Occasionally I'll run across something while looking for something else, and be quite happy about the detour it takes me on.
The below is sort of one of those things. I was digging around in the files of research for the Alianora Books (500-800 CE) and found some things that more properly belong in the Sass research files (800-1100 CE) ...
While doing said research, I had been having a heck of a time keeping the different 'era' events clearly in my head. What follows is a part of the story of France's history - as told (essentially) in a very 'Sass' kind of way.
It's kind of a long piece, relatively speaking, at 3500 words ... but is still basically only a synopsis. What a busy world we live in, past and present - and future for that matter.
And so ... Sass tells us a little about France ... the time of the story is 879-987 CE ...
Louis
II through Louis V of France
In case there are any conspiracy theory fans out there,
here’s a set of circumstances for your perusal. This bunch of Carlovingian
Kings of France … somebody must have cursed their line …
Louis II (the Stammerer, musta stuttered) reigns only 18
months, and those are filled with internal fighting because his chiefs,
vassals, and an abbot, mainly in Aquitaine (never really took to Frankish rule)
align themselves against the crown – not Louis II himself in particular, mind you
… just The Crown in general.
Plus the Vikings, aka Normans, are back.
Anyway, he gets
sick and dies on his way to try to fix things with Aquitaine.
Leaves two teenagers, he does … kind of reminds me of
Theodosius and HIS two – except that THESE two brothers act together to try to
stop the Vikings (um, Normans) …
The older one, Louis
III, is barely sixteen and the other, Carloman,
is maybe thirteen at the time their father died. There’s also a baby brother
but he doesn’t count, being as he’s the son of Louis II’s second wife (divorced
his first one) and born posthumously to boot. They will refer to him as Charles the Simple.
Anyway, their father Louis
II suddenly takes sick and dies
a year and half into his reign, in 879.
The boys, together – Louis III in the west and Carloman
in the east (I think – if you find it a matter of urgency, look it up), have but
three short years before Carloman’s ruling alone, and he has only two years of
that …
They are opposed from the get-go.
The abbot of St. Denis, with help, tries to get Louis of
Germany onto the throne, to no avail … and said abbot, Gozlin, has to leave the realm.
Then this guy Boson
gets himself declared king of Provence by the bishops and nobles there.
Once these teenaged kings get their crowns firmly on
their heads, the brothers take on the Vikings (Normans) – stop them, they do – but then some who had
hidden themselves sneak up in the night and scare the bejayzuz out of the
victors before taking themselves off to loot Germany for a while.
Sigh.
So.
Louis
III
either falls off his horse or gets sick (like his father?) and dies.
He’s 19.
Carloman goes back to fighting the Normans, who don’t
just go home after he beats them but stick around and raid in smaller bands all
over the place until Carloman opts for buying them off so they’ll leave the
vicinity again, instead of trying to chase them hither, thither, and yon.
Two years after his brother gets dead, Carloman dies in a hunting accident,
either from getting stabbed by a stag or by getting shot with an arrow
allegedly aimed at said stag. He’s 18.
So they’re both gone.
Instead of granting the baby the crown, they give it to Fat Charlie, Emperor of whatever – ah,
Charlemagne's empire – because they think he’ll be a stronger force against the
Normans.
Ha.
That’ll teach them
to think.
Apparently this guy isn’t very nice.
He invites a chief of the Normans to a meeting but, instead
of going to meet him, has him assassinated.
Well now.
This kind of makes the rest of the Normans mad.
They get together the biggest force yet and lay siege to
Paris in 885, bringing their boats and the whole nine yards.
Instead of rushing to the aid of his people, Fat Charlie
dicks around for a year or so in Pavia, wherever that is.
So Paris is on her own and holds out against this big
strong Norman assault for all that time.
When Fat Charlie does get around to showing up he doesn’t
take on the Normans, although he does get as far as Metz where apparently he
just sits around and does not much of anything in particular. Eats, maybe. I
don’t reckon they call him Fat Charlie for no good reason.
Finally the brave Count
Eudes of Paris has just about had it with this whole situation.
The Normans are trying to get past the ramparts six ways
from Tuesday, the moats are filling up with the rotting corpses of French
people, food is running out, and yada yada … enough is enough already.
So Eudes sneaks out of Paris, right?
He sneaks through the enemy camps and goes to Fat Charlie
in Metz to give him what for.
Really, what the heck kind of king sits there and lets
Paris be under seige for a whole dang year without lifting a finger to do
anything about it?!?
Under the impression that said king is actually going to
finally do something, Eudes sneaks back through the enemy camps to Paris.
Unfortunately for him, it seems somebody snitched on him.
They do say that he had to fight his way back into the city and got his sword
all bloody in the process.
And here comes Fat Charlie to the plain of St. Denis.
When he sees what he’d be up against, he pays the Normans
7,000 pounds (weight) of silver, offers them safe passage on the Seine, and
suggests they head for Burgundy.
This they agree to, and aboard their boats they go, to
take the water route (the Seine) past Paris.
Um.
No.
Paris isn’t going to let them through and they shoot the
captain of the first boat that tries it.
So the Normans bodily pick up their boats a couple of
miles outside of Paris and carry them on their backs to a couple of miles on
the other side of Paris … then off
they go to wreak havoc in Burgundy.
Fat Charlie has managed to make everybody mad at him so
he gets deposed and Charlemagne's Empire gets dismantled into eight separate
kingdoms – which was probably just as well since nobody’s getting along with
each other anyhow.
France’s new ruler is guess who.
Eudes of Paris.
They pass over little Charles the Simple again. I bet
that made his mother kind of mad but who knows – maybe she was relieved, all
things considered. But ... for all we know she had a hand in the untimely deaths of her
stepsons … paving the way for little Charles, you know ...
Anyway, Eudes takes it to the Normans in no uncertain
terms and kicks their backsides from hell to breakfast, only to have more of them show up and pick up where
the others left off in totally wrecking everything they can get their hands on.
He finally has to resort to paying them off, which kind
of gets them off his back but makes
the nobles and such pretty mad because they’re the ones who are getting stuck
with all the bills.
So they up and make little Charlie king after all.
Luckily for all involved, the responsibilities are shared
by Eudes (whew!).
When Eudes dies in 898 he tells everyone to go with
Charles as king and gets his own house off the hook of inheriting the curse of
the throne of France. Okay, I made that last bit up, but apparently he did tell
them that Charles was sole monarch.
And so things go from bad to worse. The whole shooting
match is now in the hands of the nobles and etc. Nobody is even bothering to
fight or buy off the Normans any more and the people are paying through the
teeth just to live.
Things get so bad that the Normans don’t even have
anything left to ravage.
So they settle themselves down and become colonists
instead of raiders – new towns and such come into being where the old ones have
long since become barren.
And here comes good old Rollo again. This is the guy that had been bribed by Charles the
Bald in 876, and then was in on the siege of Paris.
Now he goes about burning the monastery of St. Martin of
Tours, sacking Bourges, and marching into Paris.
So Charles the Simple hands over his daughter Gisele, gives Rollo rank, and gives him
the whole province of Maritime Neustria from the sea to the river Epte – the
Duchy of Normandy.
And Rollo is in.
He’s supposed, as a gesture of submission, to kiss the
foot of Charles.
*snicker*
He doesn’t.
Neither does the guy who’s supposed to step up to the
plate and do it for him.
Oh, he goes up to the throne all right.
But instead of stooping, he raises said foot of
said king up and uses it to topple the king from off of his throne.
Bet that got a few Norman laughs and a few French growls.
Ah no, they took it in silence I understand. Fancy that.
Rollo is duly baptized as part of the deal, with Eudes’ brother Robert Duke of France
standing as his sponsor.
The old warrior marries Gisele and turns his new lands –
Normandy – into something wondrous, apparently.
Well, who was going to argue with him about how he wanted
to do anything? Who would even want to try to stand against him? His own people
were on the same page as him, and anyone who didn’t like it was free to leave
his realm, or die I guess. All things considered, he had a darned free rein and
used it quite very well thank you very much.
Kind of reminds me of Alaric some, only with a really
deep and wide mean streak. I betcha Rollo
never had a sword whose name was Kindness. They both (bottom line) wanted
homelands for their people. Alaric asked time and again and his people paid
with their blood fighting for someone else’s gain, trying to ‘earn’ a home …
they ended up in Aquitaine by fighting to protect it. But that’s a whole
different Story, that is.
Back to topic.
Once Rollo has a homeland for his people, he and they
settle down and create peace for themselves – the hard way, they get that
peace; but I would bet they think it worth the price.
At the above site on page 284 it says:
“… according to Oderic Vital, ‘a child might have
traversed his domains, with a purse of gold in his hand, without fear of
molestation.’”
The same source says that Rollo once hung a pair of
golden bracelets on the limb of a tree and they stayed right there for a good
two years without anyone touching them. The rebuttable presumption is that he
eventually went hunting in that same area and took them down his own self.
Since there’s nobody to rebut said presumption we’ll just go with that.
Charles the Simple, meanwhile, is proving his simplicity.
His best friend Haganon
seems to be calling the shots – and he overshoots himself, or shoots himself in
the foot, when he doesn’t let Henry Duke
of Saxony and Robert Duke of France in
to see the king when they want to tell him about some crappy stuff going on out
there in the kingdom.
Makes them mad, that does.
In 920 everyone gets together, meet up with Charles, and
one and all they break their ‘reeds or wands of office’ and throw them at his
feet.
Charles the Simple is deposed.
Robert Duke of France becomes king by acclamation. Or
election. Take your pick. He gets to sit on the throne and wear the crown.
Charles goes away to Lorraine and Robert follows him for
no real good reason that anyone can figure out. Maybe he just wants to see
where Charles is going.
Dear Haganon hires himself a Norman army and surprise
surprise there’s a fight.
King Robert, an old guy by this time, grabs his own
banner and charges hellbent-for-leather at the banner of Charles. Charles warns
his standard-bearer in time and Robert's attack ends with his own head at
his own feet. So to speak.
Howsomever, Robert's son Hugues goes on to win the day and Charles goes on his way to
Germany to see if Henry of Saxony
might have mercy on him.
Now Hugues isn’t all that interested in wearing any old crown,
bless his heart, and asks his sister Emma
what to do. Being as she’s married to the Duke
of Burgundy (Raoul) the crown goes to Raoul by order of Hugues.
Sigh.
No, that’s not the end of the story.
Rollo, just to stir the pot and rile things up, now that
the whole mess is settled, declares himself for guess who –
That’s right.
Charles the Simple.
He says it’s because that’s the king he has sworn
allegiance to, and maybe he wasn’t really
lying about that.
Hindsight being 20/20 and everything being a matter of
perspective, consider how things might have evolved if France had put Rollo in
charge of the whole shebang instead of just giving him Normandy.
Ah.
You can’t expect people to go that far, given the history Rollo had already inflicted on them.
At any rate, nobody agrees with Rollo, not that I believe
he really expected them to.
Charles becomes the prisoner of Herbert Count of Vermandois by devious means; Herbert trots him out
once in a while when he wants something from king Raoul, but he never gets set
free. If they spoiled him, as they well might have even though he was a
prisoner, he might not have minded it too much. At least he was safe.
Meanwhile, Charles’ wife Elgiva takes their three year old son Louis to her brother Athelstan of England and Louis does
indeed end up on the throne down the road a piece.
Rollo himself dies at a ripe old age a little while after
Charles is taken captive. His son William
Longsword takes over …
King Raoul dies in 936 without a son so poor Hugues again has to decide who to put on the
throne.
This time he gives it to the logical recipient, Louis IV, son of the now-dead Charles
the Simple.
By now Louis IV is a whopping sixteen years old and
Hugues decides he wants Burgundy.
Good grief.
Burgundy Hugues cannot have.
So he decides he wants Laon – which is really all that
Louis IV has. So he says no and they
have a fight over it. Emperor Otho
saves Louis IV’s bacon but Hugues is pretty darned powerful …
So Louis IV goes to Aquitaine and gets a lot of sympathy
but not much else.
Everyone’s sick and tired of all the fighting. They just
want their lives back – like the Normans up in Normandy, they want their lands
and their homes to be safely their own again, productive and yada yada ...
Speaking of the Normans … William Longsword has gotten
himself assassinated by Arnoul the Count
of Flanders in retaliation for William helping out an enemy of said Count.
Now Richard,
William’s son, is only ten years old and illegitimate to boot.
Louis IV heads for Normandy to accept the homage of
Richard, which is duly performed, assigns himself Richard's guardian, and hies
him off to Laon (castle of the king, Louis’ home).
And keeps him there.
Yep.
And they called his father simple.
Richard’s governor (prior teacher?) Osmond sneaks into the castle disguised as a groom for the horses,
gets Richard the Fearless bundled into a bunch of hay, and carries him over his
shoulder out of the castle grounds to a waiting conveyance and they get the
heck out of there and back to Normandy.
So what does Louis IV do but enlist the help of Hugues
Duke of France of all people – they’re going to get rid of this Richard kid and
split Normandy between the two of them.
I tell ya. The father has nothing on the son when it
comes to simple-mindedness.
They get to Normandy and everyone just leaves them alone
(which really ought to have told
them something, right?). Louis picks
a fight with Hugues and sends him packing back to Paris.
Ditto above statement.
We’re up to 945 now, in case you were wondering.
Anyway, a honking big bunch of Danes come on down to
Normandy, into all that nice quiet peace-loving ‘innocence’, to help out (they owed Richard’s
father William a favor - and probably really just wanted the fun of the fight)
and kick the everlivin’ daylights out of Louis IV. He runs for it but gets himself
captured.
Although it goes against his grain, Hugues gets together
the ransom to free Louis IV from captivity in Rouen – and then takes him
prisoner his own self.
Poor guy.
Now he’s got to sign Laon over to Hugues after all in
order to get his freedom. So he’s got no power, no land, nothing at all – and
goes a-wandering destitute among his people, a sorrowful sight …
Uffda.
Louis IV goes to his brother-in-law Emperor Otho for help
but the help isn’t really all that helpful. Otho is also brother-in-law to
Hugues, you see. Being between fighting brothers-in-law is no doubt not a safe
place for anybody, no matter what title you carry.
Finally the Pope has to decide, and even then Hugues is
darned attitudinal, sneering at the threat of excommunication and demanding
this that and the other thing.
And he started out being such a nice guy.
Geez.
Anyway, Laon goes back to Louis IV but Hugues gets to
keep all the power.
Heck of a deal, that.
In 954, four years after all this, Louis IV dies when his horse falls while chasing a wolf.
Really.
Those French kings ought to just stay the heck off of
horses.
And here we go again.
Louis IV’s son Lothaire
is only thirteen when his father dies.
Hugues, true to his not-so-nice-guy nature, demands and
gets Aquitaine, just like he tried to get Burgundy.
Same results.
William
of Aquitaine is having none of that.
And the fight is on for a couple of years – until by the
grace of the Almighty and to the relief of all (except presumably Hugues himself)
the guy finally bites the dust.
Well now.
We’ve got fifteen year old Lothaire on the one hand and
his ten year old first cousin Hugh Capet
on the other. Their mothers are full sisters – and I can’t even begin to imagine
what in the world their lives had to have been like.
These sisters, Gerberge
and Hedwige, have some powerful brothers: Otho Emperor of Charlemagne's
territory, and Bruno Duke of Lorraine
and Archbishop of Cologne.
With their respective husbands at long last out of their
hair, the sisters get together with their brothers and the family makes a
decision.
The boys Lothaire and Hugh are going to be raised
together from here on out – and that’s all there is to it. Enough is enough of
the bickering and fighting already.
And guess what.
It works.
The two of them have each other’s backs for keeps.
*chuckle*
Emperor Otho dies, right? And his son Otho II takes over in Lorraine, first
cousin to these two.
They come to ‘take’ him just as he’s sitting down for a
nice fancy feast – he gets away, leaving his meal for his cousins to thoroughly
enjoy.
Vowing vengeance, Otho II tells his cousins that he’s
going to ‘sing Alleluia at the walls of Paris like it’s never been heard
before’ or some such …
And he does.
Scares the livers out of everyone when his army shows up
at Paris fully outfitted for serious battle.
And they do indeed sing :
The Canticle of the Martyrs –
Alleluia! And Te Martyrum candidatus Laudat exercitus Domine! – which
probably scares everyone even more.
Then they turn around to march home, carrying the booty
they’ve collected along the way …
Mm-hmmm …
They get caught in a river flood and lose all that booty,
plus cousin Lothaire takes out their rear guard for good measure.
So it isn’t all
just fun and games.
Even so, there doesn’t seem to be much angst among the
cousins, to be honest, relatively speaking, for the time.
On the other hand, Lothaire
gets dead allegedly by poison at the hand of his wife Emma in March of 986. Not the same Emma that Hugues asked
for advice – for heaven’s sake that was how many generations ago now?
Lothaire’s son Louis
V is more than a little upset with his mother and her (presumed) lover Adalberon Bishop of Laon. He threatens them but probably doesn’t follow
through; reigns for fourteen months only before he too dies of poison at the
hand of his wife Blanche, who wants (and gets) Uncle Hugh Capet as her
new husband … whether the story is true, we don’t know; whether Hugh has any
knowledge or participation, we also don’t know.
And
with Louis V ends the line of what is known as the Carlovingian race of the kings of France, in the merry
merry month of May in 987.
Which
is as good a good place as any to end this little story methinks.
