114 The End of the Carolingians
Learning Objective
- Identify the reasons for the fall of the Carolingian Dynasty
Key Points
- The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century, which saw its reached its peak with the crowning of Charlemagne as the Roman emperor in 800.
- Charlemagne’s death in 814 began an extended period of fragmentation and decline of the dynasty that would eventually lead to the evolution of the territories of France and Germany.
- Following the death of Louis the Pious (Charlemagne’s son), the surviving adult Carolingians fought a three-year civil war ending only in the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the territory into three separate regions and began the breakup of the empire.
- The Carolingians were displaced in most of the regna of the empire in 888, but ruled in East Francia until 911 and held the throne of West Francia intermittently until 987.
- One chronicler dates the end of Carolingian rule with the coronation of Robert II of France as junior co-ruler with his father, Hugh Capet, thus beginning the Capetian dynasty, descendants of which unified France.
- The Carolingian dynasty became extinct in the male line with the death of Eudes, Count of Vermandois. His sister Adelaide, the last Carolingian, died in 1122.
Terms
regna
Territorial regions of independent rule.
Carolingian
Refers to topics concerning or in the time of Charlemagne and his heirs.
Francia
The territory inhabited and ruled by the Franks, a confederation of West Germanic tribes, during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.
Charlemagne’s Death
The Carolingian dynasty began with Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel, but began its official reign with Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, displacing the Merovingian dynasty. The dynasty reached its peak with the crowning of Charlemagne as the first emperor in the west in over three centuries. Charlemagne’s death in 814 began an extended period of fragmentation and decline that would eventually lead to the evolution of the territories of France and Germany.
In 813, Charlemagne called Louis the Pious, king of Aquitaine and his only surviving legitimate son, to his court. There Charlemagne crowned his son with his own hands as co-emperor and sent him back to Aquitaine. He then spent the autumn hunting before returning to Aachen on November 1. In January, he fell ill with pleurisy. He took to his bed on January 21 and as Einhard tells it:
He died January twenty-eighth, the seventh day from the time that he took to his bed, at nine o’clock in the morning, after partaking of the Holy Communion, in the seventy-second year of his age and the forty-seventh of his reign.
He had a testament of 811, not updated prior to his death, that allocated his assets. He was succeeded by his son, Louis, but his empire lasted only another generation in its entirety; its division, according to custom, between Louis’s own sons after their father’s death l