Charles the Bald

And acting upon that principle, we find the bishops of France in the ninth century deposing Louis, the son of Charlemagne.

An ecclesiastical council in the same kingdom afterwards adjudged his son, Lothair, unworthy of the crown and conferred it on his brother, Charles the Bald.

A subsequent council deposed him when the pusillanimous monarch complained, I ought not to have been deposed, or at least not before I had been judged by the bishops who gave me royal authority.

I have always submitted to their correction and am ready to do so now.

The corsned, or morsel of execration, was either the sacramental wafer itself, or a piece of bread administered in connection with the Eucharist.

A solemn prayer was offered that the bread might cause convulsions if the person receiving it were guilty.

The reader perhaps will remember the history of Earl Godwin in the reign of Edward the Confessor, who expired as he was at table eating a mouthful of bread, which he prayed might choke him if he had been guilty of the death of the king's brother.

Some doubt has been thrown upon the tale, but its insertion in our early histories illustrates the superstitious regard which was paid to this species of ordeal, and to the result of any appeal to heaven under circumstances which bore any resemblance to its more solemn administration.

The beautiful Judith caught his fancy and became his queen.

They had one son, who was known later as Charles the Bald.

Judith soon acquired great influence over the emperor and used it to procure a kingdom for her son.

In 829, when the boy was seven years old, Louis was persuaded to make a new division, taking away a portion of Lothair's share and giving it to Charles.

The fortune of war shifted from one side to the other, and each time a new division of the empire was made.

Finally, Louis the Pious died in 840, leaving the imperial crown to Lothair and a kingdom to each of his surviving sons.

There were only three kingdoms, as one of the sons, Pippin, had died in 838, and the part intended for him had been added to the territory of Charles the Bald.

After the death of his father, Louis the Pious, Lothair tried to secure the whole empire.

Gaining boldness they pressed inland and continually threatened Paris, then a town on the frontier of the kingdom of the West Franks, whose capital lay at Laon.

So frequent were these piratical invasions that in 861 Charles the Bald granted the city and a large district round it to Robert the Strong as a march or border territory against the Northmen.

From that day forth the destinies of Paris began to rise, at first against the Normans and then in league with them, until by the accession of Hugh Capet she finally became the capital and her count the first king of modern France.

Fifteen years afterwards, in 876 according to the chronicles, Rollo, the future Duke of Normandy, entered the Seine, and from that day till nine twelve ravaged the unfortunate country.

Brittany and Aquitaine scarcely acknowledged his authority and generally stood aloof, while nearer at home his power was overshadowed by four great feudatories who often set him at naught.

In the south, the Duchy of Burgundy was held by Richard the Justicer.

In the north, the County of Flanders, formed as a march by Charles the Bald against the Northmen, was now under Baldwin the Bold, a powerful and turbulent vassal, quarreling with everyone and disturbing the peace even of the royal domain itself.

At Paris, another march, Robert, Duke of France, the brother of the king's late rival Eud, the deadly foe of his race and name, ruled over the greater part of central Gaul north of the Loire and, as was then not infrequently the case, enjoyed considerable wealth as lay abbot of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain of Paris and of Saint-Martin of Tours.

The beautiful Judith caught his fancy and became his queen.

They had one son who was known later as Charles the Bald.

Judith soon acquired great influence over the emperor and used it to procure a kingdom for her son.

In 829, when the boy was seven years old, Louis was persuaded to make a new division, taking away a portion of Lothar's share and giving it to Charles.

The fortune of war shifted from one side to the other, and each time a new division of the empire was made.

Finally, Louis the Pious died in 840, leaving the imperial crown to Lothar and a kingdom to each of his surviving sons.

There were only three kingdoms, as one of the sons, Pippin, had died in 838, and the part intended for him had been added to the territory of Charles the Bald.

After the death of his father, Louis the Pious, Lothar tried to secure the whole empire.

The beautiful Judith caught his fancy and became his queen.

They had one son, who was known later as Charles the Bald.

Judith soon acquired great influence over the emperor and used it to procure a kingdom for her son.

In 829, when the boy was seven years old, Louis was persuaded to make a new division, taking away a portion of Lothar's share and giving it to Charles.

The fortune of war shifted from one side to the other, and each time a new division of the empire was made.

Finally, Louis the Pious died in 840, leaving the imperial crown to Lothar and a kingdom to each of his surviving sons.

There were only three kingdoms, as one of the sons, Pepin, had died in 838, and the part intended for him had been added to the territory of Charles the Bald.

After the death of his father, Louis the Pious, Lothar tried to secure the whole empire.

Baldwin I, the first Count of Flanders, arrived in the region of Bruges in around 863.

He was the new son-in-law of the West Frankish King Charles the Bald, known as Charles II.

He was gifted a piece of land as a dowry, and it was called the Galle of Pegas Flanderensis.

The origins of Flanders lay in the Pegas Flanderensis, I'm not sure if I pronounced that correctly, but anyway, an area composed of Bruges and its environments under the administration of the Frankish Empire.

Louis left a widower in 818, married in the following year, 819, the fair and ambitious Bavarian Judith, the daughter of Welf, Count of Altorf on the Lake of Lucerne, the ancestor of many famous lines, among them those of Este, of the Welfs of Bavaria and Saxony, of the Plantagenets, of the House of Brunswick.

In 823 she bore a son named after the great emperor Charles and to be distinguished from him afterwards as Charles the Bald.

This roused at once the jealousy of the emperor's first family, the three sons who shared his government.

The empire was henceforth filled with their intrigues and revolts.

In Bavaria and the neighboring lands, Louis named the German had been able to defy his father.

His power and influence had become strongly rooted.

In the west, Charles the Bald, though his claims in Aquitaine were disputed by a cousin, was gradually becoming formidable in the countries between the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhône.

The trial of strength in such conditions could not fail to come.

The beautiful Judith caught his fancy and became his queen.

They had one son who was known later as Charles the Bald.

Judith soon acquired great influence over the emperor and used it to procure a kingdom for her son.

In 829, when the boy was seven years old, Louis was persuaded to make a new division, taking away a portion of Lothar's share and giving it to Charles.

The fortune of war shifted from one side to the other and each time a new division of the empire was made.

Finally, Louis the Pious died in 840, leaving the imperial crown to Lothar and a kingdom to each of his surviving sons.

There were only three kingdoms as one of the sons, Pippin, had died in 838 and the part intended for him had been added to the territory of Charles the Bald.

After the death of his father, Louis the Pious, Lothar tried to secure the whole empire.

That is an actual real theory that historians demand you take seriously when it comes to Ivar the Boneless's nickname.

In any case, it is thought that the massive army of Vikings that he led with Halfdan, Ragnarsson and Ubba was mustered after raiders were pushed out of Francia by the ongoing concerted efforts of Charles the Bald after the 845 sack of Paris.

We talked about this last week.

We talked about how Vikings raided and razed Paris in 845 and we talked about some of the ongoing concerted efforts that the Frankish King Charles made to defend his realm from these Viking raiders after what happened in 845.

But what if I told you that the Normans were, after a fashion, Vikings themselves? While their conquest of England didn't take place until the 11th century, it was back in the 9th century that Viking invaders first established themselves as the Normans in the north of France in a way not entirely unlike the Vikings of the Danelaw.

So to now explore another example of Vikings making this transition from raiding to conquest and settlement, we turn our attention back to France, or to West Francia, I suppose, to be more specific at this point.

Although, interestingly, in the same way that Alfred the Great is today generally recognised as being the first king of England, despite in his time being the king of the Anglo-Saxons, Charles the Bald, the West Frankian king in the mid-9th century, is today generally recognised as the first king of France.

Very similar to Alfred the Great, it's a funny old thing.

The Jew Deutz betrayed the Duchess of Bergen the Duchess of Bury, for 500,000 francs.

And in the last century, the Jew Sedisha poisoned Carlo il Calvo, who was betrayed by the Jewess Paiva.

Earlier in Paris, it was she who managed to sell the battle plans of the French army.

Now, people will inevitably make the argument here that, okay, so these people sold out