Transcript of 523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)

Thank you for listening to the rest is history. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is the restishistory.com. The Merovingian dynasty, from which the Franks were accustomed to choose their kings, is thought to have lasted down to King Chilperic the 3rd, who was deposed on the order of Stephen the second, the pope of Rome. His hair was cut short, and he was shut up in a monastery.

Though this dynasty may seem to have come to an end only with Chilperic the third, it had really lost all power years before, and it no longer possessed anything at all of importance beyond the empty title of king. The wealth and the power of the kingdom were held tight in the hands of certain leading officials of the court who were called the mayors of the palace, and on them, supreme authority devolved. All that was left to the king was that content with his royal title, he should sit on the throne with his hair long and his beard flowing and act the part of a ruler. Whenever he needed to travel, he went in a cart which was drawn in rural manner by yoked oxen with a cowherd to drive them. In this fashion, he would go to the palace and to the general assembly of his people, which was held each year to settle the affairs of the kingdom.

And in this fashion, he would return home again. That's the opening to the life of Charlemagne by Einhardt, the Frankish scholar and courtier. And he wrote that just after Charlemagne's death. And he's describing the greatest, the most famous of all Frankish kings, 1 of the titanic names in all European history. Lots of people, I think, Tom, will have heard the name of Charlemagne.

But to be completely honest, I think a lot of people have heard the name and have no real sense of who he was. Was he French? Was he German? Well, obviously, he was neither. Well, he's the father of both and yet was neither.

Now, Einhardt let's just talk about Einhardt for a second because he writes this very extraordinary biography of Charlemagne, doesn't he? Pretty unique, really. Yeah. And he was very proud of the fact that he'd been so familiar personally with Charlemagne, wasn't he?

Yeah. He was also a very short man, Dominic. So like, Benjamin Lay.

Oh, yes. We love a short man and the rest is history.

We do. Yes. Well, so the thing that's unusual about this is that it's a biography in a kind of Roman style. It echoes Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars. And that's not a coincidence because Einhardt, as a young boy, had been sent by his parents to a monastery, not to become a monk, but kinda rather like being sent to a boarding school or something like that, at a place called Fulda on the east bank of the Rhine.

And this monastery had a complete collection of Suetonius' lives of the Caesars. And this included a biography of the greatest of all the Roman emperors, Augustus. And Einhardt read it. And so when he came to write his biography of Charlemagne, he modeled it on Suetonius' life of Augustus. And this is very deliberate because the extraordinary thing about Charlemagne, who is this descendant of barbarian warlords, is that on Christmas Day, AD 800, he had been crowned as a Caesar, as Augustus in Rome by the pope himself.

And you said how Charlemagne is a titanic figure in the history of Europe, simultaneously a kind of dominant but also shadowy, I think. And this is the key moment in his reign. And, again, it's a moment that is simultaneously epochal yet also hard to get a sense of exactly why it matters. The kind of the meaning seems to slip as you try to grasp it.

Because even the empire that he ends up in a vertical manner's ruling, the holy Roman Empire, a lot of people have find it very hard to pin down neither holy nor Roman nor an empire famously said about

Actually, I think it was holy. I think it was Roman. And I think it was an empire. Brilliant. Well The reasons that were come to.

But you're right. So this is looking back to the age of the Roman Empire, to the age of Augustus, but it's also looking forward to the medieval empire and the empire that will endure right the way up to the time of Napoleon, who is the guy who abolishes it. So you could say I mean, I said that, you know, that the story of the Franks, it's a kind of hinge moment in European history. This, perhaps, is the key hinge moment. This is the kind of the middle point in the emergence of Europe from antiquity, from the world of ancient Rome, into what will become the Europe of the high middle ages.

And it's kind of the ultimate promotion, a Frankish warlord becoming a Caesar. And so the question is, how had this absolutely jaw dropping event happened? And this is the story that we will be telling. We'll be starting on it today and completing it in the next 2 episodes. And we'll be finishing this story, of course, on Christmas Day.

So the anniversary of Charlemagne's coronation.

Okay. Let's get going and let's get a sense of the context. In the last 3 episodes, we talked about the rise of the Franks, the warlords of the west, and we ended with the Battle of Tours. And people who listen to the first episode will remember that Charlemagne is not, in fact, the first Frankish warlord to have the title of Augustus. They will remember that 3 centuries earlier, another Frankish warlord, that is to say Clovis, had been hailed as Augustus, but not in Rome, in Tours in the Shrine of Saint Martin.

He wasn't crowned by the pope. He was crowned by himself like Napoleon.

Yeah. And that reflects the fact that Clovis is very much a kind of self made man. He has been given the title of a consul by the emperor in Constantinople. Mhmm.

But

the idea that he's an Augustus, I mean, this is this is a self promotion. And it reflects the fact that he is casting himself simultaneously as the heir of Roman power in Gaul. You know, this is what he's laying claim to. But also that he is a kind of barbarian warlord. So he's not interested in ruling a global empire as Augustus had done, as Charlemagne will aspire to do.

He's content with being king of the Franks. But, I mean, that's still an absolutely massive deal. And to justify his authority, he's casting himself as the equivalent of a Roman governor. But also, you know, he's the descendant of a weird sea creature. He's got his long hair.

He's got all this kind of stuff. He's got his very tight pants over his enormous genitals. All this stuff that marks him out as being simultaneously Roman and Frankish. And that passage that you read, I mean, Ironheart mentioned some of the things that Clovis had worn and which the Merovingian kings have inherited.

The long hair. Yeah. The beard. The cuts. The long hair, particularly.

Yeah. So the reggae's, creniti, the long haired kings. This is what kind of defines them. But the thing is that by the time of Ironheart is writing, so he's doing that kind of, what, maybe 820, 8:30, these attributes are cast as kind of grotesque, as rustic, as embarrassing. And it reflects a sense that the Merovingians themselves, as the generations have passed, as their power kind of bleeds away, have become mere shadows of Clovis, the founder of their dynasty.

They've become kind of phantasms, what French scholars have always called the, the do nothing kings, kings who play no role in the functioning of the Frankish state. And the obvious question is, why has this happened? How is it that the heirs of Clovis are just ciphers? And Einhardt, in that passage you read, I mean, again, he gives the answer. He says that they've been put in the shadow by officials known as mayors of the palace.

And these are posts that by the beginning of 8th century have become, like the kingship of the Merovingians themselves, a hereditary post. And in the previous episode, the episode we did on the Battle of Tours, we met 1 of those kind of domineering mayors of the palace. And that was Charles, Charles, who in Einhardt's time would come to be known as Martell, the hammer.

So Charles Martell, the hammer. And he's the bloke who won the battle

at all, of course. He absolutely is. And this redounds greatly to his reputation. But the thing is that long before he wins that battle, he's already won, you know, a name for himself as the most formidable warrior, not just in the lands of the Franks, but in the whole of Christendom. He's used his expertise in war to fashion a really quite coherent empire.

So he's the master of Austrasia, where his forebears came from. So that's the Eastern Frankish Kingdom, stretching in beyond the Rhine into Germany. He's the master of Neustria, which is the Frankish Kingdom that extends along the line of the channel. He has in the wake of the Battle of Tours, he's moved southwards to start trying to bring Provence and Aquitaine under his rule. So for Charles, the defeat of the invading Umayyads, the invading Saracens, I mean, this is, you know, brilliant.

It's excellent for his reputation. But the thing he really cares about is fashioning a proper empire out of all the disparate parts of the kind of the Regnum Francorum, the Kingdom of the Franks. And Tore helps him, particularly with subordinating Aquitaine, because Odo, the Duke of Aquitaine, who had been Charles' rival, he had been smashed up by the invading Saracens. Odo had come to Charles to ask for help. Charles had agreed, but Odo had had to submit to him.

And in 735, actually, Odo retires to a monastery. Now his son and his grandson will continue the fight. But, basically, they're on a losing wicket by this point. There's no way that they're gonna ultimately be able to hold out against the might that Charles and his heirs can bring to bear on them. And this is also, in the long run, true of Muslims in the south of Gaul.

So Charles targets them as well. So he advances southwards. He drives them out from the great fortresses of Arles, of Avignon. He annihilates a massive seaborne expedition of Umayyad forces outside Narbonne. There's descriptions of the Muslim fugitives trying desperately to swim back to their ships, being pursued by the victorious Franks, being speared in the shallows and the lagoons like tuna.

Golly.

Fabulous stuff if you're a Frank. And by 741, which is when Charles Martel finally dies, his armies, so the Franks under his leadership, pretty much have the range of lands stretching from the Pyrenees all the way to the Danube. So a vast, vast expanse of territory. So the Frankish lords of southern Gaul and the Umayyads, these are people who've been comprehensively hammered by Charles Martel, but they're not alone. So too have a very distinctive class in Frankish society, and these are the bishops.

And we talked about this in the first episode we did on, you know, the age of Clovis. The bishops, almost without exception, are the heirs of the kind of the old Gallo Roman aristocracy.

Right.

The kind of senatorial figures who had been the wealthy elites of Roman Gaul. And these families still preserve their authority through the institution of the episcopies, through having themselves elected by their local cities as bishops. You know, if you want an example of a class of people who preserve the traditions of the vanished Roman Empire, Frankish bishops are your guys. Right. So they're very learned.

They're very scholarly. You know, they're kind of educated in classical poetry as well as in the bible and all that kind of stuff. They may well play a kind of part on the great national stage, but, ultimately, their real loyalty isn't to the kind of the distant Frankish king or, you know, in the case of Charles Martel, the distant Frankish mayor, but to the local city, the local community that they represent on the stage of Gaul and whose peoples have elected them. And for the vast majority of Franks, it's the bishops who kind of mediate between the mass of Christians and the dimension of the divine. And they're able to do this because they are almost invariably the descendants of saints and bishops whose tombs are in the cathedrals where they sit.

So it's a kind of family project.

Right.

And the effect of this is that all across Gaul, wherever you go, there are these tombs of martyrs, of holy men, of bishops. I mean, Saint Martin is the most famous of these, but he's by no means the only 1. And it enables the Franks, when they look at their bishops, to feel not just that they have living links with the, you know, the vanished realm of Rome. I mean, they don't really care about this by this point. But they can look at their bishops and feel these are venerable representatives of a very, very ancient Christianity.

And it enables them to feel that Gaul is like a kind of holy land, a Christian holy land. Yeah. They don't really need, for instance, the sanction of the papacy or whatever.

They've got Samartan. They've got all that stuff.

Yeah. Essentially, they're spiritually self sufficient. And this has been the case ever since the first emergence of the Frankish monarchy. But the thing about Charles Martel, he doesn't like this at all.

You won't tolerate an alternative power base, presumably.

Yeah. Basically. He doesn't like these bishops. They're too independent. They're too able to defy his will.

And so what he wants is to replace them with his own kinsmen, with his own trusted allies. And it doesn't matter to Charles if the bishops he appoints, you know, kind of know Virgil or whatever. He doesn't care about their educational standards or whether they have local links to the cities that they are going to serve as bishops for or if they have family connections to the saints whose tombs lie in their cathedrals. So that class of person is being elbowed aside, and Charles is putting in their place, you know, his own henchmen. And, effectively, this is, I think, the final extinction of Roman Gaul.

This is where Gaul, if you like, becomes Francia. And Francia is the word that will give us, you know, the name of France. So you can see Gaul becoming France at this point under the rule of Charles Martel. And Patrick Gere, who's the, you know, 1 of the great historians of this process, it's so interesting. So I'll read what he says in full.

Charles Martel accomplished what no other secular power had been able to do in the previous 2 centuries by his manipulation of ecclesiastical office, so, you know, getting rid of all these bishops and replacing them with his own men, by the confiscation of the wealth it controlled, and by the appointment of ignorant and entirely worldly lay supporters, he finally succeeded in destroying the religious basis on which had long rested the independent power of the Frankish bishops. Henceforth, they would be powerful lords at times rivaling in power dukes, counts, and even kings, but they would never again command that particular power as monopolists of the sacred. This role, along with the lead in cultural life, would pass to monasteries.

So this is surely a key moment in the transition from late antiquity to early medieval. Right? That there a vestige of kind of Roman cultural spiritual life has been smashed. More power has been concentrated in the hands of the warlords who are now making themselves kings. Is that right?

Yeah. I think absolutely. And what compounds the impact of this process is that in the south of Gaul, where Roman civilization had been much more deeply planted, it had been there for much longer, urban civilization had kind of survived to a degree that it hadn't in northern Gaul. You know, the cities there have, over the previous decades, have been absolutely smashed to pieces, first by the Arab invaders and then by Charles Martel's invasion south and his attempt to reclaim these cities. So it's not just that the old Roman bishops have been swept aside.

It's also that the independence of the cities that had maintained them has also been massively shattered. So people who've been to the south of France, if you, you know, you think of Nimes or Arles or whatever, there are still incredibly impressive Roman remains there. But this is the point where they are really starting to crumble away as well, as Roman cities kind of in the north had already done. They start to be cannibalized. They crumble away.

They're shattered by wars. And as you say, I think this is really the kind of the endpoint of late antiquity in Gaul. This is where the kind of, if you wanna say, the Middle Ages begin. I mean, this is the kind of the start point. And obviously, the bishops, the kind of the Roman old school, the Ancien Regime, they hate this.

I mean, they're so resentful. And there's a perfect example of this in the form of the erstwhile bishop of Orleans, who's a man called Eucherius. And that's a Roman name. And that's really telling. Because by this point, in the 8th century, most Roman names are fading away.

They're being replaced by Frankish names.

Yeah. People are all called Theodawolf or something.

Yeah. Exactly. Childebert or whatever. Yeah. But among this kind of class of, you know, descended from senators and so on, they do preserve their Roman names.

So you can tell from Eucherius that he's a kind of very grand figure, you know, with lineage going back to the Roman past. Anyway, Charles turns up in Orleans after the battle of Tours, very chipper, very full of himself. He's beaten the enemy off. And Lucarius is kind of grumpy and grouchy and snobbish towards him. So Charles Martel just says, piss off.

Don't want you anymore, replaces him with 1 of his own henchmen. And Lucarius is furious about this. And in due course, when Charles Martel dies, he reports he reports a vision that he's been shown in a dream by an angel. And this angel leads Lucarius down into hell. And there, he shows him Charles Martel, condemned in body and soul to eternal punishment.

And Lucarius wakes up, he's absolutely thrilled by this vision, tells everyone, absolutely great news. Charles Martel is in hell. And he says, you know, if you want proof for this, let's go to Charles Martel's tomb. Let's open it up and, see if the body's there. Because if it's not there, that will be evidence that the body has been taken away and dunked in the, you know, the boiling vats of the inferno.

So a party got together. They go to Charles' tomb. They open it up. And I will quote from a subsequent record of what happens. Therefore, they went to the aforementioned monastery where Charles' body was buried.

They opened his tomb, and suddenly, Dominic, a dragon emerged.

Oh, my words.

And the whole interior of the tomb was found to be blackened as if it had been burned.

Right. And and that and that actually happened?

Well, right at the beginning of this series, in in the episode we did on Clovis, I promised people that we'd have a dragon. And there it is. And

now we have.

Comes rushing out. It's obviously been burning the tomb. Charles Martell's body has been taken, dunked in hell. What more proof do you need?

Okay. Well, that's good enough for me. Okay. But not everybody in the church thinks Charles is a bad guy. And, in fact, there are bishops who think, oh, he's brilliant,

aren't there? Well, there's there's 1 very particular bishop, and that is the bishop of Rome, the pope. So the pope from Rome I mean, he has no particular dog in the fight. He doesn't mind at all what, Charles Martel is doing to the bishops in Gaul. And, in fact, he's very, very keen to cozy up to Charles Martel.

So in 739, which is 2 years before Charles dies, the pope, who is called Gregory the third, sends him the keys of Saint Peter and a portion of the chains that had bound Saint Peter when he was held in prison before being executed by the Romans. And this is a pretty clear signal that the papacy is interested in doing a deal with Charles and with his family. And this is quite timely because everyone knows that Charles isn't long for this life. You know, by 7:39, he's pretty old. And the assumption is that Charles' 2 eldest sons, 1 of whom is called Carloman, 1 of whom is called Pepin, will succeed him.

But they will do so, obviously, not as kings, but as mayors. And I think there's a sense, not just in Rome, but also across, you know, most of the Frankish kingdom, that this is ridiculous. I mean, it's mad that, you know, you still got a Merovingian king with his long hair and he's being wheeled out on his cart and Yeah. Or that kind of thing. And this is focused when Charles dies in, 741.

And sure enough, his roles as mayor are divided up among his sons. So the elder 1, Carloman, becomes the mayor of Australia, the eastern kingdom. And the younger 1, Pepin, becomes the mayor of Neustria, with his capital now in based in Paris. And what makes this even more ridiculous and seem ludicrous to people is that there isn't even, at this point, a mayor of Ingin King on the

They've run out of mayor of engines. They've run out of mayor

of engines. They haven't got 1. So Carloman and Pepin, it's difficult for them initially to establish their authority. You know, they're not the hammer. So it takes some time to affirm their authority.

They think, well, actually, maybe it would be kind of easier for us if we did have a kind of Merovingian king on the throne. So they look around and they find a Merovingian. And he's a guy called Chilperic.

Inevitably. And

they plonk him on the throne and he becomes Chilperic the third. But the obvious solution to this whole problem is for him to be deposed, for the Merovingian monarchy itself to be abolished, and for either Carloman or Pepin or perhaps both to become kings. But there is a problem, which is, you know, how do you do this? Because Clovis, when he'd become king, you know, this is why he proclaimed himself Augustus and why he boasted about, you know, his long hair and being descended from a weird sea monster. If you're going to be a king, you need a source of legitimacy because you need to demonstrate to your people and be confident in your own heart, in your own soul, that God approves of your elevation to the throne.

So you need something or perhaps someone who can provide that legitimacy.

Who on earth would that be? We'll find out after the break. What a cliffhanger. Who is this person? Don't go away.

Hello, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook here.

And I'm Tom Holland. And we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we Dominic?

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Welcome back to the rest is history. We ended with 1 of the great cliffhangers, not merely in the history of this podcast, but I think in the history of probably of all human civilization. Who or what is the possible source of authority that could bestow kingship on Carloman and Pepin, these people who are ruling Australia and Neustria in the realm of the Franks? Massive questions. Massive question.

And you gave a a little spoiler, I felt disappointingly. You said our eyes would be turning to Rome. So tell us, who is this person?

Well, of course, Rome is the home of the papacy. And people who've listened, who've got this far in the series, may have noticed we haven't really mentioned the papacy much. And I guess, Dominic, lots of people may have the sense that the pope is the key player in medieval Europe and therefore, kind of find it a bit weird. But at this point, the authority and the influence of the papacy are just a shadow of what they will become kind of in due course over the course of the high middle ages. So the bishop of Rome, the pope, I mean, he is kind of widely acknowledged by other churchmen across the West as being the most senior.

He's the most senior bishop. But that's about the limit of it. So if the pope, you know, he writes to kings, you know, he'll get their respect. They'll hear him out, but they won't necessarily obey him. He can offer them advice, but he certainly can't kind of give them orders.

And part of that is because he would never think of doing it. I mean, it wouldn't cross his mind that that's his role. But also, even if he did, you know, he lacks the means to do it. As we said, the bishops say in Gaul are very independent. They don't see themselves as being under the thumb of the bishop of Rome.

So the Franks, I think, they respect him, the pope, but not much more than that. And, definitely, you know, the bishops in Gaul, these kind of grand descendants of senators, they don't. They don't feel any sense of cultural cringe towards Rome. You know, they don't need him. They are their own men.

They have their own saints. They have their own traditions. They are what they are. And the truth is that just as the Franks aren't particularly interested in the Bishop of Rome, the Bishop of Rome isn't really very interested in the Franks. Because in Rome, you still have this kind of inheritance of ancient assumptions that anyone north of the Alps is a complete barbarian.

I mean, the Franks are you know, they still see them as these kind of awful people with enormous mustaches and tight pants and stuff.

Yeah. Well, they're not entirely wrong, to be fair.

But it's also because, to be honest, for most of the period that we've been describing, the popes have a lot on their plate. So they have much more pressing things to worry about than, you know, what might be going on in Paris or Toulouse or whatever. And the reason for that is that they are still a part of the Roman Empire that is centered in Constantinople. So the Roman Empire in the west has fallen, but there is still an Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, as it's often called. And back in the 6th century, so that's around the time that Fredegund and Brunnhilde are being born, the great emperor Justinian, not really a friend of the show, is he, but his wife Theodora is definitely Yeah.

Absolutely is a friend of the show. Justinian.

Is he? Okay. Theodora, definitely a friend of the show. Erstwhile, star of Love Island, winner of Love Island, in fact. Anyway, Justinian had sent a great invasion force to reconquer Rome.

And that had, up to a degree, been successful. Rome had been incorporated back into the Byzantine Empire. And this had been quite humiliating for the Romans because they had been the original imperial capital and the Byzantines acknowledged Rome as the oldest city. But they also said that compared to Constantinople, it counts as the lesser city. And so the people of Rome who were once the rulers of this great empire are now themselves kind of subjects.

And the inferiority of Rome to Constantinople is institutionalized in the wake of its reconquest by Justinian's armies. So you have a Byzantine governor installed, not in Rome, but in Ravenna, Yeah. To rule Byzantine Italy.

Ravenna, to be fair, had been, imperial capital for a while.

It had. But, I mean, it's embarrassing. Rome is not just a provincial capital. It's not even a capital at all. The emperor kind of lavishes Byzantine titles on the Roman aristocracy.

Byzantine fashions become all the rage. People speak Greek. There are Greek churches set up in Rome. And Rome becomes essentially a kind of Erzat's version of Constantinople. And for the bishop constant reminders of his inferior status.

So every time he celebrates a mass, he prays for his absent master, the emperor, in Constantinople. Every time he writes a letter, he's dating it by the regnal year, again, of the emperor in Constantinople. And meanwhile, as he sits there in Rome, whether he's kind of wandering through the Forum or going for a walk on the Campus Martius, all around him, you get in this very kind of memorable phrase by Peter Brown, the great historian of late antiquity. He hears all around him the crash of falling masonry. So ancient Rome is literally falling to pieces around the pope.

But the

pope is not entirely devoid of assets, is he? He's got his spiritual assets. He's still a prestigious person. He's still the preeminent head of any church in the Christian world. Right?

He's got a palace that was given to the papacy by Constantine. And he's the heir of Saint Peter. So he's not nothing. He's not nobody.

Yeah. You're absolutely right. And I think of all those, kind of, you know, those attributes, being the heir of Saint Peter perhaps is the most significant because Saint Peter, the apostle whom Christ himself had named as his rock, He has the keys of heaven. So he has the power supposedly to bind and lose souls everywhere. And the pope claims to have inherited these powers.

So there's a certain level of potency there. And what also kind of raises the self confidence of the papacy, the willingness of the papacy to see itself not merely as a servant of the emperor in Constantinople, but perhaps, you know, his peer, maybe even his rival, is the fact that Constantinople, like Gaul, has been coming under increasing attack from Umayyad forces. And in fact, in 717, so even as Umayyad forces are spilling across Spain in the west, in the east, a great invasion force is advancing on Constantinople and investing it. And this is 1 of the models for Tolkien's portrayal of the siege of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. There's a 2 year siege.

By the end of it, in 7 18, this siege is finally broken. But it's been an unbelievably close run thing. The Byzantines have had a terrible fright. And so too in Rome has the pope because the emperor in Constantinople is supposed to be the pope's kind of sword and shield. But, of course, when the imperial capital itself is under threat Yeah.

You know, the emperor and his advisers and his military heads, you know, they're not gonna give a toss about Rome. It's a kind of obscure, you know, kind of unimportant frontier town. And the pope is kind of painfully aware of this. And when in the wake of the siege of Constantinople and the survival of the Byzantine Empire, the emperors in Constantinople try and reassert their authority in Italy, their focus isn't the north. It's the south.

Because there, they're being menaced by Umayyad forces who are moving up against Sicily and against southern Italy. So that's where Byzantine forces are concentrated. And in fact, they're stripped from the northern reaches of Italy. And that then leaves the north of Italy open and exposed. And in 751, absolute disaster for the papacy because Italy is invaded by a people called the Lombards.

And this is kind of almost like a flashback to the 5th century, the age of the barbarian invasions. Because the Lombards, they're a Germanic people. They're kind of ferocious warriors. And for pretty much 2 centuries, they've been parked the northern limits of Italy waiting for their opportunity. And the fact that Byzantine troops have been stripped from the north of Italy to go and fight in the south gives them that opportunity.

And they come sweeping down on the north and Ravenna falls to them. And when the news is brought to the pope in Rome, he's thinking, oh goodness, you know, we might be next. And there is really very little prospect that the emperor in distant Constantinople is going to hear, you know, the lamentations and appeals for help from the bishop of Rome. So he has to look around for an alternative savior.

Right. And is this where we get back to the Franks? Because surely, 1 very obvious person is 1 of the sons of Charles Martel, and in particular, Pepin. We talked about Pepin in the first half. So Pepin is gonna step forward as the sword and shield of the papacy, is he?

This is certainly the hope of the pope. But before we look at why he might be willing to do this, we should just go back and see what's been happening in Francia while all these events have been happening in Italy.

Okay.

So Pepin, as we said, is the younger brother of a guy called Carloman. And Carloman has been ruling as the mayor of Australia, the eastern region. Pepin is the mayor of Neustria, the kingdom abutting the channel. And as we said in the first half, between them, they have installed a kind of Merovingian cipher, Chilperic the 3rd, on the Frankish throne. And the brothers get on pretty well.

They seem to have been fond of each other,

kind of

quite unusual in the Yeah. Yeah. In the annals of Frankish history. And Carloman is a very distinctive character in the he combines a high level of kind of murderous ruthlessness with a very, very austere level of piety. So his most notorious display of ruthlessness people who listen to our first episode may have remembered that we talked about a great confederation of Germanic peoples called the Alemanni.

And they, amazingly, are still on the scene. And Carloman decides that the fact that they still have this identity is a threat to his own authority. And so he invites them to a kind of conference, an assembly at a place called Canstad. And all the leading figures of the Alemanni come here. You know, very excited to hear what Carloman has to say.

And, what Carloman has to say is, you're all doomed. He gives a signal. His servants, his aids, his men step up, slit the throats of all the Alemany noblemen, and that is then wiped out. And the claim is that thousands of them are killed. So Timothy Reuter, the great historian of Frankish Germany, he wrote that Canstatt did for the Alemannic landholding class what Hastings did for the Anglo Saxon landholding class, I e wipe them out completely.

So that's got rid of the Alemans from the scene. But the other project that Carloman has been pushing in the eastern regions of his empire is to sponsor a man from Devon, a guy called Winfrith, to convert all the pagan peoples who line the eastern borders of the Frankish empire. And Winfrith is a remarkable man. He's, as far as I know, the only Anglo Saxon missionary ever to have had a power station named after him.

Power station. In Germany or in England? It's in, Dorset. Oh, lovely.

Winfrith power station. So he comes over to Germany, and he's very, very effective, you know, with his, I bring you the good news of Christ.

He's got John Adams' voice, president John. Oh, he's

from Devon. He's like rich Nixon.

Right. Right. I think we agreed that Nixon was from Somerset.

So and he does so well that he comes to be called Boniface, so good deeds. And he's hailed as the apostle to the Germans. And, actually, to this day, he's the patron saint of Europe. He has an amazing impact. He converts huge numbers of people.

And Carloman thinks this is brilliant. He's got rid of the elements. He's converting all these pagans to Christianity. It's all looking good. But then, weirdly, in 747, he goes to Rome and he prays for the pope.

And he says, I don't want to be a king anymore. I want to become a monk. And the king shaves off his hair, you know, the emblem of power among the Franks, gives him a tonsier, the tonsier of a monk. And Carloman retires to the monastery of Monte Cassino.

He's gone mad. He's had a breakdown.

Or he's had a religious vision, Dominic. His party has won out against his worldly ambitions. And there is actually there's 1 chronicler who suggests that he felt guilt about what he'd done to the Allemans. So he said he felt contrite. And because of this, he abandoned his kingdom.

But the truth is, we don't know. Wow. We don't know. What a bizarre twist.

Yeah. It is a bizarre twist. I mean, people, I think, felt at the time that it was bizarre. Yeah. And, obviously, it's great for Pepin.

It's absolutely brilliant for Pepin because he is now the sole master of Franco. He's got the lot. Yeah. And he decides because of this, you know, enough is enough. It's mad that I am not the king.

But, of course, he wants the reassurance that God approves of this. And so he turns to the pope, who's a man called Zachary. He's of Greek descent. So you can see there kind of, you know, evidence for the biding influence of Constantinople in Rome. But this is a key moment because, effectively, the pope is about to turn his gaze from Constantinople northwards to the Kingdom of the Franks.

And he gets this Zachary gets his letter from Pepin. And in it, Pepin asks, is it right or not that the King of the Franks at this time has absolutely no power but nevertheless possesses the royal office? And Zachary replies, no. It is not right. And Pepin says, brilliant.

So he's talking about the Merovingian bloke who's still hanging around. He's saying, like, let's go over to him. Give me the crown. Enough of the Merovingians. Who cares about them?

Yes. And effectively, Pepin can now feel that God wants him to do what he wants to do, which is to make himself king. Yeah. So in 751, which is the same year that the Lombards invade Italy and capture Ravenna, Pepin finishes off the Merovingian dynasty. So as Einhardt described in the opening of this episode, Chilperic is kind of dragged out of his estate.

His hair is cut off. He is tonsured. He is sent off to a monastery. And that's the end of him. That's the end of the Merovingians.

The Lion of Clovis is extinct. Unless, of course, you're Dan Brown, in which case, you think it's continued into the present day, but I think it hasn't happened. So Pepin now faces the challenge of kind of setting himself aside as someone of royal status, someone who is kind of elevated above the common run that the Merovingians had never faced. Because the Merovingians could claim that they were descended from this kind of weird sea monster. They had their long hair.

They had all this kind of stuff. Pepin doesn't have any of this. So what he does is he turns to the bible. And in the bible, he reads of people who had not been of royal stock being elevated to the throne.

David.

Saul and David being the classic examples. And the mark of their becoming kings is that they are anointed with holy oil. And so this is what Pepin has done to himself. Goes to Soissons in Neustria, northeast of Francia, and there the holy oil is put on his brow by a bishop and he feels it kind of impregnating his skin and he has been elevated to a kind of sacramental level. And then 3 years later, he goes 1 better and he gets the pope himself to come to Francia to repeat this ceremony.

And by this point, Zachary is dead. But there is a new pope called Stephen the second. And he is more than ready to do as Pepin wants, basically, to answer the Frankish king's bidding. And the reason for this is that the Lombards are still very much on the scene. So in the autumn of 754, he sets off from Rome northwards towards the Alps.

And he is the 1st pope ever to travel to Gaul, to travel beyond the Alps. And there's a very dramatic account of his journey. I mean, it really does read like something out of Lord of the Rings, some kind of fantasy novel. There's descriptions of him climbing the Alps amid gusts of snow, and he's following a kind of ancient Roman road that's been left all cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair. And he travels through a great wilderness of kind of sickening mists and ice.

And finally, he reaches the summit of the pass, and this is the gateway of the Kingdom of the Franks. But below him, so below the road, there is this great frozen lake and beside it, there's the ruins of a long abandoned pagan temple. And, you know, for Stephen the second coming from Rome, this is, you know, he thinks, what am I doing? This is a terrible mistake. But then he continues down the road into the land of the Franks.

And he very soon reaches an abbey that had been sacred to an entire legion of Christians who had been martyred by the Romans back in the days of the Roman Empire. And his hosts tell the pope that there is no people in the world who are more devoted to the cult of the martyrs, to the cult of the saints, than the Franks. And the pope is told, the bodies of the holy martyrs, which the Romans had buried with fire and mutilated by the sword and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts, these bodies they had found and enclosed in gold and precious stones. So it's actually pretty passive aggressive because what they're doing is saying, we don't really need you. We've got our own saints.

We are kind of holier than the Romans. And, you know, you're the Bishop of the Romans. So, you know, just remember.

What does the pope make of this?

I don't think the pope really notices what he's being told because I think he's so relieved that he's managed to get across the Alps. He hasn't fallen into a ravine. He hasn't been attacked by the phantoms of pagan gods, that he's just glad to be among civilized Christian people. And so he continues on his way. It takes him 6 weeks.

He gets to Paris and there he meets Pepin. And he sees Pepin and he immediately kind of bursts into ostentatious floods of tears. And he begs Pepin to come to the protection of Saint Peter. And then he goes with Pepin up to the great abbey of Saint Denis, which is where Charles Martel had been buried, obviously, where the dragon had been hanging out. And there in Saint Denis, he anoints him a second time.

And just for good measure, he salutes not just Pepin as the anointed king of God, but the Franks themselves as the new Israelites. He hails them as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. So essentially, the pope is now lending his prestige to the self conceit of the Franks that they are, you know, they are something special.

And so do the Franks live up to their side of their bargain? Because, obviously, he's looking to them to protect him against the Lombards, isn't he?

He is. He absolutely lives up to his side of the bargain. So 755, 1 year after he's been anointed by the pope, he crosses the Alps. He invades Lombardy. He smashes the Lombard king, gets the Lombard king to submit.

2 years later, the Lombards are causing trouble again. So Pepin returns to Northern Italy, inflicts an even more crushing defeat on the Lombards. And this time, all the territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium are given by Pepin to the pope, or rather to Saint Peter, but effectively to the pope. And Pepin then goes down to Rome and he has all the keys of the cities that he's conquered and he lays them on the tomb of Saint Peter, on the tomb of the apostle. And, of course, as Saint Peter's caretaker is the pope, so, effectively, the pope is now the master of this great swathe of lands that previously had been ruled by the emperor in Constantinople and then had been purloined by the Lombard king.

And the news of this when it reaches Constantinople, I mean, the emperor is actually furious. He says these are mine. But the pope, you you know, he doesn't care. He shifted his loyalty. He's no longer team Constantinople.

He's now very much team Frank. And the reason for that is that Pepin and the Franks have, you know, plucked him and the papacy from the absolute jaws of disaster. And God's hand is also evident in the greatness of Pepin in the wake of his anointing. Because following Stephen's arrival in Paris and his hailing of the Franks as a holy people, everything goes absolutely brilliantly for them. Absolutely amazingly.

And in fact, by the time that Pepin dies in 7/68, he has set the Frankish monarchy and the Frankish empire on even more solid and impressive foundations than Charles Martel has done. So the taming of the Lombards is only 1 of Pepin's triumphs. He also effectively clears the Arabs from the south of Francia, kind of expels them beyond the Pyrenees. Aquitaine is also absolutely and definitively reduced to obedience. So I said that Odo, the great Duke of Aquitaine, who'd fought with Charles Martel at Tours.

He's retired to a monastery, but his son and his grandson had tried to continue the struggle, Pepin not having any of it. The last Duke of Aquitaine, Odo's grandson, gets murdered by his own followers because they think he's such a loser. And after that, there's no more talk of an independent Aquitaine. The whole while, Pepin has continued Charles Martel's devotion to military discipline. He's recruited more heavy cavalry.

He's gooned his infantry so that they're an absolute peak of discipline and fitness and expertise. He continues to sponsor missionary work on the eastern flank of his empire among the pagan Germans. And all of which means that when he dies, he leaves to his 2 eldest sons. The elder 1 is called Charles. The younger 1, confusingly, is called Carloman.

Absolute waves of Carlimans in this episode. But he leaves to them a kingdom that's not just the foremost power in Western Europe, but is obviously absolutely primed to become even more formidable. You know, everything is ready for even more impressive conquests.

But there's an obvious problem, this issue of 2 old 2 sons. So the Franks have a history of dividing up their realms to avoid fighting, to divide them up between different brothers. And, when you've got 2 brothers here, Charles and Carloman, is there not an enormous latent potential for a civil war between the 2 of them?

Right. So Pepin and the elder Carloman, they got on well. Carloman, the guy who goes off and becomes a monk. But the younger Carlerman and his elder brother, Charles, so the sons of Pepin, they don't like each other at all. And Pepin's lands have been divided up between the 2 of them.

Charles gets this kind of half doughnut and Carlerman gets the kind of lump in the middle. They really don't get on well at all. And Einhardt, in his account, he blames this on Carloman's advisers. So he says that harmony between them was maintained, but only with difficulty. For many of Carloman's advisers did their best to foster divisions between the 2 brothers to the degree that some of them were actively maneuvering to precipitate an open conflict.

But then, in December 7, 71, so that's only 3 years after the death of Pepin, a dramatic development, Carloman dies of a nosebleed.

Can you die of a nosebleed? I mean, well, clearly you can.

I mean, was there foul play? Yeah. There doesn't seem to be in the sources any suspicion of that. And I think most historians accept that if it wasn't the nosebleed. I mean, he he seems to have died of natural causes.

And that means, of course, that Charles is now really the only kid on the block. And he gets unanimously elected as king of all the lands of the Franks. And so he now has the reigns of this vast empire that's been forged by his father and his grandfather. He alone holds the reigns in his hands. And the question is, you know, as we said, what's he gonna do with it?

He's so primed, so ready to go on the offensive. And the question is, how far will he go? And I guess that there's a clue to the answer to that question in the name by which this new young king of the Franks, Charles Charles, is best known today. Because he is known by us not as Charles, not as Charles, but as Charles Le Mais, Charles the Great. And in the next 2 episodes, we will be looking at how Charles earns that name.

Wonderful. So if you remember the rest is history club, you can hear the next episode, and indeed the 3rd episode, in our Charlemagne trilogy right away. If you're not, you can hear them by signing up at the rest is history dot com. What better Christmas present to yourself could there be?

Literally can't think of any.

But if you are Scrooge or the Grinch, then I'm afraid you're gonna have to wait till next week because we'll be back on Monday and then on Christmas day with the final 2 episodes of our mighty series on the life of Charlemagne. Tom, a veritable tour de force. Thank you very much, and goodbye. Bye bye.

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