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The Merovingian dynasty, from which the Franks were accustomed to choose their kings, is thought to have lasted down to King Chilperic III, who was deposed on the order of Stephen II, the Pope of Rome.
His hair was cut short, and he was shut up in a monastery.
Though this dynasty may seem to have come to an end only with Chilperic III, it had really lost all power years before, and it no longer possessed anything at all of importance beyond the empty title of king.
The wealth and the power of the kingdom were held tight in the hands of certain leading officials of the court, who were called the Mayors of the Palace, and on them, supreme authority devolved.
All that was left of the king was that content with his royal title, he should sit on the throne, with his hair long and his beard flowing and act the part of a ruler.
Whenever he needed to travel, he went in a cart which was drawn in rural manner by yoked oxen, with a cowherd to drive them.
In this fashion, he would go to the palace and to the general assembly of his people, which was held each year to settle the affairs of the kingdom, and in this fashion he would return home again.
That's the opening to the life of Charlemagne by Einhart, the Frankish scholar and courtier, and he wrote that just after Charlemagne's death, and he's describing the greatest, the most famous of all Frankish kings, one of the Titanic names in all European history.
Lots of people I think Tom will have heard the name of Charlemagne, but to be completely honest, I think a lot of people have heard the name and have no real sense of who he was.
Was he French? Was he German?
Or obviously he was neither.
Well he's the father of both and yet was neither.
Now Einhart, let's just talk about Einhart for a second because he writes this very extraordinary biography of Charlemagne doesn't he?
Yeah pretty unique really.
Yeah and he was very proud of the fact that he'd been so familiar personally with Charlemagne wasn't he?
Yeah he was also a very short man, Dominic, so like Benjamin Lay.
Oh yes, we love a short man on the rest of his history.
We do, yes. Well so the thing that's unusual about this is that it's a biography in a kind of Roman style, it echoes Suetonius the biographer of the Caesars, and that's not a coincidence because Einhart as a young boy had been sent by his parents to a monastery not to become a monk but kind of rather
like being sent to a boarding school or something like that at a place called Fulda on the east bank of the Rhine and this monastery had a complete collection of Suetonius's lives of the Caesars and this included a biography of the greatest of all the Roman emperors Augustus and Einhart read it and so when he
came to write his biography of Charlemagne he modelled it on Suetonius's life of Augustus and this is very deliberate because the extraordinary thing about Charlemagne who is this descendant of barbarian warlords is that on Christmas day AD 800 he had been crowned as a Caesar as Augustus in Rome by the Pope
himself and you said how Charlemagne is a titanic figure in the history of Europe simultaneously a kind of dominant but also shadowy I think and this is the key moment in his reign and again it's a moment that is simultaneously epical yet also hard to get a sense of exactly why it matters, the kind
of the meaning seems to slip as you try to grasp it.
Because even the empire that he ends up in a vertical as ruling the Holy Roman Empire a lot of people have find it very hard to pin down neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire famously was said about it.
Actually I think it was holy I think it was Roman and I think it was an empire for reasons that will come to but you're right so this is looking back to the age of the Roman Empire to the age of Augustus but it's also looking forward to the medieval empire and the empire that will endure right the way
up to the time of Napoleon who is the guy who abolishes it so you could say I mean I said that you know the story of the Franks it's a kind of hinge moment in European history this perhaps is the key hinge moment this is the kind of the middle point in the emergence of Europe from antiquity from the world
of ancient Rome into what will become the Europe of the high middle ages and it's kind of the ultimate promotion of Frankish warlord becoming a Caesar and so the question is how had this absolutely jaw -dropping event happened and this is the story that we will be telling we'll be starting on it today
and completing it in the next two episodes and we'll be finishing this story of course on Christmas day so the anniversary of Charlemagne's coronation.
Okay let's get going and let's get a sense of the context.
In the last three episodes we talked about the rise of the Franks the warlords of the west and we ended with the battle of Tor and people who listened to the first episode will remember that Charlemagne is not in fact the first Frankish warlord to have the title of Augustus they all remember that three
centuries earlier another Frankish warlord that is to say Clovis had been hailed as Augustus but not in Rome in Tor in the shrine of St Martin he wasn't crowned by the Pope he was crowned by himself like Napoleon.
Yeah and that reflects the fact that Clovis is very much a kind of self -made man he has been given the title of a consul by the emperor in Constantinople but the idea that he's an Augustus I mean this is this is a self -promotion and it reflects the fact that he is casting himself simultaneously as the heir
of Roman power in Gaul you know this is what he's laying claim to but also that he is a kind of barbarian warlord so he's not interested in ruling a global empire as Augustus had done as Charlemagne will aspire to do he's content with being king of the Franks but I mean that's still an absolutely massive
deal and to justify his authority he's casting himself as the equivalent of a Roman governor but also you know he's the descendant of a weird sea creature he's got his long hair he's got all this kind of stuff he's got his very tight pants over his enormous genitals all this stuff that marks him out
as being simultaneously Roman and Frankish and that passage that you read I mean Einhard mentioned some of the things that Clovis had worn in which the Meravision kings have inherited the long hair the beard the cards the long hair particularly yeah so the reggae's criniti the long -haired kings this is what kind
of defines them but the thing is that by the time of Einhard his writing so he's doing that kind of what maybe 820 830 these attributes are cast as kind of grotesque as rustic as embarrassing and it reflects a sense that the Meravisions themselves as the generations have passed as their power kind of bleeds
away have become mere shadows of Clovis the founder of their dynasty they've become kind of phantasms what French scholars have always called the ruin fényon the do -nothing kings kings who play no role in the functioning of the Frankish state and the obvious question is why has this happened how is it
that the heirs of Clovis are just ciphers and Einhard in that passage he read I mean again he gives the answer he says that they've been put in the shadow by officials known as mayors of the palace and these are posts that by the beginning of the 8th century have become like the kingship of the Meravisions
themselves a hereditary post and in the previous episode the episode we did on the battle of Tor we met one of those kind of domineering mayors of the palace and that was Charles who in Einhard's time would come to be known as Martel the Hammer so Charles Martel the Hammer and he's the boat who won the battle
at all of course he absolutely is and this redounds greatly to his reputation but the thing is that long before he wins that battle he's already won you know a name for himself as the most formidable warrior not just in the lands of the Franks but in the whole of Christendom he's used his expertise
in war to fashion a really quite coherent empire so he's the master of Australia where his forebears came from so that's the eastern Frankish kingdom stretching in beyond the Rhine into Germany he's the master of Neustria which is the Frankish kingdom that extends along the line of the channel he has in the wake
of the battle of Tor he's moved southwards to start trying to bring Provence and Aquitaine under his rule so for Charles the defeat of the invading Emmaides the invading Saracens I mean this is you know brilliant it's excellent for his reputation but the thing he really cares about is fashioning a proper
empire out of all the disparate parts of the kind of the Regan and Frank or of the kingdom of the Franks and Tor helps him particularly with subordinating Aquitaine because Odo the Duke of Aquitaine who had been Charles's rival he had been smashed up by the invading Saracens Odo had come to Charles
to ask for help Charles had agreed but Odo had had to submit to him and in 735 actually Odo retires to a monastery now his son and his grandson will continue the fight but basically they're on a losing wicket by this point there's no way that they're going to ultimately be able to hold out against the might that Charles
and his heirs can bring to bear on them and this is also in the long run true of Muslims in the south of Gaul so Charles targets them as well so he advances southwards he drives them out from the great fortresses of Arles of Avignon he annihilates a massive seaborne expedition of Umayyad forces outside
Narbonne there's descriptions of the Muslim fugitives trying desperately to swim back to their ships being pursued by the victorious Franks being speared in the shallows and the lagoons like tuna.
fabulous stuff if you're a Frank and by 741 which is when Charles Martel finally dies his armies so the Franks under his leadership pretty much have the range of lands stretching from the Pyrenees all the way to the Danube so a vast vast expanse of territory so the Frankish lords of southern Gaul and the Umayyads
these are people who've been comprehensively hammered by Charles Martel but they're not alone so too have a very distinctive class in Frankish society and these are the bishops and we talked about this in the first episode we did on you know the age of Clovis the bishops almost without exception are the heirs
of the kind of the old gallo Roman aristocracy right the kind of senatorial figures who had been the wealthy elites of Roman Gaul and these families still preserve their authority through the institution of the episcope through having themselves elected by their local cities as bishops you know if you
want an example of a class of people who preserve the traditions of the vanished Roman empire Frankish bishops are your guys right so they're very learned they're very scholarly you know they're kind of educated in classical poetry as well as in the bible and that kind of stuff they may well play a kind
of part on the great national stage but ultimately their real loyalty isn't to the kind of the distant Frankish king or you know in the case of Charles Martel the distant Frankish mayor but to the local city the local community that they represent on the stage of Gaul and whose peoples have elected
them and for the vast majority of Franks it's the bishops who kind of mediate between the mass of Christians and the dimension of the divine and they're able to do this because they are almost invariably the descendants of saints and bishops whose tombs are in the cathedrals where they sit so it's a kind
of family project right and the effect of this is that all across Gaul wherever you go there are these tombs of martyrs of holy men of bishops i mean Saint Martin is the most famous of these but he's by no means the only one and it enables the Franks when they look at their bishops to feel not just
that they have living links with the you know the vanished realm of Rome i mean they don't really care about this by this point but they can look at their bishops and feel these are venerable representatives of a very very ancient Christianity and it enables them to feel that Gaul is like a kind of Holy
Land a Christian Holy Land yeah they don't really need for instance the sanction of the papacy or whatever they've got Saint Martin they've got all that stuff yeah essentially they're spiritually self -sufficient and this has been the case ever since the first emergence of the Frankish monarchy but the thing
about Charles Martel he doesn't like this at all he won't tolerate an alternative power base presumably yeah basically he doesn't like these bishops they're too independent they're too able to defy his will and so what he wants is to replace them with his own kinsmen with his own trusted allies and it
doesn't matter to Charles if the bishops he appoints you know kind of no Virgil or whatever he doesn't care about their educational standards or whether they have local links to the cities that they are going to serve as bishops for or if they have family connections to the saints whose tombs lie in their
cathedrals so that class of person is being elbowed aside and Charles is putting in their place you know his own henchmen and effectively this is I think the final extinction of Roman Gaul this is where Gaul if you like becomes Frankia and Frankia is the word that will give us you know the name of France
so you can see Gaul becoming France at this point under the rule of Charles Martel and Patrick Geary who's the you know one of the great historians of this process it's so interesting so I read what he says in full Charles Martel accomplished what no other secular power had been able to do in the previous
two centuries by his manipulation of ecclesiastical office so you know getting rid of all these bishops and replacing them with his own men by the confiscation of the wealth it controlled and by the appointment of ignorant and entirely worldly lay supporters he finally succeeded in destroying the religious
basis on which had long rested the independent power of the Frankish bishops henceforth they would be powerful lords at times rivaling in power dukes counts and even kings but they would never again command that particular power as monopolists of the sacred this role along with the lead in cultural
life would pass to monasteries so this is surely a key moment in the transition from late antiquity to early medieval right that there a vestige of kind of Roman cultural spiritual life has been smashed more power has been concentrated in the warlords who are now making themselves kings is that right
yeah I think absolutely and what compounds the impact of this process is that in the south of Gaul where Roman civilization had been much more deeply planted it had been there for much longer urban civilization had kind of survived to a degree that it hadn't in northern Gaul you know the cities there
have over the previous decades have been absolutely smashed to pieces first by the Arab invaders and then by Charles Martel's invasion south and his attempt to reclaim these cities so it's not just that the old Roman bishops have been swept aside it's also that the independence of the cities that had
maintained them has also been massively shattered so people who've been to the south of France if you you know you think of Neem or Arlo or whatever there are still incredibly impressive Roman remains there but this is the point where they are really starting to crumble away as well as Roman cities
kind of in the north had already done they start to be cannibalized they crumble away they're shattered by wars and as you say I think this is really the kind of the end point of late antiquity in Gaul this is where the kind of you want to say the middle ages begin I mean this is the kind of the start
point and obviously the bishops the kind of the Roman old school the Aussian regime they hate this I mean they're so resentful and there's a perfect example of this in the form of the erstwhile bishop of Orleon who's a man called Eucharius and that's a Roman name and that's really telling because by this point
in the eighth century most Roman names are fading away they're being replaced by Frankish names yeah people are all called theodowulf or something yeah exactly Childerbert or whatever yeah but among this kind of class of you know descended from senators and so on they do preserve their Roman name so you
can tell from Eucharius that he's a kind of very grand figure you know with lineage going back to the Roman past anyway Charles turns up in Orleon after the battle of Tor very chipper very full of himself he's beating the enemy off and Eucharius is kind of grumpy and grouchy and snobbish towards him
so Charles Martel just says piss off don't want you anymore replaces him with one of his own henchmen and Eucharius is furious about this and in due course when Charles Martel dies he reports he reports a vision that he's been shown in a dream by an angel and this angel leads Eucharius down into hell
and there he shows him Charles Martel condemned in body and soul to eternal punishment and Eucharius wakes up absolutely thrilled by this vision tells everyone absolutely great news Charles Martel is in hell and he says you know if you want proof for this let's go to Charles Martel's tomb let's open
it up and see if the body's there because if it's not there that will be evidence that the body has been taken away and dunked in the you know the boiling vats of the inferno so a party got together they go to Charles's tomb they open it up and i will quote from a subsequent record of what happens therefore
they went to the aforementioned monastery where Charles's body was buried they opened his tomb and suddenly Dominic a dragon emerged oh my word and the whole interior of the tomb was found to be blackened as if it had been burned and that actually happened well right at the beginning of this series
and in the episode we did on clavers i promised people that we'd have a dragon and there it is and now we have comes rushing out it's obviously been burning the tomb Charles Martel's body has been taken dunked in hell what more proof do you need okay well that's good enough for me okay but not everybody
in the church thinks Charles is a bad guy and in fact there are bishops who think oh he's brilliant aren't there well there's there's one very particular bishop and that is the bishop of Rome the pope so the pope from Rome i mean he has no particular dog in the fight he doesn't mind at all what uh Charles
Martel is doing to the bishops in Gaul and in fact he's very very keen to cozy up to Charles Martel so in 739 which is two years before Charles dies the pope who's called Gregory the third sends him the keys of Saint Peter and a portion of the chains that had bound Saint Peter when he was held in prison before
being executed by the Romans and this is a pretty clear signal that the papacy is interested in doing a deal with Charles and with his family and this is quite timely because everyone knows that Charles isn't long for this life you know by 739 he's pretty old and the assumption is that Charles's two
eldest sons one of whom is called Carleman one of whom is called Pepin will succeed him but they will do so obviously not as kings but as mares and i think there's a sense not just in Rome but also across you know most of the Frankish kingdom that this is ridiculous i mean it's mad that you know you've
still got a mare of engine king with his long hair and he's being wheeled out on his cart and that kind of thing and this is focused when Charles dies in 741 and sure enough his roles as mare are divided up among his sons so the elder one Carleman becomes the mare of Australia the eastern kingdom and the younger
one Pepin becomes the mare of Neustria with his capital now in based in Paris and what makes this even more ridiculous and seem ludicrous to people is that there isn't even at this point a mare of engine king on the throne out of mare of engines they run out of their visions they haven't got one so Carleman and Pepin it's
difficult for them initially to establish their authority you know they're not the hammer so it takes some time to affirm their authority they think well actually maybe it would be kind of easier for us if we did have a kind of mare of engine king on the throne so they look around and they find a mare of engine
and he's a guy called Chilperic inevitably and they plonk him on the throne and he becomes Chilperic the third but the obvious solution to this whole problem is for him to be deposed for the mare of engine monarchy itself to be abolished and for either Carleman or Pepin or perhaps both to become kings
but there is a which is you know how do you do this because Clovis when he'd become king you know this is why he'd proclaimed himself Augustus and why he'd boasted about you know his long hair and being descended from a weird sea monster if you're going to be a king you need a source of legitimacy because you
need to demonstrate to your people and be confident in your own heart in your own soul that God approves of your elevation to the throne so you need something or perhaps someone who can provide that legitimacy who on earth would that be we'll find out after the break what a cliffhanger who is this person don't
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unexpectedly delicious visit screwball whiskey .com to learn more that's screwball with a k enjoy responsibly copyright 2023 screwball spirits llc new york new york Welcome back to the Rest is History we ended with one of the great cliffhangers not merely in the history of this podcast but i think in the history
probably of all human civilization who or what is the possible source of authority that could bestow kingship on carloman and pepin these people who are ruling austrasia and noistria in the realm of the francs i mean massive questions a massive question and you gave it a little spoiler i felt disappointingly
you said our eyes would be turning to rome so tell us who is this person well of course rome is the home of the papacy and people who listen who got this far in the series may have noticed we haven't really mentioned the papacy much and i guess don't it lots of people may have the sense that the pope
is the key player in medieval europe and therefore kind of find it a bit weird but at this point the authority and the influence of the papacy are just a shadow of what they will become kind of in due course over the course of the high middle ages so the bishop of rome the pope i mean he is kind of widely
acknowledged by other churchmen across the west as being the most senior he's the most senior bishop but that's about the limit of it so if the pope you know he writes to kings you know he'll get their respect they'll hear him out but they won't necessarily obey him he can offer them advice but he certainly
can't kind of give them orders and part of that is because he would never think of doing it i mean it wouldn't cross his mind that that's his role but also even if he did you know he lacks the means to do it as we said the bishops say in gall are very independent they don't see themselves as being under the thumb
of the bishop of rome so the francs i think they respect him the pope but not much more than that and definitely you know the bishops in gour these kind of grand descendants of senators they don't they don't feel any sense of cultural cringe towards rome you know they don't need him they are their own
men they have their own saints they have their own traditions they are what they are and the truth is that just as the francs aren't particularly interested in the bishop of rome the bishop of rome isn't really very interested in the francs because in rome you still have this kind of inheritance of ancient
assumptions that anyone north of the alps is a complete barbarian i mean the francs are you know they still see them as these kind of awful people with enormous moustaches and tight pants and stuff yeah well they're not entirely wrong to be fair but it's also because to be honest for most of the period
that we've been describing the popes have a lot on their plate so they have much more pressing things to worry about than you know what might be going on in paris or taluz or whatever and the reason for that is that they are still a part of the roman empire that is centered in Constantinople so the roman empire
in the west has fallen but there is still an eastern roman empire the byzantine empire as it's often called and back in the sixth century so that's around the time that fredegund and hill are being born the great emperor justinian not really a friend of the show is he but his wife theodora is definitely
he absolutely is a friend of the show justin is he okay theodora definitely a friend of the show erstwhile star of love island winner of love island in fact anyway justinian had sent a great invasion force to reconquer rome and that had up to a degree been successful rome had been incorporated back
into the byzantine empire and this had been quite humiliating for the romans because they had been the original imperial capital and the byzantines acknowledged rome as the older city but they also said that compared to Constantinople it counts as the lesser city and so the people of rome who were once
the rulers of this great empire are now themselves kind of subjects and the inferiority of rome to Constantinople is institutionalized in the wake of its reconquest by justinians armies so you have a byzantine governor installed not in rome but in Ravenna to rule byzantine it's a ravenna to be fair
it'd been a imperial capital for a while it had but i mean it's embarrassing rome is not just a provincial capital it's not even a capital at all the emperor kind of lavishes byzantine titles on the roman aristocracy byzantine fashions become all the rage people speak greek the greek church is set up
in rome and rome becomes essentially a kind of ersatz version of Constantinople and for the bishop of rome again there are kind of constant reminders of his inferior status so every time he celebrates a mass he prays for his absent master the emperor in Constantinople every time he writes a letter he's
dating it by the regnal year again of the emperor in Constantinople and meanwhile as he sits there in rome whether he's kind of wandering through the forum or going for a walk on the campus marshes all around him you get in this very memorable phrase by peter brown the great historian of late antiquity
he hears all around him the crash of falling masonry so ancient rome is literally falling to pieces around the pope but the pope is not entirely devoid of assets is he he's got his spiritual assets he's still a prestigious person he's still the preeminent head of any church in the christian world right
he's got a palace that was given to the papacy by constantine and he's the heir of saint peter so he's not nothing he's not nobody yeah you're absolutely right and i think of all those kind of you know those attributes being the heir of saint peter perhaps is the most significant because saint peter
the apostle whom christ himself had named as his rock he has the keys of heaven so he has the power supposedly to bind and loose souls everywhere and the pope claims to have inherited these powers so there's a certain level of potency there and what also kind of raises the self -confidence of the papacy
the willingness of the papacy to see itself not merely as a servant of the emperor and constantinople but perhaps you know his peer maybe even his rival is the fact that constantinople like gall has been coming under increasing attack from amaeyad forces and in fact in 717 so even as amaeyad forces
are spilling across spain in the west in the east a great invasion force is advancing on constantinople and investing it and this is one of the models for tulkine's portrayal of the siege of minas tyreth in the lord of the rings there's a two -year siege by the end of it in 718 this siege is finally
broken but it's been an unbelievably close run thing the Byzantines have had a terrible fright and so too in rome has the pope because the emperor in constantinople is supposed to be the pope's kind of sword and shield but of course when the imperial capital itself is under threat yeah you know the emperor and his advisors
and his military heads you know they're not going to give a toss about rome it's a kind of obscure you know kind of unimportant frontier town and the pope is kind of painfully aware of this and when in the wake of the siege of constantinople and the survival of the byzantine empire the emperors in constantinople
try and reinsert their authority in italy their focus isn't the north it's the south because there they're being menaced by amaeyad forces who are moving up against sysale and against southern italy so that's where byzantine forces are concentrated and in fact they're stripped from the northern reaches
of italy and that then leaves the north of italy open and exposed and in 751 absolute disaster for the papacy because italy is invaded by a people called the lombards and this is kind of almost like a flashback to the fifth century the age of the barbarian invasions because the lombards there are germanic
people they're kind of ferocious warriors and for pretty much two centuries they've parked the northern limits of italy waiting for their opportunity and the fact that byzantine troops have been stripped from the north of italy to go and fight in the south gives them that opportunity and they come sweeping
down on the north and revenna falls to them and when the news is brought to the pope in rome he's thinking oh goodness you know we might be next and there is really very little prospect that the emperor in distant constantinople is going to hear you know the lamentations and appeals for help from the bishop
of rome so he has to look around for an alternative savior right and is this where we get back to the franks because surely and one very obvious person is one of the sons of sharl martell and in particular pepin we talked about pepin in the first half so pepin is going to step forward as the sword and shield
of the papacy is he this is certainly the hope of the pope but before we look at why he might be willing to do this we should just go back and see what's been happening in frankia while all these events have been happening in italy okay so pepin as we said is the younger brother of a guy called carloman and carloman has been
ruling as the mayor of austrasia the eastern region pepin that is the mayor of noestria the kingdom abutting the channel and as we said in the first half between them they have installed a kind of merovingian cipher chilparek the third on the frankish throne and the brothers get on pretty well they
seem to have been fond of each other kind of quite unusual yeah in the annals of frankish history and carloman is very distinctive character in that he combines a high level of kind of murderous ruthlessness with a very very austere level of piety so his most notorious display of ruthlessness people
who listen to our first episode may have remembered that we talked about a great confederation of germanic peoples called the ala mani and they amazingly are still on the scene and carloman decides that the fact that they still have this identity is a threat to his own authority and so he invites them
to a kind of conference and assembly at a place called canstat and all the leading figures of the ala mani come here you know very excited to hear what carloman has to say and what carloman has to say is you're all doomed he gives a signal his servants his aides his men step up slit the throats of all
the ala mani noblemen and that is them wiped out and the claim is that thousands of them are killed so timothy reuter the great historian of frankish germany he wrote that canstat did for the ala manic land holding class what hastings did for the anglo -saxon land holding class i .e.
wipe them out completely so that's got rid of the alamans from the scene but the other project that carloman has been pushing in the eastern regions of his empire is to sponsor a man from devan a guy called windfrith to convert all the pagan peoples who line the eastern borders of the frankish empire
and windfrith is a remarkable man he's as far as i know the only anglo -saxon missionary ever to have had a power station named after him power station in germany or in england it's in dorset windfrith power station so he comes over to germany and he's very very effective you know with his i bring you
the good news of christ he's got john adams his voice president john he's from devan he's like rich nixon right right i think we agreed that nixon was from summerset so and he does so well that he comes to be called bonaface so good deeds and he's hailed as the apostle to the germans and actually to
this day he's the patron saint of europe he has an amazing impact he converts huge numbers of people and carloman thinks this is brilliant he's got rid of the alamans he's converting all these pagans to christianity it's all looking good but then weirdly in 747 he goes to rome and he prays before the pope
and he says i don't want to be a king anymore i want to become a monk and the king shaves off his hair you know the emblem of power among the ranks gives him a tonsier the tonsier of a monk and carloman retires to the monastery of monty casino he's gone mad he's had a breakdown or he's had a religious
vision dominick his piety has won out against his worldly ambitions and there is actually there's one chronicler who suggests that he felt guilt about what he'd done to the alamans so he said he felt contrite and because of this he abandoned his kingdom but the truth is we don't know wow we don't know
what a bizarre twist yeah it is a bizarre twist i mean people i think felt at the time that it was bizarre yeah and obviously it's great for pepping it's absolutely brilliant for pepping because he is now the sole master of frankie who's got the lot yeah and he decides because of this you know enough
is enough it's mad that i am not the king but of course he wants the reassurance that god approves of this and so he turns to the pope who's a man called zachary he's of greek descent so you can see there kind of you know evidence for the biting influence of consan to nope in rome but this is a key
moment because effectively the pope is about to turn his gaze from consan to nope northwards to the kingdom of the francs and he gets this zachary gets his letter from pepping and in it pepping asks is it right or not that the king of the francs at this time has absolutely no power but nevertheless
possesses the royal office and zachary replies no it is not right and pepping says brilliant so he's talking about the merovingian bloke who's still hanging around he's saying let's get rid of him give me the crown enough of the merovingians who cares about them yes and effectively pepping can now feel
that god wants him to do what he wants to do which is to make himself king yeah so in 7 5 1 which is the same year that the lombards invade italy and capture revener pepping finishes off the merovingian dynasty so as einhardt described in the opening of this episode chilperic is kind of dragged out
of his estate his hair is cut off he is taunted he is sent off to a monastery and that's the end of him that's the end of the merovingians the lion of clovis is extinct unless of course your damn brown in which case you think it's continued into the present day but i think it hasn't happened so pepping
now faces the challenge of kind of setting himself aside as someone of royal status someone who is kind of elevated above the common run that the merovingians had never faced because the merovingians could claim that they were descended from this kind of weird sea monster they had their long hair they
had all this kind of stuff pepping doesn't have any of this so what he does is he turns to the bible and in the bible he reads of people who had not been of royal stock being elevated to the throne like david saw and david being the classic examples and the mark of their becoming kings is that they
are anointed with holy oil and so this is what pepping has done to himself he goes to swassar in noistria northeast of frankia and there the holy oil is put on his brow by a bishop and he feels it kind of impregnating his skin and he has been elevated to a kind of sacramental level and then three years
later he goes one better and he gets the pope himself to come to frankia to repeat this ceremony and by this point sacary is dead but there is a new pope called stephen ii and he is more than ready to do as pepping wants basically to answer the frankish king's bidding and the reason for this is that the lombards
are still very much on the scene so in the autumn of 754 he sets off from rome northwards towards the alps and he is the first pope ever to travel to gall to travel beyond the alps and there's a very dramatic account of his journey i mean it really does read like something out of lord of the rings some
kind of fantasy novel there's descriptions of him climbing the alps amid gusts of snow and he's following a kind of ancient roman road that's been left all cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair and he travels through a great wilderness of kind of sickening mists and ice and finally he reaches
the summit of the pass and this is the gateway of the kingdom of the francs but below him so below the road there's this great frozen lake and beside it there's the ruins of a long abandoned pagan temple and you know for stephen ii coming from rome this is you know he thinks this is a terrible mistake
but then he continues down the road into the land of the francs and he very soon reaches an abbey that had been sacred to an entire legion of christians who had been martyred by the romans back in the days of the roman empire and his hosts tell the pope that there is no people in the world who are more
devoted to the cult of the martyrs to the cult of the saints than the francs and the pope is told the bodies of the holy martyrs which the romans buried with fire and mutilated by the sword and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts these bodies they had found and enclosed in gold and precious stones
so it's actually pretty passive aggressive because what they're doing is saying we don't really need you we've got our own saints we are kind of holier than the romans and you know you're the bishop of the romans so you know just remember what does the pope make of this i don't think the pope really
notices what he's being told because i think he's so relieved that he's managed to get across the alps he hasn't fallen into ravine he hasn't been attacked by the phantoms of pagan gods so that he's just glad to be among civilized christian people and so he continues on his way it takes him six weeks
he gets to paris and there he meets pepin and he sees pepin and he immediately kind of bursts into ostentatious floods of tears and he begs pepin to come to the protection of st peter and then he goes with pepin up to the great abbey of san deni which is where charmartel had been buried obviously where the dragon had
been hanging out and there in san deni he anoints him a second time and just for good measure he salutes not just pepin as the anointed king of god but the franks themselves as the new israelites he hails them as a chosen generation a royal priesthood a holy nation a peculiar people so essentially the pope
is now lending his prestige to the self -conceit of the franks that they are you know they are something special and so do the franks live up to their side of their bargain because obviously he's looking to them to protect him against the lombards isn't he he is he absolutely lives up to his side of the bargain so 7
5 5 one year after he's been anointed by the pope he crosses the alps he invades the lombody he smashes the lombard king gets the lombard king to submit two years later the lombards are causing trouble again so pepin returns to northern italy inflicts an even more crushing defeat on the lombards and this time
all the territories that the lombards had conquered from Byzantium are given by pepin to the pope or rather to saint peter but effectively to the pope and pepin then goes down to rome and he has all the keys of the cities that he's conquered and he lays them on the tomb of saint peter on the tomb of the apostle
and of course as saint peter's caretaker is the pope so effectively the pope is now the master of this great swathe of lands that previously had been ruled by the emperor in Constantinople and then had been purloined by the lombard king and the news of this when it reaches Constantinople i mean the emperor is absolutely
furious he says these are mine but the pope you know he doesn't care he shifted his loyalty he's no longer team constant in opel he's now very much team frank and the reason for that is that pepin and the francs have you know plucked him and the papacy from the absolute jaws of disaster and god's hand is also evident
in the greatness of pepin in the wake of his anointing because following steven's arrival in paris and his hailing of the francs as a holy people everything goes absolutely brilliantly for them absolutely amazingly and in fact by the time that pepin dies in 768 he has set the frankish monarchy and the frankish
empire on even more solid and impressive foundations than charles martel has done so the taming of the lombards is only one of pepin's triumphs he also effectively clears the arabs from the south of frankia kind of expels them beyond the pyrenees aquitaine is also absolutely and definitively reduced
to obedience so i said that odo the great duke of aquitaine who'd fought with charles martel at tor he's retired to a monastery but his son and his grandson had tried to continue the struggle pepin not having any of it the last duke of aquitaine odo's grandson gets murdered by his own followers because they
think he's such a loser and after that there's no more talk of an independent aquitaine the whole while pepin has continued charles martel's devotion to military discipline he's recruited more heavy cavalry he's gooned his infantry so that they're an absolute peak of discipline and fitness and expertise
he continues to sponsor missionary work on the eastern flank of his empire among the american germans and all of which means that when he dies he leaves to his two elder sons the elder one is called charles the younger one confusingly is called carloman absolute waves of carlamans in this episode but he
leaves to them a kingdom that's not just the foremost power in western europe but is obviously absolutely primed to become even more formidable you know everything is ready for even more impressive conquests but there's an obvious problem this issue of two old two sons so the franks have a history of dividing
up their realms but to avoid fighting to divide them up between different brothers and um when you've got two brothers here charles and carloman is there not an enormous latent potential for a civil war between the two right so pepin and the elder carloman they've got on well carloman the guy who goes
off and becomes a monk but the younger carloman and his elder brother charles say the sons of pepin they don't like each other at all and pepin's lands have been divided up between the two of them charles gets this kind of half doughnut and carloman gets the kind of lump in the middle they really don't
get on well at all and einhard in his account he blames this on so he says that harmony between them was maintained but only with difficulty for many of carloman's advisors did their best to foster divisions between the two brothers to the degree that some of them were actively maneuvering to precipitate
an open conflict but then in december 771 so that's only three years after the death of pepin a dramatic development carloman dies off a nosebleed do you die of a nosebleed i mean well clearly you can i mean was there foul play yeah there doesn't seem to be in the sources any suspicion of that and i
think most historians accept that i mean if it wasn't the nosebleed i mean he he seems to have died of natural causes and that means of course that charles is now really the only kid on the block and he gets unanimously elected as king of all the lands of the francs and so he now has the reigns of this vast
empire that's been forged by his father and his grandfather he alone holds the reigns in his hands and the question is you know as we said what's he going to do with it he's so primed so ready to go on the offensive and the question is how far will he go and i guess that there's a clue to the answer
to that question in the name by which this new young king of the francs charles charles is best known today because he is known by us not as charles not as charles but as charlemaine charles the great and in the next two episodes we will be looking at how charles earns that name wonderful so if you
remember the rest is history club you can hear the next episode and indeed the third episode in our charlemaine trilogy right away if you're not you can hear them by signing up at therestishistory .com what better christmas present to yourself could there be literally can't think of any but if you're
scrooge or the grinch then i'm afraid you're gonna have to wait till next week because we'll be back on monday and then on christmas day with the final two episodes of our mighty series on the life of charlemaine tom a veritable tour de force thank you very much and goodbye bye bye hello everybody dominick
sanbrook here and i'm tom holland and we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you don't we dominick we do so we often say we've got exciting news but this is genuinely very very exciting news we are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year the rest is history
will be returning to the royal albert hall on sunday the 4th of may to perform live once again with an orchestra and we will be bringing you a brand new show and this time discussing two more of history's most extraordinary fascinating and iconic classical composers in this case cikovsky and vaguena and these
extraordinary lives will be brought to life thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned philharmonia orchestra conducted by the celebrated oliver zephyrman so that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience and we are hoping that this too will be an unforgettable night there'll
be great music we'll be telling great stories we'll be delving into their history so you had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can and these tickets will be available from www .royal alberthall .com on thursday the 19th of december with a presale for the rest is history club
members and royal albert hall friends and patrons 24 hours earlier on wednesday the 18th of december at 10 am that is the rest is history live with the philharmonia orchestra cikovsky and vaguena it's at the royal albert hall on sunday the 4th of may now the tickets are available for members on wednesday
the 18th of december and for the general public on thursday the 19th of december and please make sure that you don't miss it
