The Creation of the Frankish Empire: Territorial Expansion and Dynastic Succession

When Charlemagne’s father Pippin III usurped the Frankish throne in 751 and deposed the last Merovingian king, he came into possession of a kingdom that was the most successful of Rome’s heirs among the barbarian successor states of the Roman Empire.

When Pippin III died in 768 and handed on his newly won kingdom to his two sons Charles and Carloman, therefore, the Frankish realm occupied the whole of the former Roman provinces of Gallia, Germania, and Belgica. Under Charlemagne, sole ruler of the Franks after his brother’s death in 771, the kingdom expanded to embrace most of what we now include in western Europe, and incorporated former Roman territory as well as areas that had never known Roman rule.

It is essential to acknowledge that the territorial expansion under Charlemagne was not a grand strategic plan of conquest, but the result of what were initially and inevitably short-term political and diplomatic decisions. Only occasionally were particular political issues, such as the pope’s need for military support, recognized as opportunities to be seized. At the time there was, of course, no knowledge of what the consequences might turn out to be. It is only hindsight, for the most part since the late nineteenth century, that has imposed a heavy burden of significance on many of the political developments of this period.

The first major acquisition of Charlemagne’s reign was the kingdom of the Lombards. In answering an appeal for help from the papacy, which had been presenting itself with ever mounting urgency as threatened by the Lombards’ aggres­sive expansion into papal territories, Charlemagne was able to capture the royal city of Pavia after a short siege and be accepted as the Lombards’ ruler in the winter of 773/774.^[1274] By 781 Charlemagne was sufficiently confident of the Franks' hold on northern Italy to establish his four-year-old son Pippin as king in Italy with his own entourage. In 788 Charlemagne annexed Bavaria. Blood ties between the Carolingian family and the Agilolfings, the ruling family of Bavaria, had initially strengthened the latter's regime in the earlier eighth century but were ultimately to prove its downfall.^[1275] Our understanding of Bavaria's position is much distorted by the Franks' excessively biased portrayal of the events,^[1276] but essentially claims were made at a “show trial” in 788 that Duke Tassilo of Bavaria had broken his oaths to both his uncle Pippin III and to his cousin Charlemagne. After being threatened with major aggression, Tassilo's duchy was taken away from him, and he and his family were incarcerated in various West Frankish monasteries far from their own homeland.^[1277]

Campaigns were conducted by Charlemagne and his armies, with the successful creation of two “marches” in eastern Brittany (by 799)^[1278] and in the far south of Gaul and northwest Spain, a region known as Septimania (between 797 and 803).

With hindsight, the only intended Frankish conquest appears to have been the protracted series of campaigns, over more than three decades, against the Saxons. Summer after summer from 772 until 803, the military host was assembled and led against the peoples of Westphalia and then of the regions beyond the Weser and Elbe rivers. Even against the Saxons at the outset, however, Charlemagne may well simply have been dealing with Saxon raids, or mounting preemptive acts of occasional ag­gression. But the campaigns were subsequently presented, by Einhard as well as by later Saxon historians, as a determined conquest of the pagan Saxon people and their conversion to Christianity, which made the Saxons “one people” with the Franks.^[1281]

The series of expeditions against the Saxons, as well as the incidents in rela­tion to Lombards, Basques, Bretons, Danes, Avars, Obodrites, and Wilzi, cannot be simplified as the outcome of aggression or defense, for there does seem to be an ideological element involved as well. As we shall see later in this chapter, the strategy of Carolingian rule included a program of religious reform and the ex­pansion of Christian culture.

Certainly it is in terms of the territory created by Charlemagne that the inherit­ance and succession of subsequent kings is discussed. These kings, moreover, had to be legitimate adult male members of the Carolingian family. In 806, for example, Charlemagne himself made provision for the division of his realm between three of his sons: Charles the Younger, Pippin of Italy, and Louis the Pious, in which Charles was to inherit the greater part, including Saxony, while Pippin was to receive Italy and Bavaria and Louis was to retain the subkingdom of Aquitaine.^[1284] Because Charles and Pippin predeceased their father, all these plans came to naught, and Louis alone succeeded to the kingship and the empire on his father's death in 814. In his turn, Louis the Pious tried to determine the succession in the famous Ordinatio imperii of 817 by dividing his realm between his three sons, Lothar, Louis “the German,” and Pippin of Aquitaine. These plans too were foiled, both by the rivalry between the brothers and by another son, Charles the Bald, born six years after the Ordinatio imperii, to Louis the Pious and his second wife. On Louis's death in 840, these fraternal rivalries came to a head, and the Frankish realm was divided again in 843 at the famous Treaty of Verdun between the surviving sons by Louis's first wife—Lothar and Louis “the German”—and Charles the Bald. All these kings—Charles the Bald ruling the western region, Lothar ruling the “middle kingdom” from Frisia down to Rome, the northern part of which subsequently be­came known as Lotharingia, and Louis “the German” ruling the eastern region and Bavaria—had legitimate male heirs.

Map 17.2. The Division of the Frankish Empire in 843.

Source: McKitterick, 2001, The Short Oxford History of Europe, The Early Middle Ages, p. 286. Copyright: Oxford University Press.