Louis the Pious

End of Section 16 Section 17 of The Beginning of the Middle Ages by Richard William Church This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 8 The Carolingians Successors of Charles Part 1 1.

Louis the Pious and his sons 2.

The Northmen 3.

Fall of the Carolingian lines It seemed as if under Charles the Franks were to be to the new world of Christendom what the Romans had been to the old world of heathendom.

The empire, so prosperous while united, began to suffer from external attacks.

Northmen and Slavs became more troublesome and audacious.

At length, still victorious, but victorious over his own children, with a threatening future and amid natural calamities importance, Louis the Pious, the Kindly, died in one of his palaces on the Rhine on June 20, 840, and was buried at Metz, leaving discord among his sons and his great heritage shaken and in confusion.

The last ten years of Louis' empire had made it clear that the power to govern its turbulent elements had departed with its founder.

But we will pick up the narrative of the 10th century in the next episode, and we finish with a cute story from the 9th century.

Under Louis the Pious in the 9th century, there took place an event in Rome which set all Christians into commotion.

There was a guy called Bodo.

He was the chaplain to the emperor and very esteemed at court, and he experienced an urge after a rather lax life to undertake a pilgrimage from France to Rome in 838 CE.

Section 17 of The Beginning of the Middle Ages by Richard William Church This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by Pamela Nagami Chapter 8 The Carolingians Successors of Charles Part 1 1.

Louis the Pious and his sons 2.

The Northmen 3.

Fall of the Carolingian lines It seemed as if under Charles the Franks were to be to the new world of Christendom what the Romans had been to the old world of heathendom.

The empire, so prosperous while united, began to suffer from external attacks.

Northmen and Slavs became more troublesome and audacious.

At length, still victorious, but victorious over his own children, with a threatening future and amid natural calamities importance, Louis the Pious, the Kindly, died in one of his palaces on the Rhine on June 20, 840, and was buried at Metz, leaving discord among his sons and his great heritage shaken and in confusion.

The last ten years of Louis' empire had made it clear that the power to govern its turbulent elements had departed with its founder.

They then took advantage of internal conflicts in Europe to extend their activity further inland.

After the death of Louis the Pious, Emperor of Francia, modern-day France and Germany, in 840, his son Lothar actually invited the support of a Viking fleet in a power struggle with brothers.

Before long, other Vikings realized that Frankish rulers were willing to pay them rich sums to prevent them from attacking their subjects, making Francia an irresistible target for further Viking activity.

In addition to a wibbly moniker, the Vikings are also a little fuzzy in the timeline department.

Taste varied in this respect.

The Frankish emperor Louis the Pious is said to have taken a disgust at the heathen poetry which he had learned when he was young.

But there were greater kings who were less delicate in their religion.

Charles the Great made a collection of the barbarous ancient poems which sung the wars and exploits of the olden time.

This history of Arthur was of course translated wherever Geoffrey was translated, and sometimes it was picked out for separate treatment, as by the remarkable author of the Morte Arthur, one of the best of the alliterative poems.

Arthur had long been known in Britain as a great leader against the Saxon invaders.

Geoffrey of Monmouth took up and developed this idea in his own way, making Arthur a successful opponent not of the Saxons merely, but of Rome, a conqueror of kingdoms, himself an emperor before whom the power of Rome was humbled.

In consequence of which the Saxons came to think of their country as Britain and had to make Arthur their national hero in the same way as Charlemagne was the national hero in France.

An emperor, God's chosen on Earth, would remove his crown, take off his elaborate badges of office, kneel down, prostrate himself on the ground, and beg for forgiveness while his eldest son stood in judgment above him.

It is clear that Louis the Pious was a man whose life was bonded to religion, and his constant worries about his own soul's place in heaven informed much of his later life.

When Louis the Pious lay on the ground and begged for forgiveness, he was not just asking for forgiveness from his family under duress, but also from what he considered the almighty power of the universe, God and Jesus Christ.

So how did it come to this? Well, Louis the Pious had four sons, as we know, three from his first marriage to the now dead Ermengarde, and one from his next wife, Judith, who was an influential and, for the three elder sons, a malign influence on the court of the emperor.

I see Judith as a fairly impressive person, however, clearly fighting the corner of her son Charles, while running a lot of the day-to-day operations of the court of her husband.

By the middle of the 820s, Lothair, Louis the Pious's eldest son, was a powerful man.

Born in 795 AD, he was in his late 20s and had already been invested with control of Italy after his cousin Bernard's blinding and death.

In 817 AD, he had been declared heir and joint emperor of the Frankish realms with his father's Ordinatio Imperii, and in 823 AD, he was crowned as King of Italy with the Iron Crown.