Louis the Pious

Louis was born in 778, while Charlemagne was on an expedition to Spain (remember The Song of Roland?). Charlemagne gave him the newly-acquired land of what is now southern France, stretching from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, with its capital at Toulouse, and with the name of the Kingdom of Aquitaine. He left the child there under the care of a very able group of secular and clerical counsellors led by Count William of Toulouse (William of Orange in the epics, and St. William of the Desert in the lives of the saints) and Saint Benedict of Aniane, monastic reformer, scholar, and political theorist. Louis had older brothers, so he did not expect ever to get more of his father's lands than the kingdom he had been given.

By 814, when Charlemagne died, however, Louis' brothers were already dead, and he went to Aachen at the age of thirty-six, with three sons of his own, to assume control of the entire empire. He was probably the best-trained ruler to assume a Western throne in over three hundred years and he was ready to reform the whole Carolingian system.

He started by expelling all illegitimately-born men from the civil service and high ecclesiastical posts. The problem was that many of these people had Charlemagne for a father. When Louis dismissed his half-brothers, he turned a powerful body of potential supporters against him. He also stripped the civil service of many of its experienced administrators at an inopportune time. Some nobles in Italy used a young boy, Bernard, with a claim to the throne as an excuse to rebel. Louis called out the Frankish army, enjoyed a massive show of support, defeated his Italian opponents and captured Bernard. He ordered Bernard blinded, as was the custom at the time. Since a blind man could not rule, Louis expected to eliminate young Bernard as a future threat to his own authority. Louis's executioner was clumsy, however, and, rather than tapping the eye very lightly with a red-hot poker and so permanently clouding the cornea, he touched the eye so that the shock traveled directly up the optic nerve, and Bernard died on the spot. By having accepted his crown from a clergyman, Louis had already demonstrated his willingness to subordinate himself to the Church, something his father had never done. The popes, based in Italy as they were, had probably been sympathetic to the recent rebellion and thought to use Louis's killing of his nephew as an opportunity to reaffirm ecclesiastical power and influence. The Church imposed a penance on Louis, and he humbled himself before his highest nobles. Many of these fighting men were competing for power and prestige with local bishops and abbots. They were dismayed at the degree to which Louis had abandoned Charlemagne's policy of claiming equality at the very least between ecclesiastical and imperial authority. The public humiliation of King Louis, even though it was self-imposed, must have been a distasteful sight to men who had followed Charlemagne. Louis was left with the approval of the Church but, among his nobles, he had gained a reputation for weakness of character.

Louis and his advisors had devised a plan, called Imperium Christianum (Christian Empire), with which they intend to end the problems arising from the custom of gavelkind being observed even at the imperial level. As the first step, Louis divided the lands of the empire among his three sons, establish their borders, arranged for the imperial crown to pass to his eldest son, and ordered that, when his sons died, the clerical and lay leaders of each kingdom would choose as king the best qualified of their deceased monarch's heirs. All were supposed to work together under the leadership of the emperor. This was all well and good; who knows but what it might even have worked (although I doubt it)? The plan was never fully implemented however. Most elaborate plans founded on abstract principles fail to take into account human frailties. At least this was the case with the Imperium Christianum, Some time after settler their estates on his three sons, Louis was introduced to a girl by the name of Judith, who was -- the chroniclers report -- an absolute knockout. Unlike his father, Louis, a widower, didn't believe in simply taking young women to bed. He seems to have had "family values," and so married the girl.

When Judith gave birth to a son, Louis announced that he was going to redraw the borders of the kingdoms of the Imperium Christianum so that Charles, his new son and the apple of his eye, would have an inheritance equal to those of his half-brothers. Those half-brothers didn't believe as much as did Louis that this was a Good Idea. They defied his attempts to reduce their lands, and civil war broke out between the emperor Louis and his sons. The fighting continued even past Louis' death in 840 and came to involve no only Louis's sons, but his grandsons, and virtually anyone who commanded a sufficient number of fighting men to become a player in this rather pointless game.