have nothing to do with the Middle Ages themselves. So with Charlemagne, for example, like, he is infinitely malleable, but oftentimes people aren't actually. They don't. They're not actually saying anything about the 9th century. They're saying about images of him from the 19th century, from the 18th century, from the 20th century, and stuff like that. And they think those are historical, but they're just. It's just kind of like an endless loop of myths that are. That are feeding off one another.
- [43:23]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And actually a good example of a group or of him as this sort of cipher for whatever concerns are, is the Nazi Party, who initially starts out not liking Charlemagne because they see him as this sort of French national figure who came in and. And tried to unite Europe, but under his own sort of French Frankish rule. And then later Hitler becomes a fan of him because his legacy supports Hitler's expansionist goals and because Hitler starts to cat him not as this French nationalist figure, as this Frankish figure, but instead as a Germanic unifier, like Hitler alleges that he wanted to be, right. Like. So even within one group, you can still see These sort of battling mythologies or this battling image that then shifts even within that one singular group to sort of fit whatever it is that they want.
- [44:12]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, there is an amazing. I'm going to ruin this reference, but there was an amazing HBO show that was on, and it had Kate Winslet as the dictator of Eastern European country. And I can't remember the name of it, unfortunately, but anyway, but there's. There's. There's a running joke throughout about how she was and wasn't obsessed with Charlemagne at various points during her rule in exactly that way. Like, she got really into Charlemagne as like a cipher for this kind of great heroic progenitor. And then she got really turned off for other reasons. And then she kind of comes back to like. And stuff like that. But again, like, it's exactly that. It's just like he can be whatever, you know, because it's just. He's just kind of deployed as an image however you need him, because he is this kind of blank slate.
- [44:57]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And because you're not referring to these sort of petty squabbles he has. You're not referring to his willingness to basically sell off his kids. You're not referring to his five wives in rapid succession. You're not talking about the person. You're talking about the myth that it comes after the person. And that is the thing that's malleable. I mean, even, like now in terms of the idea of him being malleable or his memory being malleable or manipulable, he's still popular now, since we haven't totally, I think, totally abandoned the medieval desire to reconstitute the Roman Empire. Everyone is still trying to figure out a way to unify everything all the time and, and get, as you know it. Even in America, we're like, well, why don't we just take Canada? We can just have it like. Like there's. There's this expansionist thing and this idea of the New Roman Empire. Even now, particularly on the, on the far and alt right, you see people talking about America as the New Roman Empire, and, and they. They use the Charlemagne myth in order to justify this or to create a historical through line that allows for that to be possible, regardless of the fact that a lot of what he's trying to do is like, take revenge on people or just get land back that he feels like having or whatever that it's. It's not always about this great, you know, glorious desire and that there can be individual personal beefs that. Cause some of this stuff. But that doesn't fit the narrative. So it's, it's abandoned pretty much immediately.
- [46:22]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
No, absolutely, yeah. There's a, there's a right wing school, I use school with kind of scare quotes around it in Minnesota called the Charlemagne Institute. And they basically, you know, they're promoting kind of the classical liberal arts as they understand them. But like, I don't know what that has to do with Charlemagne. I mean, like, yeah, there's kind of a Carolingian Renaissance and stuff like that. But like, they're clearly using him as just kind of like, hey, here's a great figure in the past that you probably heard of and think maybe is important and we're going to name our thing after them and then you know, kind of pretend that we're associated with him in these various ways.
- [46:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I think what's interesting because, yeah, you're right, there is this, it's a particularly, I would think, on the thing that's happening on the right at the moment. Absolutely. Like where they sort of are also wanting to disavow modern politics, modern social, cultural values. They'll say things like, we need to return to the traditions of the past. We need to get back. Yes. And, and they'll do that. And this is also another good example of the fact that it's not about the person, it's about the myth around the person. Where, like I said, these are people who are saying we should return to traditional values, particularly things like traditional gender roles. We should return to a true Christianity, all of that. Charlemagne had five wives in rapid succession. He had four concubines, a bunch of other unknown partners with whom had a ton of other kids. And again, the way we conceive of marriage now is not the same thing as an 8th or 9th century political marriage, but it does call into question the idea that this godly chivalric person that we're talking about now as being, you know, believing in their trad wife and their, you know, their chivalrous Christianity and the Crusades, like that person also didn't exist back then. Also Charlemagne famously educated his daughters, which is a thing that people on the right way do not want to do.
- [48:09]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he probably. Just, just to clarify something you said he probably murdered one, maybe two of his wives and then he def. Almost certainly not definitely, almost certainly murdered his sister in law and his young nephews as well. So, you know, family man with caveats there. So.
- [48:27]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, I mean, but that, but that doesn't fit with the myth, so. It doesn't. So why Would. We don't need to talk about that.
- [48:32]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
That's fine. Yeah, yeah.
- [48:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Nephew murder is just par for the course, actually, in. And I think it's also interesting because when these groups talk about people like this in history, they will find a way to justify that as well. That was back then and this is now. But also we want to return to back then, but not to that part of back then, to our now version of what was happening back then. And it doesn't make any sense at all when you actually think about it. But it's not about it making sense. It's not about logic. It's not about facts. It's about referring to a sort of consistently better past to which we can return if we simply abandon modernity, if we abandon modern cultural and social values. But it doesn't exist. Like the past that they want to return to didn't exist in the first place. And that is what's so infuriating as a historian. Look at it.
- [49:18]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a cafeteria style of history. Right? It's just you kind of. You stand in the line looking at the past, you kind of just pick and choose what you want and you put it on your plate and you just kind of ignore everything else. And the historian's job is exactly the opposite of that, is to pay attention to everything that's there there on the table, on the schmorga's board.
- [49:36]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But, yeah, also, as with sort of a lot of major historical figures, we lionize that. We lionize in the contemporary period. We're just projecting stuff back onto him and making assumptions about his goodness, his morality, his ethics, his values based on legends about him rather than the actual events that occurred during his lifetime and in which he was actually involved. And when historians push back on that and say that this wasn't real because the myths have been so widely and successfully dispersed for so long and so widely believed and held and taught in textbooks and whatever and just taken as fact. There's a really strong pushback against any corrections that are made to the narrative because those pushbacks are seen as being politically motivated rather than motivated by what you're saying, which is the desire to include all of the information that we have, not just the information we like, which is also, like, deeply frustrating. I can imagine.
- [50:37]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Always. Always. But I mean, that's. That's. That's the job of being a historian sometimes is banging your head against the wall, unfortunately.
- [50:43]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And I think. I mean, I said this to Eleanor on her episode, but I think there's something also, too, that you experience, if you're a World War II historian, that you also experience as a medieval historian, which is. Everyone on planet Earth is a medieval scholar. Everyone on planet Earth is a World War II. Everyone truly feels that their knowledge of this is real. Regardless of how much time you've spent in the archives, regardless of how many languages you've learned, regardless of how many people you've spoken to, how many original thoughts you've had, none of those things matter. As long as they've seen documentaries on this and. Or read several tweet threads, they know. And you. And you are simply a political pawn for trying to assert that you actually do, in fact, know more.
- [51:25]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, it's. It's. It's unfortunate. I mean, I think that that's a problem bedeviling the human generally, but I think history specifically is that it doesn't people. Not all people, but. But there's. There are a lot of people who think it doesn't require expertise. Like, it's. There's no methodology that's required. Like you said, it's just reading a few tweets or picking up, you know, a Bill O'Reilly history book, and then all of a sudden, like, you know something about it. It's just like, no, it doesn't. It doesn't work like that, man. Like, it just does not work like that.
- [51:54]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Like, I know that a lot of people think that this piece of paper that I have is simply a piece of paper, but I really did spend a lot of hours reading things in order to get. Reading things, writing things, talking about things, being told that I was wrong, and then having to fix the things that I was reading. And, like, there's a lot of work that goes into this. And then you emerge with, you know, people being like, well, Charlemagne was just the political figure that we imagine him to be now. And you're wrong because you don't know anything. And I know everything that's right or.
- [52:26]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
I'm related to him. That's another one you get sometimes with a classic. With Charlemagne. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
- [52:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A classic. And I think that that's also a whole other issue. But there's, like, I think you could pick any historical figure, and there will be several people, several celebrities, several random people like Cleopatra or, like, any. Any biblical king. A classic is for, like, you to say that he's my 200th great grandfather or whatever, as though also political and religious sort of predilections passed down genetically to you, as though his morals have passed down to you. From hundreds of years ago, which is just wild. Okay. I think we have gotten to the point of me believing that he sucked. I think I already kind of did. I usually enter these feeling a little bit like, yeah, okay. But I think we've gotten there and I think he sucked, basically. But I also think not only does he suck, but the image we have of him sucks. I did not know that he murdered that many people like him personally. Murdered that many people.
- [53:37]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Yeah, I mean, you know, like, I don't know if he was like, like stabbing his. His nephews or anything like that, but he certainly, you know, ordered the death of his nephews, you know, and, and ordered the massacre of 4,500 Saxons. He's definitely responsible. The bucks, the buck had to stop with him.
- [53:52]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So, yeah, 100%. Well, thank you very much for coming on.
- [53:57]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
My pleasure. How much fun.
- [53:59]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Professor Gabriel can be found on Bluesky. Prof. Gabriel, and you can buy his new book, Oath breakers at the link in the episode description.
- [54:06]
Dr. Matthew Gabriel
Thank you for having me.
- [54:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Professor Matthew Gabriel, and produced and edited by Tom Amani. All of our theme music was written and produced by Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes from month, you can subscribe at patreon. Com this guysucked. See you next week.