Charles the Fat

Charles was born in 839, probably at or near Neudingen in the upper Danube valley, the youngest of three sons of Louis the German, king of East Francia, and his wife Emma, a member of the powerful Welf family ^[1]. His birth year placed him at the tail end of a crowded generation of Carolingian princes. As a great-grandson of Charlemagne he carried the most prestigious name in Europe, yet as a third son he could expect only a fraction of his father's lands.

The nickname that follows him through the sources, Carolus Crassus in Latin, does not appear in any text written during his lifetime. It surfaces only in the twelfth century, and no contemporary writer comments on his weight, so the label tells us more about later medieval storytelling than about the man himself ^[2]. Modern scholars such as Simon MacLean prefer to call him Charles III of East Francia and treat the epithet as a historiographical accident.

His youth unfolded amid constant family conflict. Louis the German spent decades fighting his brothers and then his own sons over the division of Frankish territory. Charles first appears in the record as a participant in these disputes, including a brief rebellion against his father in the early 870s that ended in reconciliation. Some annalists also describe an alarming episode in 873 in which Charles suffered a violent public seizure at an assembly, an event contemporaries read in religious terms and some modern historians have linked to a possible illness such as epilepsy, though no diagnosis is certain ^[3].

When Louis the German died in 876, his kingdom was split three ways according to a plan drawn up years earlier. Charles received Alemannia (roughly modern Swabia, Alsace, and northern Switzerland) together with Rhaetia, the smallest and poorest of the three shares ^[1]. His elder brothers Carloman and Louis the Younger took Bavaria and Saxony with Franconia respectively. Nothing about this settlement suggested that the youngest son would one day outstrip them both.

Fortune, or rather the fragility of Carolingian health, changed everything. Carloman was incapacitated by a stroke in 879 and could no longer rule his Italian kingdom, so Charles crossed the Alps and was accepted as king of Italy that year ^[4]. Two years later Pope John VIII, desperate for a protector against Saracen raiders in southern Italy, crowned Charles emperor in Rome on February 12, 881 ^[2]. It was the imperial title his great-grandfather Charlemagne had received exactly eighty one years before, and it instantly made Charles the senior figure in the dynasty.

The inheritances kept coming. Louis the Younger died in 882 without a surviving son, and Charles absorbed the whole East Frankish kingdom, Bavaria and Saxony included ^[1]. Then in 884 the West Frankish king Carloman II, still a teenager, died in a hunting accident. The magnates of West Francia passed over his five year old half brother, the future Charles the Simple, and invited the emperor to rule them instead. By 885 anyone asking who was Charles the Fat could receive a startling answer: he was king or emperor over almost every territory Charlemagne had held, from the North Sea to Rome, a reunification no one had planned ^[4].

Any honest account of Charles the Fat achievements has to begin with the sheer scale of what he governed. No ruler since Louis the Pious, who died in 840, had held the Frankish lands together, and none would ever do so again ^[5]. Charles managed this vast inheritance the way ninth century kings had to: by traveling, holding assemblies, issuing charters, and delegating. Surviving diplomas show him confirming the rights of monasteries and bishoprics from Lombardy to Saxony, and he relied heavily on his archchancellor Liutward of Vercelli, a bishop of modest birth whose influence bred deep resentment among the Frankish aristocracy ^[2].

The defining military problem of the reign was the Vikings. In 882 Charles besieged a large Norse army at Asselt on the Meuse, then ended the campaign by negotiation, granting the Viking leader Godfrid lands in Frisia on condition of baptism and paying off his companion Sigfrid ^[3]. Critics in the Annals of Fulda were scathing, but buying off Northmen was standard Carolingian practice, used by Charles the Bald before him and by West Saxon kings across the Channel.

The episode that shaped his reputation forever came at Paris. From November 885 a Viking fleet blockaded the city, whose defense was led by Count Odo and Bishop Gauzlin from the fortified Île de la Cité. Charles arrived with an imperial army in October 886, camped on the heights of Montmartre, and chose once again to negotiate. He allowed the Vikings to sail past Paris to ravage Burgundy, a region then in revolt against him, and promised a payment of 700 pounds of silver, delivered in 887 ^[5]. Contemporaries in West Francia contrasted his caution with Odo's heroism, and the settlement became, fairly or not, the emblem of a failed emperor. Modern historians note that a pitched battle against a fortified Viking camp carried enormous risk and that the deal did end the siege ^[4].

In 862 Charles married Richardis, daughter of Erchanger, a count in Alsace ^[2]. The marriage endured for twenty five years but produced no children, a dynastic failure with heavy political consequences, since the survival of his enlarged empire depended on a legitimate heir. Richardis was a formidable figure in her own right: she was crowned empress alongside her husband and founded the abbey of Andlau in Alsace, where she was later venerated as a saint ^[6].

The marriage ended in scandal. In 887, at an assembly, Charles publicly accused Richardis of adultery with Liutward of Vercelli, whom he had just dismissed from court. According to the annalists Richardis declared that the marriage had never been consummated and offered to prove her innocence by ordeal. She then withdrew to Andlau, where she spent the rest of her life ^[3]. Historians read the affair less as a domestic drama than as a calculated, and botched, attempt by Charles to dissolve a childless marriage so he could remarry and father an heir.

Charles did have one son, Bernard, born to a concubine whose name is not recorded. The emperor tried repeatedly to have Bernard recognized as his successor, seeking papal support to legitimize the boy, but the East Frankish bishops blocked the scheme ^[1]. He also explored adopting Louis of Provence, his young kinsman, as a fallback. None of these arrangements stuck, and the succession question hung over his final years like a sentence waiting to be pronounced.

By 887 the emperor's position was rotting from within. His health was visibly failing: that year he underwent a painful surgical procedure, described as an incision of the head, which contemporaries connected to his chronic illness ^[3]. The dismissal of Liutward, the humiliating separation from Richardis, and the lack of an accepted heir left him isolated just as confidence in his rule drained away.

The blow came from his own family. Arnulf of Carinthia, the illegitimate son of Charles's late brother Carloman, marched into Franconia in November 887 with an army of Bavarians and Slavs. At an assembly at Tribur the East Frankish magnates abandoned the emperor almost without resistance and recognized Arnulf as king ^[1]. Charles, too weak to fight, negotiated only for his personal maintenance. Arnulf granted him a handful of estates in Alemannia, including Neudingen, the place of his birth.

He did not outlive his fall by long. Charles died at Neudingen on January 13, 888, barely six weeks after his deposition, and was buried at the island monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance ^[2]. The regino of Prüm, writing a generation later, observed that on his death the kingdoms he had held broke apart and each chose a king from within itself. Within months there were separate rulers in East Francia, West Francia, Italy, Burgundy, and Provence, several of them from families outside the Carolingian line ^[5].

For centuries Charles carried the blame for the Carolingian collapse. Chroniclers and later historians painted him as sluggish, sickly, and cowardly, the fat king who paid Vikings instead of fighting them and let Charlemagne's empire slip through his fingers. Basic Charles the Fat facts were filtered through this hostile lens, starting with the nickname itself, which no one who knew him ever used ^[2].

Recent scholarship has pushed back hard. Simon MacLean's 2003 study argued that Charles was a conventional and often effective Carolingian ruler whose methods, including tribute payments and negotiated settlements, matched those of his most admired predecessors, and that the empire fractured in 888 because of a succession accident rather than personal failure ^[4]. Timothy Reuter and other historians of East Francia have likewise stressed the structural strains of ruling so many kingdoms with ninth century tools: a king could only be in one place at a time, and aristocracies expected a resident, active lord ^[1].

Whatever verdict one prefers, the significance of the reign is not in dispute. Charles was the last ruler of a united Carolingian Empire, and the fragmentation that followed his deposition in 887 and death in 888 fixed the outlines from which France, Germany, and Italy would eventually develop ^[5]. That is why any serious Charles the Fat biography is really a study of an ending: the moment Europe stopped being one Frankish empire and became a continent of competing kingdoms.