Charles the Bald

Charles was born on June 13, 823 in Frankfurt, the only surviving son of Emperor Louis the Pious and his second wife, the Bavarian noblewoman Judith ^[1]. His birth complicated an inheritance plan that had seemed settled. In 817 Louis had divided the future empire among his three older sons, Lothar, Pippin, and Louis the German, and a fourth heir born six years later had no place in that arrangement ^[2].

Judith pressed hard to secure territory for her child. In 829 Louis the Pious granted the boy Alemannia, a decision that helped push his older sons into open revolt ^[1]. The rebellions of the 830s twice drove Louis from power, and the young Charles was at one point confined in the monastery of Prum while his mother was sent to Italy ^[2]. Court politics shaped his entire childhood, and he learned early that Carolingian family loyalty rarely survived a disputed inheritance.

Despite the turmoil, Charles received an unusually thorough education for a Frankish prince. His tutor Walahfrid Strabo, a poet and scholar from the monastery of Reichenau, gave him a grounding in Latin letters that later made him one of the most bookish rulers of his dynasty ^[3].

When Louis the Pious died in June 840, the empire fell into civil war. The eldest son, Emperor Lothar I, claimed authority over the whole realm. Charles allied with his half brother Louis the German, and in June 841 their combined armies defeated Lothar at Fontenoy, one of the bloodiest battles Frankish sources record ^[2].

The alliance was sealed in February 842 at Strasbourg, where Charles and Louis exchanged oaths before their assembled troops. The Oaths of Strasbourg were sworn in both early Romance and early German so that each army could understand the other side, and the text preserved by the historian Nithard is among the oldest written witnesses to the French language ^[4]. Nithard, himself a grandson of Charlemagne, wrote his history of these wars at Charles's own request ^[4].

Exhaustion forced a settlement. By the Treaty of Verdun in August 843, the three brothers partitioned the empire: Lothar kept the imperial title with a long middle strip from the North Sea to Italy, Louis took the lands east of the Rhine, and Charles received the western kingdom ^[2]. That western share, West Francia, is conventionally treated as the starting point of the kingdom of France, which is central to any Charles the Bald biography ^[1].

Holding West Francia proved harder than winning it. Aquitaine resisted for years under Charles's nephew Pippin II, and Charles only gradually asserted control over the region, having himself crowned king of Aquitaine at Orleans and later placing his own sons there ^[2]. In Brittany he suffered defeats against the Breton leaders Nominoe and Erispoe and settled for treaties that recognized Breton autonomy in exchange for formal submission ^[5].

The most persistent threat came from the sea. Viking fleets sailed up the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne throughout his reign, sacking Paris in 845, when Charles paid a tribute of 7,000 pounds of silver to make the raiders withdraw ^[5]. He answered with a mix of payments, sieges, and engineering. The Edict of Pitres in 864 ordered fortified bridges built across rivers to block the longships, regulated coinage, and restricted the sale of horses and weapons to the Northmen ^[5]. The fortified bridge at Pont de l'Arche on the Seine is the best documented of these works ^[5].

Charles the Bald achievements were not only military. His assemblies produced a large body of capitularies, and his reign supplied later jurists with texts on royal consecration and the duties of kings ^[2]. Crowned and anointed at Metz in 869 when he seized Lotharingia, he treated ritual and writing as instruments of power. When Emperor Louis II died in 875, Charles crossed the Alps and was crowned emperor in Rome by Pope John VIII on Christmas Day, exactly seventy five years after Charlemagne's imperial coronation ^[1].

Among Charles the Bald facts, his patronage of scholarship deserves more attention than his nickname. His court attracted the Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, who taught at the palace school and, at Charles's request, translated the Greek writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin ^[3]. Eriugena's major work, the Periphyseon, took shape in this West Frankish milieu ^[3].

Manuscript painting reached a peak under his sponsorship. Workshops associated with his court produced lavish books such as the Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, completed in 870, and the First Bible of Charles the Bald, presented to him by the monks of Tours around 845 ^[6]. These volumes, heavy with gold and full page portraits of the king enthroned, projected an image of sacred rulership to the elite who saw them ^[6].

He also cultivated the great churchmen of his realm, above all Hincmar, archbishop of Reims from 845, who drafted coronation rites, wrote political treatises for the king, and argued with him almost as often as he served him ^[2]. Contemporary annals describe a ruler who read, collected books, and understood the propaganda value of learning, a profile closer to his grandfather Charlemagne than to most ninth century warlords ^[1].

In 842 Charles married Ermentrude, daughter of Count Odo of Orleans. The marriage linked him to an influential noble family and produced many children, including his heir Louis the Stammerer, the rebellious son Carloman, and Judith, who was married as a teenager to King Aethelwulf of Wessex and crowned queen, an unusual honor for a Frankish bride in England ^[2].

Ermentrude died in 869, and within weeks Charles took up with Richilde, whom he married early in 870. Her family, the so called Bosonids, rose rapidly in his service, and her brother Boso later became a king in Provence ^[2]. None of Richilde's children survived to adulthood, which left the succession resting on Louis the Stammerer alone.

Family discipline could be brutal. His son Carloman, ordained a cleric, rebelled repeatedly and was blinded on Charles's orders in 873 ^[2]. The nickname "the Bald" appears in sources close to his own time, though scholars still debate whether it described real hair loss or was an ironic joke, since royal portraits show him with a full head of hair ^[1].

The imperial coronation of 875 brought prestige and trouble in equal measure. Louis the German invaded West Francia while Charles was in Italy, and after Louis died in 876 Charles tried to seize land east of the Rhine, only to be routed by his nephew Louis the Younger at Andernach in October 876 ^[2].

In June 877 Charles issued the Capitulary of Quierzy, a set of arrangements for governing the kingdom while he campaigned in Italy, including provisions on what should happen to the offices of counts who died during his absence. Historians long read it as a charter of hereditary feudalism, though most now see it as a temporary practical measure ^[2].

The last Italian expedition failed. Pope John VIII had begged for help against Saracen raiders, but Charles's magnates refused to follow him south in force, and the approach of his nephew Carloman of Bavaria forced a retreat. Crossing back over the Alps, Charles fell ill and died on October 6, 877 at Avrieux, a small place in the Maurienne valley of Savoy ^[1]. His body was buried locally at first because it could not be carried far in the heat, and his remains were later moved to the abbey of Saint Denis, the royal necropolis he had favored and served as lay abbot ^[7].

Charles's death ended the last serious attempt to hold Charlemagne's inheritance together under one strong hand. His son Louis the Stammerer reigned barely two years, and the West Frankish crown then passed through minors and rivals until the Carolingian line there finally gave way to Hugh Capet in 987 ^[1]. Because the kingdom created at Verdun in 843 evolved into France, French historical tradition has often counted Charles as an early king of France, and the Treaty of Verdun remains a standard starting point for the separate histories of France and Germany ^[2].

Modern scholarship has rehabilitated a ruler once dismissed as a failure who bribed Vikings and lost battles. Janet Nelson's 1992 biography presented him as a resourceful politician who kept a fractious kingdom functioning for thirty four years amid constant invasion and family war ^[2]. The administrative records of his reign survive in unusual quantity, which makes his kingdom one of the best documented corners of ninth century Europe ^[2].

His cultural legacy is easier still to see. The jeweled Gospel books, the ivory carvings, the throne later kept at Saint Denis, and the works of Eriugena all descend from his patronage, and art historians treat the court school of Charles the Bald as the final flowering of Carolingian book art ^[6]. Few medieval kings left behind so much parchment and gold to argue their case ^[3].