September 2, 2025 • 15 mins
In 395 A.D., the last emperor of the undivided Roman Empire, Theodosius, passed away, leaving his inept son, Honorius, to govern the western half. Honorius relied heavily on the formidable general Stilicho to fend off the Visigoths led by the relentless Alaric. However, when palace intrigues led to Stilichos execution, Alaric seized the moment, culminating in the sack of Rome in 410 A.D. This marked the dawn of an era characterized by chaotic leadership, social upheaval, and barbarian invasions that once bore the ominous label of the Dark Ages. Amidst this turmoil, the Franks rose to prominence, laying the groundwork for the Papacys temporal power. Charlemagne later unified a vast empire and sparked a revival of learning, but his reigns final years were marred by the terrifying incursions of the Vikings, who navigated their shallow-draft vessels through France‚s rivers and established a foothold across England. - Summary by Pamela Nagami, M.D.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section eighteen of the Beginning of the Middle Ages by
Richard William Church. This librovox recording is in the public
domain recording by Pamela and Nagami, Chapter eight The Carolingians
successors of Charles, Part two. Speaking roughly, we may say
(00:20):
that by the Treaty of Verdont in eight forty three,
and by the confirmation of it at Tillon Vie in
eight forty four and Miuzon in eight forty seven, Louis
the German took the Eastern and German Franks, and Charles
the Bald the Western and Latinized Franks. Lo Tar, besides
(00:41):
the imperial dignity and whatever claims went with it, had
the middle portion of the frank Kingdom between the Rhine
eastwards the Schelt Meuse and Rohane westwards, with Italy the
emperor's special share the realm of Lotar. The Emperor was,
says Palgrave, built upon Italy. The two imperial residences Roman Achen,
(01:05):
the centers of the two great sis Alpine and trans
Alpine crown lands, were conjoined by an unbroken and continuous territory,
including all varieties of soil, climate and production. The wine
and oil of the South the harvests and pastures of
the north once and once only again. After the disruption
(01:28):
of Verdont. The three realms were for a short time
under one Emperor, Charles the Fat eight eighty four to
eight eighty seven, but his hand was too feeble to
hold them. The inherent tendencies to separate national life were irresistible.
The new world grew too fast and became too large
(01:50):
for any constitutional authority of those days to manage, and
for anything but the rarest personal qualities to keep together.
Charles the Its design was more than once attempted, but
was never again accomplished. The history of modern Europe, says
Sir F. Palgrave, is an exposition of the Treaty of Verdant.
(02:13):
With the breaking up of the West into these great
national divisions occasioned by the family feuds of the Carolingians,
the interest of their history is extinguished. For a time
they continued at the head of these divisions. They gave
their names to some of them. We hear of Carlingia
and more enduring Low Taringia, now narrowed down to loth
(02:37):
ring and or Lorraine. Each member of the family was
forever endeavoring for his own advantage to undo the partition
of Verdant in whole or in part. But to this
their efforts were confined. The political and administrative aims of
the founders of their house of Pippin and Charles disappear.
(02:59):
The legislative record, the capitularies, so full under Charles the
Great and Louis the Pious, thins out with a few
important documents under Charles the Bald, and after him comes
to an end, leaving less trace than the legislation of
the later Merovingians. Their history becomes a dizzy and unintelligible
(03:21):
spectacle of monotonous confusion, a scene of unrestrained treachery, of
insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal
to his father. No brother can trust his brother, No
uncle spares his nephews. Members of the same family, their
(03:42):
greedy envy of each other's possessions kept them in an
unvarying round of attempts at unscrupulous spoliation, successful or unsuccessful.
There were rapid alternations of fortune, rapid changing of sides.
There was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood and crime.
(04:03):
But nothing, not even the barbarians of the north and east,
desolating their cities and provinces, could interrupt the infatuated passion
to overreach and encroach. While the Northmen were piercing to
the heart of Noistria by the sin, the lwar and
the garun. Charles the Bald, unable with his utmost efforts
(04:25):
to check them, never could resist the temptation when it
offered to filch a province from a neighboring kinsman, and he,
in like manner, when his hands were full, became the
natural victim of their greediness. Yet the men themselves, some
of them at least, such as Louis the German, and
even Charles the Bald, were of a higher stamp than
(04:47):
the Meravingians. And to the last we find among them
men of spirit and vigor, capable of striking a heavy
blow and winning a success over a powerful opponent. But
their energy d he was fitful and ill applied. They
had lost sight of all high aims and large purposes.
The times were against them and were too strong for them,
(05:10):
and there were too many of them. Their rival pretensions
were extravagant and irreconcilable. The dream of reuniting their great
ancestors empire was ever before their eyes, and their capacity
never reached to this. They were but able to balance
and check one another, and thus their history became a
(05:30):
repetition of the disorder and dislocations of the Merovingian times.
Pretenders struck in carving out new kingdoms or dukedoms from
the older divisions, the imperial and then the kingly title,
and at last the family itself dies out in one
line after another. First in that of the Emperor lo
(05:52):
Tar Louis the Second, who died in age seventy five,
next in that of Louis the German Louis the Child,
who died in nine to eleven, and last in that
of Charles the Bald Louis the Lazy, who died in
nine eighty seven. And each line ends in some feeble
representative who passes away unhonoured, perhaps deposed and imprisoned. The family,
(06:17):
more numerous than the Maravingians, confined themselves, like the Marravingians,
to but few names. In the House of Clovis, almost
everyone was a Clovis, a Clotar, a Theodoric, a Childebert,
a Chilperic, a Zigibert or Dagobert. In the House of Pippin.
Almost everyone was a Pippin or Charles or Carlomann, or
(06:41):
with the altered or modernized forms of the older names,
a Ludwig, Louis or a Lotar, But after the glory
of their founder had departed, history can only distinguished them
at last by some scornful nickname Charles the Fat, Charles
the Simple, Louis the stammerer, Louis the child, Louis the
(07:03):
lazy that do nothing. Of the three sons who survived,
Louis the pious Lotar, the Emperor died first in eight
fifty five, and his family was extinguished within the twenty
years that his two brothers outlived him. His kingdom was
divided between three sons, Louis the Second, the Emperor, lo Tar,
(07:25):
and Charles. The three brothers quarreled among themselves and were
assailed by their uncles. They all died without male heirs,
the elder, the Emperor, Louis the second, being the survivor,
and at each death, whether of brothers or nephews, and
whether children were left or not, the moment was seized
by the others to snatch or divide the vacant share,
(07:49):
which usually had been contested in life, the middle portion
of the frank Dominion, to the northern part of which
along the course of the Mius and the Moselle as
far as the sh the second Lotar gave the name
of Lotaringia, that middle kingdom, which the Great Charles supposed
could arbitrate between east and West, and the idea of which,
(08:12):
after repeated Vain attempts, was revived again in Vain in
the fifteenth century by the French House of Burgundy was
immediately on Lotar's death torn into by his uncles Louis
the German and Charles the Bald in eight seventy At
the death of Louis the Second, the Emperor in eight
seventy five, Charles the Bald succeeded in anticipating Louis the
(08:36):
German and seized what was specially the imperial portion Italy,
gaining from Pope John the Eighth the Imperial crown in
eight seventy five, which he received, like his great namesake,
on Christmas Day at Saint Peter's, but he wore it
only for a short time. Three successive years eight seventy
(08:57):
five to eight seventy seven saw the extinction of the
line of the first lo Tar and the death of
his two brothers, Louis in eight seventy six and Charles
in eight seventy seven, one of the main lines of
the Carolingian stock was gone. Two were left. The house
of Louis. The German, who is said to have been
the wisest and most just of the brothers, ruled at
(09:20):
last over all the German lands to the eastward of
an irregular boundary line drawn from the mouth of the
Shell to the Jurras, according to the custom of his race.
He had to encounter the rebellions of his three sons,
who had been invested with the government of different parts
of his kingdom, but he was able to hold his
own against them. The survivor of them, Charles the Fat,
(09:44):
for a moment raised the hopes of his subjects. For
a brief interval he was emperor and united under his
rule all the realms of Charles the Great, But the
promise of reviving power was a treacherous one. Health and
v bigger gave way before the difficulties of the times
and the intrigues of the younger Kinsman. Eleven years after
(10:07):
his father's death, he was deposed in eight eighty seven,
and he died in prison in the monastery of Reichenau
in an island of the Lake of Constance, in eight
eighty eight. The line of Louis the German was continued
only by an illegitimate nephew, Arnulf, Duke of Carinthia, who
took from his uncle Charles both the kingdom of Germany
(10:29):
and the imperial dignity, and it finally died out in
Arnulf's feeble son, Louis the Child eight ninety nine to
nine eleven. Thus, within a century from the death of
Charles the Great, one main branch alone survived of his house,
the line of Charles the Bald among the Western Francs
(10:50):
in Gaul. It dragged out a longer existence, but with
no greater glory than the two which had failed. Charles,
his father's youngest son and favorite son by his second
marriage with the ambitious Velph Princess Judith, was early taught
not to trust even his brothers. He had to win
his way through great difficulties to the kingdom, which at
(11:12):
last he secured. He was not without some of his
famous namesake's gifts. He inherited Charles's literary tastes, perhaps some
of his ideas of law and government, but all high
political aims were subordinated to his restless and unscrupulous eagerness
to enlarge his borders, while he could not save them
(11:34):
from the ravages of the Northmen. His reign was spent
in trying to add to dominions which he could not govern.
Like Charles the Fat after him, he seemed for a
moment to have succeeded, only to prove the impossibility of success.
For two years he bore, eight seventy five to eight
(11:55):
seventy seven, amid humiliation and disaster, the coveted name Emperor,
but he left no stronger or more fortunate posterity than
his brothers. His son Louis the Stammerer, his successor in Gaul,
died two years after him in eight seventy nine. The
two elder sons of this Louis saw their Western realm
(12:18):
broken up and the new kingdom created in Burgundy and
Provence in eight seventy nine by a stranger Boso, who
had married a Carolingian princess. They both of them passed
away amid disaster and ill fortune. Within seven years from
their grandfather's death. The Kingdom of the West Franks was
for a moment transferred to the German Charles the Fat,
(12:41):
and after his death, the claims of their younger brother,
the posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer, Charles named the Simple,
were set aside by a powerful party among the Franks
in favor of a new man. This was the deliverer
of Paris from the Northman, Count Odo or Ud, the
son of a warrior of unknown origin Robert the Strong,
(13:05):
the ancestor of the line of Cape. On the death
of Odo, Charles was again acknowledged in eight ninety nine,
but the allegiance of the Franks to the Carolingian house
was shaken, and the family and realm of Charles the
Bald had to bear the brunt of the Great Revolution
in Western Europe, caused by the intrusion of a new
(13:26):
barbarian element into the civilization of Charles the Great. The
date of the Treaty of Verdun eight forty three marks
also the beginning of a series of events only second
in importance to the Empire of Charles the Great, and
of lasting influence not only on the history of Gaul
and the Franks, but on the history of Europe and
(13:48):
the world. This was the second stage of Barbarian invasions,
the assaults and settlements of the Norsemen, or as we
call them in England, the Danes, which were coincident with
the breakup of Charles's Empire. They were not the only
barbarian invasions of the time. On the Mediterranean coasts, the
(14:09):
Saracens were and long continued to be threatening and sometimes dangerous.
On the Eastern border, the Heathen Saxons, the more numerous
Slav tribes, with some tribes of the Turanian or Turkish stock,
had long been formidable. The great military achievement of Charles
the Great had been to subdue them. The German tribes
(14:32):
had been more or less Christianized and assimilated to their
more civilized frank brethren. The Slavs long continued to be
refractory and troublesome, and the eruptions of the Tartar, Madiars
or Hungarians brought back the terror of Attila's Huns even
in the heart of Gaul and Italy. But the Eastern Barbarians,
(14:54):
though causing terrible misery and loss, and long defying the
efforts of the Carolingians kings to bridle them, never accomplished
a settlement in the west. They were kept within their
own borders, and the vast plains north and south of
the Danube were finally occupied by the Hungarian and slav populations,
which were definitely to inherit them. End of Section eighteen
Section eighteen of the Beginning of the Middle Ages by
Richard William Church. This librovox recording is in the public
domain recording by Pamela and Nagami, Chapter eight The Carolingians
successors of Charles, Part two. Speaking roughly, we may say
(00:20):
that by the Treaty of Verdont in eight forty three,
and by the confirmation of it at Tillon Vie in
eight forty four and Miuzon in eight forty seven, Louis
the German took the Eastern and German Franks, and Charles
the Bald the Western and Latinized Franks. Lo Tar, besides
(00:41):
the imperial dignity and whatever claims went with it, had
the middle portion of the frank Kingdom between the Rhine
eastwards the Schelt Meuse and Rohane westwards, with Italy the
emperor's special share the realm of Lotar. The Emperor was,
says Palgrave, built upon Italy. The two imperial residences Roman Achen,
(01:05):
the centers of the two great sis Alpine and trans
Alpine crown lands, were conjoined by an unbroken and continuous territory,
including all varieties of soil, climate and production. The wine
and oil of the South the harvests and pastures of
the north once and once only again. After the disruption
(01:28):
of Verdont. The three realms were for a short time
under one Emperor, Charles the Fat eight eighty four to
eight eighty seven, but his hand was too feeble to
hold them. The inherent tendencies to separate national life were irresistible.
The new world grew too fast and became too large
(01:50):
for any constitutional authority of those days to manage, and
for anything but the rarest personal qualities to keep together.
Charles the Its design was more than once attempted, but
was never again accomplished. The history of modern Europe, says
Sir F. Palgrave, is an exposition of the Treaty of Verdant.
(02:13):
With the breaking up of the West into these great
national divisions occasioned by the family feuds of the Carolingians,
the interest of their history is extinguished. For a time
they continued at the head of these divisions. They gave
their names to some of them. We hear of Carlingia
and more enduring Low Taringia, now narrowed down to loth
(02:37):
ring and or Lorraine. Each member of the family was
forever endeavoring for his own advantage to undo the partition
of Verdant in whole or in part. But to this
their efforts were confined. The political and administrative aims of
the founders of their house of Pippin and Charles disappear.
(02:59):
The legislative record, the capitularies, so full under Charles the
Great and Louis the Pious, thins out with a few
important documents under Charles the Bald, and after him comes
to an end, leaving less trace than the legislation of
the later Merovingians. Their history becomes a dizzy and unintelligible
(03:21):
spectacle of monotonous confusion, a scene of unrestrained treachery, of
insatiable and blind rapacity. No son is obedient or loyal
to his father. No brother can trust his brother, No
uncle spares his nephews. Members of the same family, their
(03:42):
greedy envy of each other's possessions kept them in an
unvarying round of attempts at unscrupulous spoliation, successful or unsuccessful.
There were rapid alternations of fortune, rapid changing of sides.
There was universal distrust and universal reliance on falsehood and crime.
(04:03):
But nothing, not even the barbarians of the north and east,
desolating their cities and provinces, could interrupt the infatuated passion
to overreach and encroach. While the Northmen were piercing to
the heart of Noistria by the sin, the lwar and
the garun. Charles the Bald, unable with his utmost efforts
(04:25):
to check them, never could resist the temptation when it
offered to filch a province from a neighboring kinsman, and he,
in like manner, when his hands were full, became the
natural victim of their greediness. Yet the men themselves, some
of them at least, such as Louis the German, and
even Charles the Bald, were of a higher stamp than
(04:47):
the Meravingians. And to the last we find among them
men of spirit and vigor, capable of striking a heavy
blow and winning a success over a powerful opponent. But
their energy d he was fitful and ill applied. They
had lost sight of all high aims and large purposes.
The times were against them and were too strong for them,
(05:10):
and there were too many of them. Their rival pretensions
were extravagant and irreconcilable. The dream of reuniting their great
ancestors empire was ever before their eyes, and their capacity
never reached to this. They were but able to balance
and check one another, and thus their history became a
(05:30):
repetition of the disorder and dislocations of the Merovingian times.
Pretenders struck in carving out new kingdoms or dukedoms from
the older divisions, the imperial and then the kingly title,
and at last the family itself dies out in one
line after another. First in that of the Emperor lo
(05:52):
Tar Louis the Second, who died in age seventy five,
next in that of Louis the German Louis the Child,
who died in nine to eleven, and last in that
of Charles the Bald Louis the Lazy, who died in
nine eighty seven. And each line ends in some feeble
representative who passes away unhonoured, perhaps deposed and imprisoned. The family,
(06:17):
more numerous than the Maravingians, confined themselves, like the Marravingians,
to but few names. In the House of Clovis, almost
everyone was a Clovis, a Clotar, a Theodoric, a Childebert,
a Chilperic, a Zigibert or Dagobert. In the House of Pippin.
Almost everyone was a Pippin or Charles or Carlomann, or
(06:41):
with the altered or modernized forms of the older names,
a Ludwig, Louis or a Lotar, But after the glory
of their founder had departed, history can only distinguished them
at last by some scornful nickname Charles the Fat, Charles
the Simple, Louis the stammerer, Louis the child, Louis the
(07:03):
lazy that do nothing. Of the three sons who survived,
Louis the pious Lotar, the Emperor died first in eight
fifty five, and his family was extinguished within the twenty
years that his two brothers outlived him. His kingdom was
divided between three sons, Louis the Second, the Emperor, lo Tar,
(07:25):
and Charles. The three brothers quarreled among themselves and were
assailed by their uncles. They all died without male heirs,
the elder, the Emperor, Louis the second, being the survivor,
and at each death, whether of brothers or nephews, and
whether children were left or not, the moment was seized
by the others to snatch or divide the vacant share,
(07:49):
which usually had been contested in life, the middle portion
of the frank Dominion, to the northern part of which
along the course of the Mius and the Moselle as
far as the sh the second Lotar gave the name
of Lotaringia, that middle kingdom, which the Great Charles supposed
could arbitrate between east and West, and the idea of which,
(08:12):
after repeated Vain attempts, was revived again in Vain in
the fifteenth century by the French House of Burgundy was
immediately on Lotar's death torn into by his uncles Louis
the German and Charles the Bald in eight seventy At
the death of Louis the Second, the Emperor in eight
seventy five, Charles the Bald succeeded in anticipating Louis the
(08:36):
German and seized what was specially the imperial portion Italy,
gaining from Pope John the Eighth the Imperial crown in
eight seventy five, which he received, like his great namesake,
on Christmas Day at Saint Peter's, but he wore it
only for a short time. Three successive years eight seventy
(08:57):
five to eight seventy seven saw the extinction of the
line of the first lo Tar and the death of
his two brothers, Louis in eight seventy six and Charles
in eight seventy seven, one of the main lines of
the Carolingian stock was gone. Two were left. The house
of Louis. The German, who is said to have been
the wisest and most just of the brothers, ruled at
(09:20):
last over all the German lands to the eastward of
an irregular boundary line drawn from the mouth of the
Shell to the Jurras, according to the custom of his race.
He had to encounter the rebellions of his three sons,
who had been invested with the government of different parts
of his kingdom, but he was able to hold his
own against them. The survivor of them, Charles the Fat,
(09:44):
for a moment raised the hopes of his subjects. For
a brief interval he was emperor and united under his
rule all the realms of Charles the Great, But the
promise of reviving power was a treacherous one. Health and
v bigger gave way before the difficulties of the times
and the intrigues of the younger Kinsman. Eleven years after
(10:07):
his father's death, he was deposed in eight eighty seven,
and he died in prison in the monastery of Reichenau
in an island of the Lake of Constance, in eight
eighty eight. The line of Louis the German was continued
only by an illegitimate nephew, Arnulf, Duke of Carinthia, who
took from his uncle Charles both the kingdom of Germany
(10:29):
and the imperial dignity, and it finally died out in
Arnulf's feeble son, Louis the Child eight ninety nine to
nine eleven. Thus, within a century from the death of
Charles the Great, one main branch alone survived of his house,
the line of Charles the Bald among the Western Francs
(10:50):
in Gaul. It dragged out a longer existence, but with
no greater glory than the two which had failed. Charles,
his father's youngest son and favorite son by his second
marriage with the ambitious Velph Princess Judith, was early taught
not to trust even his brothers. He had to win
his way through great difficulties to the kingdom, which at
(11:12):
last he secured. He was not without some of his
famous namesake's gifts. He inherited Charles's literary tastes, perhaps some
of his ideas of law and government, but all high
political aims were subordinated to his restless and unscrupulous eagerness
to enlarge his borders, while he could not save them
(11:34):
from the ravages of the Northmen. His reign was spent
in trying to add to dominions which he could not govern.
Like Charles the Fat after him, he seemed for a
moment to have succeeded, only to prove the impossibility of success.
For two years he bore, eight seventy five to eight
(11:55):
seventy seven, amid humiliation and disaster, the coveted name Emperor,
but he left no stronger or more fortunate posterity than
his brothers. His son Louis the Stammerer, his successor in Gaul,
died two years after him in eight seventy nine. The
two elder sons of this Louis saw their Western realm
(12:18):
broken up and the new kingdom created in Burgundy and
Provence in eight seventy nine by a stranger Boso, who
had married a Carolingian princess. They both of them passed
away amid disaster and ill fortune. Within seven years from
their grandfather's death. The Kingdom of the West Franks was
for a moment transferred to the German Charles the Fat,
(12:41):
and after his death, the claims of their younger brother,
the posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer, Charles named the Simple,
were set aside by a powerful party among the Franks
in favor of a new man. This was the deliverer
of Paris from the Northman, Count Odo or Ud, the
son of a warrior of unknown origin Robert the Strong,
(13:05):
the ancestor of the line of Cape. On the death
of Odo, Charles was again acknowledged in eight ninety nine,
but the allegiance of the Franks to the Carolingian house
was shaken, and the family and realm of Charles the
Bald had to bear the brunt of the Great Revolution
in Western Europe, caused by the intrusion of a new
(13:26):
barbarian element into the civilization of Charles the Great. The
date of the Treaty of Verdun eight forty three marks
also the beginning of a series of events only second
in importance to the Empire of Charles the Great, and
of lasting influence not only on the history of Gaul
and the Franks, but on the history of Europe and
(13:48):
the world. This was the second stage of Barbarian invasions,
the assaults and settlements of the Norsemen, or as we
call them in England, the Danes, which were coincident with
the breakup of Charles's Empire. They were not the only
barbarian invasions of the time. On the Mediterranean coasts, the
(14:09):
Saracens were and long continued to be threatening and sometimes dangerous.
On the Eastern border, the Heathen Saxons, the more numerous
Slav tribes, with some tribes of the Turanian or Turkish stock,
had long been formidable. The great military achievement of Charles
the Great had been to subdue them. The German tribes
(14:32):
had been more or less Christianized and assimilated to their
more civilized frank brethren. The Slavs long continued to be
refractory and troublesome, and the eruptions of the Tartar, Madiars
or Hungarians brought back the terror of Attila's Huns even
in the heart of Gaul and Italy. But the Eastern Barbarians,
(14:54):
though causing terrible misery and loss, and long defying the
efforts of the Carolingians kings to bridle them, never accomplished
a settlement in the west. They were kept within their
own borders, and the vast plains north and south of
the Danube were finally occupied by the Hungarian and slav populations,
which were definitely to inherit them. End of Section eighteen
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