Part XXX: The Franks in 850
When last we left the wider Frankish state you will recall that Pepin Martel had seized the throne from the Merovingingans and embarked on a war against his own nobility to bring them into line. However, Pepin died in 742, leaving behind a thirty year old son, who wasn’t the commander his father was initially. The nobility seized on Charles’s inexperience, and drove the young king from Parisius, effectively taking all of the Regnum Occidens from him. Charles fled to Cologne where he set up a government from which to reexert power over the West.
A series of skirmishes followed as Charles gained in experience and power, until in 746 he retook Parisium, decisively defeating a rebel army of eight thousand with his own force of twelve thousand. Their leaders dead much of the rebel army switched sides, and Charles suddenly commanded an army of sixteen thousand. This was joined by a force of Bugrundi who revolted against their Frankish masters and pledged allegiance to the king. Charles happily accepted their pledges of loyalty, and led his army south into Aquitaine to secure the region.
At this point all of the territory we would know as Burgundi and France was under Charles’s control, as well as Parisius.Much of Gaelli however remained firmly in revolt. Charles swept across the south of his kingdom first, securing the coastline and important networks of supply with Roman and Gothic merchants. In 749 however he was forced to rush back north to battle a noble army that was once again besieging Parisius. Winning another decisive battle near the city Charles now swung north, cutting the rebels off from supplies purchased from the Saxons, and soon the northern coast was also under royal control.
By now hope of rebel victory was slim, and nobles deserted the cause in droves, supplicating themselves before Charles in the hope that he would spare them. Charles magnanimously did so in most cases, but he also stripped vast areas of land from the surrendering nobles, bringing enormous territories directly under royal control. These would be often be handed out to his close associates, but much of the land would remain in the king, and later Emperor’s hands, until the Empire’s disintegration in the eleventh century.
By 751 only Bordeux and the environs on the West cost of Gael remained unconquered. Charles laid siege to the city and set about reducing its defenses over the next several months. After eight months the defenders had had enough. They murdered their lord who refused to give up and threw open the gates. Charles ordered the city sacked and its defenses destroyed. He might be generally magnanimous, but the city had been a thorn in his side for too long.
Charles returned to Parisius, but he disliked the city, and soon officially moved the center of Frankish administration to Cologne, where it would remain for the next fifty years. He also however built a residence in the town of Aquae, to take advantage of nearby hot springs. This town would eventually become Aachen, the capital of the Empire of the Franks, and even today is of course the capital of Franci.
The king set about tackling the many administrative duties he had been forced to neglect while on campaign, and he didn’t leave the city again before his death in 757. His son took power without issue when his father died, and while there were stirrings among the nobles King Carloman was a powerful and dynamic personality. He looked at all his nobles not really doing anything and decided that what they needed was a nice war. One where they could burn off the excess energy that led to rebellion, and maybe make a little money.
He considered invading Italy, but rejected it because that would war with Leo, who was a political ally of his family. And also, because he recognized that war with Leo was a really, really bad idea. Invading the Goths was an idea, but that might also draw a Roman response, treaty or no treaty, and really taking that territory would just bring a bunch of Gothic nobles under his control, and he had enough trouble with the aristocracy when they were just other Franks. Adding even more rebellious nobles, especially ones on the far side of a mountain range didn’t seem productive.
Fate intervened in 759 when Germani raiders from Saxony sacked a number of towns around Cologne, and burned down several churches. Carloman eyed the raiders, looked at his own forces, and decided he had his excuse. He ordered his vassals to come to Cologne, and the next year he crossed the border and invaded Germani. Carloman’s army at this stage was about fifteen thousand men, and for the next four years he waged war against the Westphali Saxons across the Rhine. Each year towns were captured, prisoners shipped off as slaves, to be shipped south to Marseilles, where they were loaded onto Italian ships and sent into the Roman Empire, in particular to Africa and Mesopotamia. And yes, this is why there is a modern city named Saxi near the Tigris today.
After four years of war Carloman felt he had done enough and ended the campaigns. He went back across the Rhine and planned to stay there semi-permanently. But the people he had just be terrorizing had other ideas. The Westphali had been hit hard by the campaign, and had called in their cousins across Saxony to take a bit of revenge on the Franks, and so in 662 a large barbarian army crossed the Rhine and sacked a number of Frankish towns, and made a point to destroy every church they could get their hands on before retreating back into their home territory. That could not stand, and so in 663 Charles re-raised his army and went back into Saxony, this time intending to finish the job.
He would continue the job for the next twenty years.
In the first year Carloman completely overran Westphalic Saxony, and set about setting up a new administration to govern the territory. Land was handed out to loyal nobles, and Frankish settlers moved into keep the locals in line. Forced Christianization also took place, with locals baptized at sword-point when necessary, and every altar, shrine, and sacred grove to the old German gods was pillaged, smashed, and then burned. Most famously when he took the sacred tree at Irminsul Carloman gathered every German chieftain he could find, put them in chains, and then made them watch as he had the tree chopped down, part of its wood made into an altar, had a mass conducted with it, and then burned the rest.
The message was clear. The time of pagans was over, and the Saxons had better get with the program.
The Saxons did not get with the program. Instead they fought on harder than ever. Carloman fought multiple major battles, and was virtually always victorious. Fort after fort fell to the Frankish king, until finally he had pushed all the way to the Northalbigini in the north, and the Alvis River in the East. Something like half of the Saxon population was dead, fled, or enslaved by the end of the war. Carloman returned to Cologne, and there he put the wealth and captives taken on display, before having the captives unceremoniously strangled.
Carloman was clearly emulating the Romans in this regard. Stories had come from Constantinople of the great triumph that Leo had staged on his return from the East, and while Carloman didn’t have quite that level of prestige, he was clearly trying to associate his reign with the Roman Emperors of old.
During the course of the war the army that Carloman led had changed. The wealth taken in plunder and from the sale of slaves had allowed his soldiers to buy better equipment, and transform into a disciplined force. In addition, Carloman had strengthened his own authority significantly, and was able to call up not fifteen thousand men, but fifty thousand. Frankish domination of the northern coast was solidified in 795 when the king of Frisia died without an heir. As the nobles squabbled over who to elevate Carloman provided an answer, namely himself. He marched ten thousand men into Frisia and dared the nobles to challenge him. They did no, and the region was annexed into the Frankish Empire.
Carloman would not live to rule his enlarged domain however ,as he died in 796, leaving his son Louis to take over.
Louis has already made his presence felt in our narrative of course, but we’ll now go back to the beginning of his career. There was a brief revolt to try to get back some of the powers Carloman had stripped away from the nobility returned, but Louis crushed this easily. Louis however wanted to cement his legacy as his father had, and so he turned to military conquest as well. For the next fifteen years he spent year after year invading and conquering territory across the Eastern border. In his campaigns he conquered in the north to the Viadrus River, incorporating even more tribes into his growing kingdom. In the south he invaded and conquered the kingdom being set up by the Serbi, leaving the Eastern border on the Danube, which meant he had a border with the Bulgars. This left him with two problems. One obvious, the other less so.
The obvious problem was that a border with the Bulgars was deeply dangerous. The powerful steppe tribe was currently in the middle of beating the pulp out of the Romans in the Balkans, and if they managed to win that war they might well turn on the Franks next. Louis had exactly zero interest in being next on Krum’s hit list.
Second, Louis had three sons. In Frankish tradition he was expected to divide up his kingdom, allowed each to rule a third. But Louis didn’t particularly want to divide his kingdom up. He was rather proud of his realm, which had grown to exceed even the old Roman borders in Germani. Dividing up the kingdom would just bring back civil war and, well division. So he went back to Cologne and set about trying to come up with a solution. We don’t know what exactly made him come to his eventual decision, but in early 819 Louis seems to have made up his mind. A kingdom could be divided. But an Empire? That was a different thing entirely. The title of Augustus was still respected inside the Frankish Kingdom. The Roman Empire was still the biggest, and most respected entity around. Even if the Western half was mostly gone the rest was still moving along just fine, less whatever the Bulgars were still holding onto.
Which led Louis to his great idea. He really didn’t want a powerful Bulgar state on his eastern border, and he really did want an Imperial title so he could lay the groundwork for a new succession system. So he decided to kill two birds with one stone. He would offer the Romans his large, well-trained, highly disciplined, experienced, and well-equipped army to crush the Bulgars, and in exchange his oldest son would marry a princess, and Louis would be crowned Augustus of the West.
He was talked down from this request by the bishop of Cologne, and instead asked to be crowned simply Emperor of the Franks. This was a lesser title, and would still leave him as a man with less prestige than the Emperor of the Romans, but it would still make the Frankish king the second most prestigious ruler in the world, so far as the Franks were concerned at least. This was acceptable, and messengers were sent to Constantinople.
You know what happened next. Justin accepted the proposal, Louis marched East, and the Bulgars were crushed. In doing so Louis led a Frankish army further East than any ruler would until Henry III marched a hundred thousand Franks, Normans, Goths, Saxons, Danes, Poles, and Bulgars to the walls of Constantinople itself in his great crusade in 1248. By then the Frankish Empire had risen, fallen, and there were but dreams of it one day rising again. For now when Louis departed the city he held an Imperial title, and began putting his real plan into action.
That plan did not proceed perfectly, and a major revolt broke out inside Franci itself that required Louis to crush it personally. When he did so territories on the edges of his Empire also rebelled, and had to be put down as well. But when Louis died in 830 he successfully handed power over to his son Charles, who would proceed to squander much of his father’s power and effort. Charles had two sons, and he left most of the Empire to his oldest son, but left large partes of Aquitaine to his younger, leaving the main branch of the royal family holding most of their territory in the northeast. Charles would also move the capital officially to Aachen, where it would more or less remain until the present day, even as the Frankish Empire of old would break apart.
That’s for next century though. For now, in 850 the Franks ruled over the second most powerful state in Christendom, and were poised to be the major Western rival of the Romans for the next three hundred years. While armed conflict would be rare for the forseeable future, it really was inevitable.
Next time we will cover the disparate territories of the Gothic kingdom and Britanni, as well as lay the groundwork for the great pagan invasions of the island that would begin in the 860s.