Betrayal in the family

Now let’s crack open a tale of deformity, hatred between brothers, scheming wives and priests, broken promises, and family betrayal. The place is not Mar-a-Lago, but Francia in 769. Pepin the Short, the first true Carolingian king, is dead, felled by a fever after eight years waging a war of scorched earth against Aquitaine.^1.Covered extensively, starting here. Before Pepin’s death in 768 both Charles and his brother Carloman, “by your father’s order, joined in lawful marriage” two good Frankish women.^2.King, Caroline code, Letter 2, 770, p271. Charles first pulled the trigger, so to speak, and sometime in 769^3.No one really knows, but the consensus is prior to 770. his wife Himiltrude gave birth to a healthy son, whom Charles named Pippin, for his father.^4.Yes, I know I spell them differently. But it’s the same name.

Naming his first-born son after his father showed that Charles intended this boy to inherit the kingly title in some form or another. Carloman’s wife Gerberga, not to be outdone, gave birth to a son in 770.^5.King, Petau Annals, 770, p.149. What name did they bestow? I’m sure you can guess – the conflict between Charles and Carloman had started before their father had cooled in his crypt. Carloman will get his own post soon, but suffice it to say that after a visit from his mother in 772 Carloman died, and his wife and children (including Pippin) fled to Lombardy.^6.As noted before, I think this family is much darker than do conventional historians.

Pippin (son of Charles) no doubt led a childhood suffused with the assumption that he would someday be king. Perhaps a shared kingdom, per Frankish custom, as Charles and Carloman had begun their respective reigns, but some piece of the regnal pie would be his. Even when Charles “put aside” Himiltrude in favor of a Lombard princess for political reasons,^7.Pope Stephen’s letter on this subject, cited above, is hilarious. Pippin retained his name and place. After Charles discarded his unnamed and unfortunate Italian bride and took the hand of Hildegard, still nothing appeared to shake Pippin’s status.

Until Hildegard’s first son, born in 777, was named Charles. Probably not much doubt who would inherit the bulk of the kingdom after that baptism. Her second child received the name Carloman, which must have heartened Pippin, for surely that name augured nothing but a shadow life at court. Around the year 779 or 780 Pippin turned ten, no doubt secure in his future. Then father Charles went to Rome in 781 and changed everything.

Was Charles’s marriage to Himiltrude somehow not in keeping with Catholic teaching? Was Pippin, as Einhard described him (and only Einhard, it should be noted), a hunchback? Did Himiltrude work her wiles on Charles to exclude his child by a previous marriage? We have no insights into his decision except for its execution: pope Hadrian re-baptized Carloman as Pippin!

Charles should have known that no son of his would give up without a fight! But what would he do?

More than ten years later Charles spent 792 in Regensburg. One spring day a Lombard priest named Fardulf begged to see Charles, for he had vital information for the king’s ears only.^8.Notker paints quite a lurid picture, Noble, pp.104-105. This Fardulf informed Charles that a conspiracy was underway to kill him and his sons (by Hildegard), led by none other than the first Pippin.^9.The fact of the conspiracy is reported in the Royal Annals, the Revised Annals, the annals of Lorsch and Moselle, Einhard’s Life, and other documents we will come to shortly. The conspiracy is probably as close to an established fact as you are going to find in this time period. All of the Annals mention that a large number of other nobles were involved as well. Charles, as ever, took swift and sure action.

Unlike Hardrad’s rebellion three years earlier Charles felt the need to obtain official and popular sanction for the punishments he imposed. “But when king Charles learned of the plot by Pippin and those who were with him, he called together an assembly of the Franks and other fideles at Regensburg, and there the whole Christian people present with the king judged that Pippin as well as those who were his accomplices in this abominable plot should lose both their estates and their lives. And this judgement was carried out with regard to some; but as regards Pippin, since the king did not wish him to be put to death, the Franks judged that he must be subjected to God’s service. And this decision was carried out; the king sent him, now a cleric, into a monastery.”^10.King, 792, Lorsch Annals, pp.139-140. The Moselle annalist added that, “Some were hanged, some beheaded, some flogged and exiled.”^11.King, 793, Moselle Annals, p.135.

Even Charles, who must have killed tens if not hundreds of thousands in the battles he waged over forty years, could not find it within him to have his own son executed. Pippin was sent to the monastery at Prum.

The Royal Annals blamed queen Fastrada (Charles’s fourth wife, whom the court intellectuals despised), as Einhard did for both this revolt and the earlier conspiracy led by Hardrad. While the cause of Hardrad’s revolt is murky, there appears (to me) every reason for Pippin to take a shot at the position he was raised to believe his own. Blaming Fastrada seems gratuitous, a false flag to coverup some particularly vicious family politics.

Charles wielded carrots as well as sticks. The good priest Fardulf, in return for his loyalty and timely warning, was given the abbey at St. Denis, a plum position indeed. Also, “[W]hen he had identified his fideles, bishops, abbots, and counts, who were there present with him, and the rest of the loyal people, who did not support Pippin in that most wicked plot, he rewarded them abundantly, with gold and silver, silk and numerous gifts.”^12.King, 793, Lorsch Annals, pp.139-140.

Charles, as he did in 789, followed these short-term measures with further legislation. The capitulary of 793 was intended to bolster personal loyalty to himself. Following so soon after the oath mandated in 789, chapter one of the new decree straightforwardly asked, why is this oath necessary? “[T]hose unfaithful men recently plotted to cause great strife in the realm of the lord king Charles and conspired against his life and said, when questioned, that they had not sworn fidelity to him.”^13.King, Capitulary 8, p.223. Charles was tightening the web of oaths that bound the kingdom to his person. Perhaps it worked, for he faced no further revolts during his reign.

And Pippin? He lived the next nineteen years in that monastery, until he died in 811, in his early 40’s. His father’s thoughts when informed of his first born son’s death are not recorded.