Sustaining the Carolingian empire: politics and government, 840–888

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yayın yılı:

2011

Yayıncı:

Cambridge University Press

The deposition of Louis the Pious in 833 was neither, we have seen, the definitive disaster of the emperor's own reign nor of the Carolingian empire writ large. Still, the Frankish political community was unmistakably shocked. The main protagonists harboured anxieties about what they had done: in a letter of 847, the emperor Lothar reflected almost disbelievingly on that time of conflict between him and his brothers as ‘the work of the Devil through his agents’. But even the traumas of the early 830s were eclipsed in the Frankish psyche by the three years of bloody civil war which followed the death of Louis the Pious in 840. Once again, his sons were at the heart of the matter. A loose alliance of Charles the Bald and Louis the German teamed up against Lothar and Pippin II of Aquitaine (the three kings’ nephew who was hoping to dislodge Charles from the south-west and claim the kingdom of his father Pippin I, who had died in 838). As their armies ceaselessly roamed the empire in a game of armed chess whose top prize was control of the Carolingian heartlands in the north, a long series of armed stand-offs and skirmishes peaked at the bloody battle of Fontenoy in June 841. (See Map 14 for places mentioned in this chapter.) A man called Engelbert, who fought on Lothar's side, later wrote a poem lamenting the extreme violence and horrifying implications of the battle: ‘No slaughter was ever worse on any field of war…This battle is not worthy of praise, not fit to be sung.’

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