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Unraveling the Middle Ages: Charlemagne's Legacy and the Rise of Medieval Europe

• Michele McAloon

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Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michele McAloon. You can find out more about me at bookcluescom or on X at MicheleMcAloon1, on Blue Sky MicheleMcAloon1, or True Social MicheleMcAloon1. Hopefully you noticed a theme there. Hope you enjoy the show. Thank you. Okay, folks, let's forget Game of Thrones. We've got an even better book and better story with our two authors today. Today we are going to talk about Charlemagne and the history of Charlemagne and the Caroliginian Empire in a book called Oathbreakers, and it's about the war of brothers that shattered an empire and made medieval Europe, and it's written by Professors Matthew Gabriel and David Perry. They have done a writing project together and right now we are speaking with Matthew Gabriel. He's a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech. His research generally has been on religion and violence, nostalgia and apocalypse and how people tell stories about the past. I bet you are fun at a dinner party. You know that.

Matthew Gabriel:

Oh yeah, no people can't wait to have me over, that's right.

Michele McAloon:

Talk about good conversation over and yeah, that's right, talk about good conversation and we'll also, hopefully his writing partner, professor David Perry, a journalist, a medieval historian and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. Hopefully he'll be joining us in the interview, and this is their second book that they have written together. Their first book was the Bright Ages, right, the story of what?

Matthew Gabriel:

is that.

Michele McAloon:

Professor Gabriel.

Matthew Gabriel:

So our first book was called the Bright Ages A New History of Medieval Europe, and we were just you know, we're both medievalists by training, we both have PhDs in medieval history, and we were just a little bit dissatisfied with kind of the general histories of the period that we saw in English language, especially in a public-facing venue, a lot of the ones that people may know Barbara Tuchman, william Manchester. They're very old and we have actually learned quite a bit about the Middle Ages since those were written in the 1960s. And so we decided that we wanted to try to update it and so we tried in that book to kind of tell interesting, very human stories about the past. The moniker the Dark Ages, which people kind of have about this period it comes from the idea that this is an unknowable period, that we don't have sources and that's simply not true. And then this current book, oathbreakers, we decided to tell one of those stories in much greater depth.

Michele McAloon:

And that is the story of Charlemagne, the years that we're talking about. It's really about mid-8th century to mid-9th century that you're talking about, correct?

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, no, absolutely, I think we kind of spin out, kind of do concentric circles around a central focus. I think we kind of spin out, kind of do concentric circles around a central focus. The kind of crux of the story is this one battle, this one day really kind of the morning of Saturday June the 25th of 841, in which this battle of Fontenoy, in which this bloody civil war between brothers literally between brothers erupts in what's now France, and then kind of back up to talk about what are the generational kind of reasons that we got to this, and then kind of back up to talk about what are the generational kind of reasons that we got to this and then kind of what happens after that.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, let's start at the very beginning, because we're going to talk about Charlemagne, and Charlemagne was a Franc or a Frank. Who were the Franks or who are they?

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, the Franks are really interesting people, so we know about them from Roman sources, you know, since kind of the late part of the empire.

Matthew Gabriel:

They're one of these groups of Germanic peoples that had lived on the east side of the Rhine but then, as opposed to some of the other Germanic peoples, kind of very slowly emigrated west into Roman territory to Gaul primarily into what's now the Low Countries, looking for refuge and a safe place to stay.

Matthew Gabriel:

They assimilated very quickly into Roman customs. They served in Roman armies, they converted to Christianity relatively early in the 6th and the 7th centuries and then they kind of consolidated under a dynasty called the Merovingians, named after their legendary founder Merovic, and they were supplanted in the middle of the 8th century by the kind of the people that were telling the story about this dynasty called the Carolingians, Carolus being the Latin for Charles, so named after one of the first Charles, Charles Martel, who people may know from the Battle of Tours and things like that in the 8th century. Charlemagne himself is the second ruler in this dynasty and he is the one who kind of brings the empire to its greatest height, and under his rule, which starts in 768 and then ends when he dies in 814, he rules a territory that's basically all of Western Europe, most of Europe itself, from the borders of southern Denmark all the way past Rome and Italy, from Brittany's Atlantic coast to beyond the Danube, past the Pyrenees, past Barcelona and then all the way up in through Saxony as well.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, am I mistaken in saying that Caroliginians were the first empire after Rome has fallen? So they are the first empire in the West. They're not the Byzantine Empire, they are the Western Empire, the Frankish kingdom, right.

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, I think definitions of empire in the early Middle Ages are a little bit tricky, because there's some reason. You could say the Visigoths were kind of an empire in Iberia, they themselves I don't know if they would use that terminology. Certainly Charlemagne is crowned Roman emperor in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800, resurrecting the Roman empire in the West after it had kind of fallen off, not to supplant, as you said, kind of the Byzantine Empire in the East, but to be to once again kind of bring the empire back in the West. So in that sense, absolutely In the other sense, empires are often defined. The title emperor is kind of a supreme title above a variety of different types of peoples, all of whom have their own kind of kings and kingdoms. Then yes, absolutely.

Michele McAloon:

The Carolingians are kind of the first since Rome to do that in the West. Okay, but you knocked the fairy dust off this story in telling this history.

Michele McAloon:

Try to yeah, you really do, and you say that this empire, like all empires, rested on a foundation of lies and what we know, what we traditionally probably before your book understood about Charlemagne was actually written backwards from the present, and you bring out sources that have written backwards from the present. So we really haven't had a clear picture of Charlemagne without this, your magnificent duo doing some sleuth detective, some sleuthing, some great police investigation in the sources and what the sources really tell us. So talk to us a little bit about your approach to this history and why you decided to take this approach, to tell us the real story of Charlemagne.

Matthew Gabriel:

No, I think that that's a really great question, and you know, I think that one of the things that attracted me to the study of the past generally, to being an historian you know kind of way back when, is that it was presented to me in a way that I never thought about it before. Sometimes, you know, history is taught as kind of just the succession of dates and events that kind of inevitably happen one after another. But you know, when I was an undergraduate kind of a million years ago now you know it was presented as much more kind of contingent, that these were people and they made choices and there were kind of reasons, that there were lots of reasons that things turned out the way they did, but it wasn't inevitable, and there were always people who were kind of working against the decisions that were made, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, in a destructive way. And so I think that's true for both David and I is that we're interested in kind of the hows and the whys of the past, and the ways that we tell stories about the past today are no different than the ways that people in the past told stories about themselves in their own past. And what I mean by that is that the Carolingians take power in a coup d'etat. Historians have known that for quite a while.

Matthew Gabriel:

But one of the most interesting things I think about this coup d'etat is there's this great source called the Royal Frankish Annals. It was composed at the court of Charlemagne during his reign Again just kind of one generation after this coup. It's a type of historical text called an annal and what that means is it's literally like a year, a year listed, and then important events that happened in that year. It's just kind of like a bullet-pointed list in some ways, of events happened in that year. It's just kind of like a bullet pointed list in some ways, of events. The point of an annul is its completeness, and there's lots of annuls from the early middle ages, meaning that you show every year, and there's lots of annuls in fact that just have blank entries for the year, but you have to show the succession of years.

Matthew Gabriel:

The thing about the Royal Frankish annuls is that it's complete with one very important exception and that's the year 751 and 752, which is conveniently the years of the coup d'etat. So if you're just kind of scanning the annul it looks like it's just kind of a run-of-the-mill thing and the Merovingians, they had lost power and they ceded power to these Carolingians who were kind of the rightful rulers who took over for them. But if you look a little bit closer and that's why that sleuthing is really important when we're approaching our primary sources is they don't want to tell us the things that we want to know. They want to tell us the things they want us to know, which isn't always the truth, and the truth is, I think, that that absence of those two years obscures a very bloody, contentious coup in which everybody, even in Charlemagne's generation, a generation after, still remembered, but they didn't want successive generations to remember it and so they simply omitted it.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, so let's talk about names too, because your book it's a little bit of Sudoku in trying to keep the name straight, but you do a great job. One of the things that was really helpful in the beginning of the book you actually cataloged the different names that the reader is going to come across and it's actually really easy to go back and that does clarify a lot. But let's start with Pepin the Hunchback. I mean, what a name to go through history with. This was Charlemagne's son, correct?

Matthew Gabriel:

Charlemagne's eldest son. And you're absolutely right. There are so many Louis and Charles and Pepins and then a couple Lothars kind of thrown in there as well.

Michele McAloon:

So Pepin the Hunchback, he's the son of Charlemagne. He actually leaves the coup d'etat right and then ends up in the good old monastery, right.

Matthew Gabriel:

He goes into timeout, absolutely yeah, yeah, so Pepin is the eldest son. Pepin the Hunchback is the eldest son of Charlemagne Eldest legitimate son of Charlemagne, I should say by his first wife. But he's kind of supplanted in importance because Charlemagne ends up remarrying. He has four wives in total. Second wife become very, very important at court and so Pepin in 792, so well into Charlemagne's reign. As Pepin is himself an adult and so is attracting kind of followers around, that leads an attempted coup d'etat which is unsuccessful. Charlemagne kind of squashes it out and Pepin is sent to the monastery of Prüm where he is to live out his days kind of as a monk and kind of removed from the possibility of inheriting power.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, why, for the Franks, was inheritance so hard? We are very used to hereditary kingdoms. We look at the House of Windsor One dies, another one supplants it. Why was this so difficult? For because this is the genesis of the whole problem it's about inheritance correct inheritance, correct, absolutely, yeah.

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, parents not getting along with their kids and kids not liking what their parents do. So I mean the timeless story, if ever there was one, right, sure. But you know, most of us don't lead coup d'etats against our parents. So, but the Carolingian sure liked that. But yes, no, no, it's a great question.

Matthew Gabriel:

Part of the problem is that primogeniture. So the idea that the eldest inherits kind of everything from the parent is a much later invention. It really doesn't come into effect in the Middle Ages in Europe until probably the 12th and 13th century, really kind of fully enforced. Before then, the Frankish tradition was always, always, always to split things evenly, as evenly as possible between all of the legitimate heirs. And so in Charlemagne's case, for example, he was prepared, if Pepin probably hadn't led that coup, to divide the territory, his entire empire, between his eldest son, pepin the Hunchback, and his younger son, charles the Younger. Another Pepin, pepin of Italy, and then Louis the Pious, who was an Aquitaine. The thing that heads that off is that all the other kids die, and so Louis the Pious, his youngest, an Aquitaine. The thing that heads that off is that all the other kids die, and so Louis the Pious, his youngest son, charlemagne's youngest son, is the only one left to inherit.

Matthew Gabriel:

So when Louis, when we get to the civil war of the 830s and the 840s, among Louis' sons he has the kind of great good fortune and the great bad fortune of having all of his children survive into adulthood and be ready to inherit, and so he has to make a decision about what to do with the empire, and one of the things that we try to emphasize throughout is that Louis the Pious, the whole thing that is indeed a question of inheritance that causes a civil war.

Matthew Gabriel:

It's not about cutting anybody out. It's really never about cutting anybody out. It's just about who gets what, and that's where the real tension is. How much land in the West does Charles de Bal get? How much land in the East does Louis the German get? How much land in the imperial center? And what role does the emperor play for Louis de Pius's eldest son, lothar and you can see this even beyond this this causes problems for the Franks for generations afterwards, even into the early Capetians in the West, for the Etonians in the East and for the rulers of Italy in the South as well.

Michele McAloon:

I have to ask a question, and this really doesn't have to do with this book per se. But what changes that to primogenitor? It changes from this morass of inheritance to a single inheritor.

Matthew Gabriel:

So great question, really complicated answer.

Matthew Gabriel:

I'll give you the short answer right now and then anybody who has any questions please feel free to email me and I'll send you a bibliography about five pages long.

Matthew Gabriel:

The short answer is that power becomes subdivided very quickly in the 10th and 11th centuries, meaning that parcels of land and counties, baronies, dukedoms and stuff like that become ever smaller, and so it becomes against the family's best interest to keep subdividing that land, and so they try to keep it together, whereas splitting the inheritance kind of comes top down from kings and emperors and then permeates the aristocracy down below, primogeniture kind of moves.

Matthew Gabriel:

Bottom up is that you have castellans and petty counts who don't have a ton of land and so they can't really subdivide it, and so they create this new system and there's a resistance against the system, of course, as with all new systems in which they want to keep it together in a family, with all new systems in which they want to keep it together in a family, and they find other venues for their other children, especially their sons, to take, such as oblation giving to monasteries, getting them into the church as bishops or as priests or something like that, or marrying them off to women and then try to add to their counties in that way.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, all right, so let's talk about Charlemagne before we move on to his son. So in 800, I believe he helps Pope Hadrian. I think that's correct, leo.

Matthew Gabriel:

III oh, leo III that's right. Hadrian's his predecessor, yeah.

Michele McAloon:

He helps Leo III kick the nasty Lombards out of Italy. Correct, Okay? And then so the Pope, on Christmas Day 800, places the crown, the royal, the Holy Roman Emperor crown, on Charlemagne. When he put that crown on him, did he know that he was creating the Holy Roman Empire?

Matthew Gabriel:

Well, that's another great question, because he wasn't and he did not intend that at all, and Charlemagne himself had made no pretensions that this was something called the Holy Roman Empire.

Matthew Gabriel:

What happens is that Frederick Barbarossa, in the 12th century, creates the Sacrum Romam Imperium, which we know today as the Holy Roman Empire, romam Imperium, which we know today as the Holy Roman Empire, and what he does in the 12th and 13th century is that he creates another fiction that ties himself back to Charlemagne and says that Charlemagne is his progenitor.

Matthew Gabriel:

I think this is a really important distinction, because Barbarossa is trying to create something new.

Matthew Gabriel:

Charlemagne is trying to resurrect something old, in that he is crowned just Roman emperor in the model of Constantine, especially in Theodosius, but also kind of Augustus and Julius Caesar as well, because that gives him legitimacy that he needs in order to control Italy, and to control Italy against the Byzantines, saying that the Byzantine Empire, which is the eastern part of the Roman Empire, should have no place in Italy again, because the Roman Empire has been revived, and so it's kind of a power play both to give them legitimacy north of the Alps, but especially kind of south of the Alps as well.

Matthew Gabriel:

And so, if you look at the primary sources which we have a number of them about what the Pope did on Christmas Day in 800, it's very clear that Imperator Romanorum, emperor of the Romans, there's no sacrum, there's no sanctus or anything like that attached to it, and in none of Charlemagne's sources, his diplomatic sources, his bureaucratic sources does he claim that as well. This is kind of a separate thing, because it gives him a certain type of political and cultural power south of the Alps, which also has sacred valences because he's a Christian Roman emperor, like Constantine and Theodosius had been before him.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, all right, excellent explanation. Charlemagne has a son, louis the Pious, who lives, but then Louis the Pious has three sons, and this is where the headache really begins.

Matthew Gabriel:

Who are?

Michele McAloon:

those three sons of Louis the Pious.

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, so he has three sons that survive till his death. He actually has four legitimate children. There's another Pepin there's so many Pepins in this story there's another Pepin of Aquitaine, who dies a couple of years before Louis. So that in some ways kind of simplifies things, but it also complicates things for other reasons we don't have to go into. The three sons that survive are Lothar.

Matthew Gabriel:

Lothar is born actually before Louis seems set to inherit, and the reason that we know that is because he has a different name. One of the reasons that we have so many Pepins and Louis and Charleses is because it designates an ability to succeed and designates an ability to inherit from the father a royal line. When Louis had his first son, lothar, he was just kind of king of Aquitaine. He was probably fourth in line to the throne or to the imperial title after his older brothers. But then again his older brothers die and so Lothar becomes inherent, comes to to start to inherit.

Matthew Gabriel:

Lothar interesting guy you know, is in charge of kind of Italy, also as a co-emperor with his father, louis the Pious, since about 817. So for many years. And so he seems kind of primed to inherit the empire when, when, when his father dies but his brothers have other ideas. One of them is Louis the German the youngest, or well, I guess the second youngest son, very important in Bavaria and Saxony eastern parts of the Rhine. Through some machinations he looks like maybe he's going to supplant his older brother and kind of inherit the imperial title, and then that all falls apart very dramatically in about 838, shortly before his father dies. And then the other guy is Charles the Bald. He was probably bald when he was born, but he was not.

Michele McAloon:

You knew I was going to ask that.

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, I don't exactly know kind of why he was there. I think he becomes bald kind of later on and then it's kind of retroactively kind of placed on him when he's younger Throughout this entire Civil War. He's no older than 18 years old, so that's a really interesting bit is that he's an adult. But he is a young man and his brothers are much older. He's the son of Louis the Pious and Louis' second wife, so he's a stepbrother to all these other guys. And that's an incredible source of tension throughout the 830s and the 840s is what is Louis, his father, the father, going to do for this new son? Who is he going to take land away from which of these other brothers? What right does he have to rule in his own, especially kind of in the West, in Aquitaine and then in kind of what's now northern France?

Michele McAloon:

Okay. So Louis the Pious, his oldest son, lothar right, mm-hmm. Yep. Okay, he becomes co-emperor and he rules Italy, and so he kind of becomes king of the hill, and these two younger brothers just won't accept this. They just have issues right yeah, yeah.

Matthew Gabriel:

Well, what happens in the 830s? Is that so when louis the pious remarries, which is which is pretty early, it's, like you know, in the late 18s, and then charles the bald is born. His fourth son is born at 823, is that in about 830, 833, as Charles the Bald is moving out of a medieval stage of life called infancy and into adolescence, which is like from seven to 15 or so, and that brings new responsibilities, especially for children of kings. Louis decides to shake up his court, and by doing so he kind of breaks up the established roots of access to power which his other sons had cultivated for decades. This annoys, shall we say, everyone, and it leads to two attempted coup d'etats, two rebellions against Louis the Pious led by his sons.

Matthew Gabriel:

It's not that Lothar's younger brothers are being passed to him, it's that Lothar and various combinations of his brothers attempt to overthrow their father, and this annoys some of the other brothers but also his father, and so Louis the father, this annoys some of the other brothers but also his father, and so Louis the father tries to disinherit him, is to kind of cut him out of the empire in the later 830s, right before his death, and then he kind of reconciles in 840.

Matthew Gabriel:

So when Louis the Pious dies, the big thing to remember is that nobody exactly knows what the father wanted, what the emperor wanted to happen, because there's been so many rebellions, so many different alliances, louis has changed his mind about who's due to take kind of different lands and things like that. So everything is kind of up in the air and Charles the Bald and Louis the German end up figuring out that the only way to kind of keep what they think their father had promised them is to ally against their older brother. And that comes to a head in this great bloody battle at Fontenoy in 841.

Michele McAloon:

One of the things that you really bring out is that, the final battle. They had always come right up to the line, but they hadn't crossed that line. And you show there is a battle on the field of lies which actually isn't a battle. Talk to us about the field of lies. This is a fascinating piece of history.

Matthew Gabriel:

Super, super interesting. So in the second rebellion in 833 of Louis de Pice's sons against the father as you say in 830, and then a couple of times in between and then afterwards, the Franks were always willing to walk up to the precipice of all-out war is to assemble their armies, stare at each other and then negotiate their way to a settlement. What makes the field of lies different, which happens in 833, during the Second Rebellion, is that Louis is facing down with the Imperial Army against his sons, all three of his sons, allied at the time, not with Charles de Balde Charles de Balde is too young and so he's with his father but Lothar Pepin of Aquitaine and Louis the German. And they brought the Pope with them. This is where Hadrian comes in, okay, and they brought the Pope with them, and they are negotiating about kind of the future of the empire. They're saying that Louis has kind of steered the ship into an iceberg, as it were, and the sons need to take over.

Matthew Gabriel:

And Louis the emperor does not agree. But what happens in the middle of the night is his army abandons him. Louis literally wakes up to an empty camp. His army is gone, he is alone, except for some royal household retainers and is forced to surrender in a humiliating fashion to his children and that's why the Franks themselves, they dub this the field of lies when the emperor has been betrayed by his most loyal subjects, who, you know, who should have stood with him and, you know, forced a better settlement.

Michele McAloon:

So this happens, and yet he goes back to Aachen, goes back to his kingdom, to the palace, the Charlemagne Palace in Aachen, germany, or what we know as Aachen Germany today, and his court reassembles around him. No one seems to think that he's a loser. He still keeps his crown, he keeps his gold, he keeps his arms. What was that really a show about? I mean, it seems a little fruitless at this point to come that close. But then you know what kind of everybody went back home and it was like nothing happened, sort of.

Matthew Gabriel:

Yeah, I think this is kind of. The great paradox is that there's all these attempted coups, you know, going back to, as we said, pepin the Hunchback, and there's a couple, there's another attempted kind of coup against Charlemagne in the 780s which doesn't involve one of his sons. You know. There's other kind of small scale revolts against the Carolingians. That happened under Louis the Pious, and then once the sons take over, there's coups against them. Coup attempts against them as well is that it's really hard to get rid of a king once that king is on the throne.

Matthew Gabriel:

And that's the thing that bedevils Louis the Pious' sons in those rebellions of 830 and 833 is what do you do with your dad? Because the Pope has placed a crown on his head and made him emperor. Can you undo that? How do you undo that? That doesn't make any sense. So what his sons try to do is they try to get him to become a monk, because if he makes a voluntary retirement from the imperial palace to a monastery, then that kind of gives them a free and clear kind of path to controlling the empire. And Louis very astutely kind of goes along with the charade but never formally takes his monastic vows.

Matthew Gabriel:

He kind of accepts imprisonment in a monastery but refuses to become a monk himself and just kind of waits. And that's exactly what happens is then the nobles get dissatisfied and they're like, oh man, what did we do? And then they put him back on the throne and then he's just emperor again until he dies in 840.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, that just to me is just amazing. But it doesn't really stay static because these ne'er-do-well brothers are still creating a ruckus and they are not happy. Do you think they are pushed by the people? Are they pushed by the courts around them, because they each had individual courts, or are they pushing the courts? I didn't really get that one.

Matthew Gabriel:

Absolutely so. Some of the main actors here are not necessarily the kings themselves, meaning you know, the Carolingians, the dynasty but it's these powerful nobles who are at the courts of all of these guys. And by the time we get to the 830s, all of the sons of Louis VIII and Louis VIII himself have separate courts and advisors who are immensely powerful people, some of whom had been advisors to Charlemagne himself but had kind of broken up, you know, based on kind of region, by kind of where their base of power lies, to support different suns. And so they're oftentimes the ones who are kind of pushing and pulling and plotting and scheming and sometimes, you know, kind of trying to talk the suns out of doing something dumb, and not always successfully.

Matthew Gabriel:

In the midst we talk about this one letter that we have which survives from the 840s the early 840s by one of the advisors to Charles the Bald, in which the empress, lothar's wife, is writing to this guy because they had known each other at Louis de Pius's court, and saying hey, let's end this war.

Matthew Gabriel:

What are you doing? Why are you betraying the rightful emperor and siding with this other guy, charles the Bald, this kind of petty king? And the guy basically says like listen, I've been trying to get you guys to the table for forever, but you should look at your own court, at people who are counseling war. Your advisors are pushing Lothar to unproductive discussions, and if we could just all sit down we could all kind of work this out. What I mean is by giving that example, it's like there's this high level discourse in which the brothers are talking to one another, but I think in some ways the more important thing are the nobles who are talking to one another throughout this thing. We don't have the sources sometimes to kind of get at that, but we can absolutely tell, because of these things, like this letter that I mentioned, that kind of bubble through to the surface and survive. We can see that there was so much more going on, so many other voices that should be heard, but we just unfortunately can't hear them right now.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely. Looking at modern politics today, it's not any different. I mean, the king has his advisors and the Republicans and Democrats they have their advisors and their power, their power sources. It's not all the president, yeah. So I mean, you know, times change, but they absolutely do not change point of history. And it the battle of fontenoy. And this is where they're no longer joking around. This time there is it's blood that is drawn.

Matthew Gabriel:

No, yeah, yeah, and an immense amount of blood, and I think that's that's part of it. Is that a there's a shock that this kind of cold war becomes hot and the, the, the tension between the brothers erupts into this kind of immense violence, and then the scale of the violence kind of horrifies people afterwards. So on 25th of June we know this because the sources are very clear about this in the morning of 841, this battle erupts between Lothar as the emperor and his forces and his brothers, charles the Bald and Louis the German. They kind of meet by accident there. There's nothing at Fontenois. There's nothing at Fontenois. Now there's a little monument that was erected in the 1860s which we talk about in our book, but other than that it's just kind of fields. It's a beautiful kind of verdant farming area, and there was nothing there in the 9th century either. But the armies kind of meet, they stare across the field at one another, they send emissaries back and forth, and this is very typical Frankish political behavior. This happened again, like in the field of lies we were talking about before, but dozens of other occasions as well, and everybody thinks maybe there's a way out of it, except something changes, and we're not entirely clear what that is, but I think the accreted bad blood between the brothers it was like the straw that breaks the camel's back. It did just become enough and they agreed it was not a surprise attack or anything like that. They agreed that they were going to meet in battle the next morning, on Friday, and on Saturday morning they all charged out in wings and they fought.

Matthew Gabriel:

The thing about medieval battles is that I think we're enamored of kind of Hollywood depictions in which there's lots of blood and screaming and stuff like that. But as we talk about, early medieval battles don't have a lot of casualties, especially among the elites, because elites have horses, they can escape from danger. They have metal armor. You know swords can do damage but armor turns a lot of blows away from swords and spears and things like that. Foot soldiers bear a brunt of the violence because they're often poorer. They can't afford the type of armor that can kind of save them. They can't escape from things as well. But what happens here is that Lothar's army flees the field and Charles and Louis' army pursues them, and that's where most of the violence happens, is that from people running away are cut down from behind and that violence continues until finally, charles and Louis kind of call their armies backwards and then afterwards they got to kind of clean up the mess.

Matthew Gabriel:

Louis and Charles convene a council of bishops, literally on the battlefield. They say mass, literally on the battlefield. They haven't even buried the corpses yet. To ask God like what does this mean? What are we supposed to do with the fact that Franks have killed Franks, which has never happened before in their memory? You know, they're kind of ignoring the coup d'etat and the bloody, you know, battle of the Carolingians took power, but they like to ignore things. Anyway, we tell stories about the past that we like to hear and they come to the understanding that this was a horrible sin and people should atone for that if they participate in the battle, but that God was on their side and God wanted this to happen. They wanted Lothar chastised and they wanted Louis and Charles to inherit their rightful part of the empire.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, and God was probably nowhere near that field at the moment. So yeah, or at least in the souls of those people. My gosh, all right. So you know what? So we have the Battle of Fontenoy, and that's actually from what I gather from reading your book is that's actually a turning point. Starts using this as a the formation of the french and the german nations, but you said that this is an 18th or 19th century fiction, because that isn't how it went down. But they this is when the nation state was forming and they're looking, those people in the 18th and 19th century are looking for kind of some divine interaction to make their own nation states, to justify what they are doing at that point. But what is the impression of Fontenoy through, immediately after and through history?

Matthew Gabriel:

We talk a little bit about this and some of the stuff. We just we didn't have time to include this in the book as we were kind of hurtling towards the end of the book, but throughout the Middle Ages it's remembered as a tragedy, like something that broke Charlemagne's empire more so than kind of any of the coups that happened in the 30s or even each other, and there was such an outpouring of blood. One of the sources even says that they killed so many of each other that they couldn't defend against external threats. Because the thing that's happening at the same time in the 840s and the 50s is you. You do have new external threats. One of them everybody's heard of is called the vikings.

Matthew Gabriel:

The vikings start to show up on the coast of the Carolingian Empire, you know, beginning in the 830s and 40s.

Matthew Gabriel:

This is an explicit, organized reaction to the fact that there is a civil war going on in the Frankish Empire and an attempt to expand at their expense or at least to raid at their expense. It's different in, you know, in England and Ireland. That's a different set of questions, but the raids that happen in Frankia and the Frankish lands are explicitly reaction to it. You also have new incursions by the Berbers from North Africa, muslims throughout the Mediterranean, raiding into what's now southern France, into Iberia, the area around Barcelona, into Sicily and northern Italy as well, and that's the way that this is framed in histories that are written about Fontenoine in the Middle Ages themselves is that you have this great battle. The brothers are so preoccupied by the Civil War that they've lost their understanding of the public good, of Christianity as a whole, and they allow these foreign invaders which the sources, because they're all Christian are very happy to point out and very enthusiastic about pointing out are non-Christians these are the agents of God as punishments for the frank sins at Fontainebleau.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. And you know what, If there's not a truism in history, it's that you want to avoid civil war at all costs, because civil war just destroys everything. It really just destroys, just it destroys the fabric. This is actually a great book. I mean, there's so much layer and so much depth in it. I mean we didn't get into figures like Dick Wiko or the astronomer or you know these very, very colorful people that made this society.

Michele McAloon:

That was not simple, that was complex. That people and you do an excellent job of showing people had problems, they had real problems. It wasn't just nobles that were affected by war. It was families and women and children and whole societies torn apart. And I thought you did a very good, very sympathetic understanding of the long-term effects of war, which is what we need to understand as we look at Israel and Ukraine today that these will not be done tomorrow and everybody just goes home and it's okay. I mean, these have real effects and they last forever. Okay, what is your next writing project? Because I got a few suggestions for you if you're looking for it, okay, so I'm the kind of person when I finish a project I need to get my head straight, if you're looking.

Matthew Gabriel:

So I'm the kind of person when I finished a project, I need to get my head straight for a little while. So I'm not entirely sure. So David and I are both working on kind of smaller well, not smaller, but kind of independent projects right now. That's not because there was any sort of falling out or anything like that, because there is kind of a can't really talk about it, but there is kind of a little secret project that we're kind of slowly working on, which hopefully we'll be able to talk about a little while, but we can't right now. Um, but yeah, but.

Matthew Gabriel:

But I think you know one of the things that's that's been great is that is is having interviews like this and just having people ask us questions to learn a little bit more, and so one of the the actual writing things that we're doing is we have a newsletter, is that we have a newsletter where we talk about the Middle Ages. We answer questions, but we talk about kind of interesting things that are happening in the European Middle Ages that we're learning about all the time, and that's been a really fun thing because it does allow us to engage with our audience, not just people who are reading the book but are interested in kind of other things related to the medieval world too.

Michele McAloon:

How can the audience get a hold of that newsletter? Where can we go to sign up for that?

Matthew Gabriel:

Sure, absolutely so. It's called Modern Medieval and it's on Button Down, so it's buttondowncom. Modern medieval, all one word. Or you can find it through my website, which is just profgabrielcom.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, I'm gonna hurt myself to go sign up for that, so that I'm looking for that's great, all right, we have been speaking with Matthew Gabriel. He is one of the co-authors of Oathbreakers, the War of Brothers that Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. It is a Harper, it's published by Harper, which is, I guess, an imprint of HarperCollins, but a great book and I really look forward to speaking both to you and hopefully maybe David Perry will make a cameo appearance in the next interview, because I'm sure you guys have got some fabulous writing projects in the future. Thank you so much for taking your time to do this interview.

Matthew Gabriel:

Oh my pleasure, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for taking your time to do this interview. Oh my pleasure, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.