When
he was merely King Charles, one of Charlemagne’s family feuds involved his
ex-father-in-law, along with his widowed sister-in-law and her young sons, and
the fate of the Church hung in the balance.
On
his deathbed in 768, King Pepin followed Frankish custom and split the realm
between his surviving sons, Charles and Carloman. Charles was 20, and Carloman
was 17. Both were married to Frankish women Pepin had picked out for them.
The
brothers did not get along. Charles put down a rebellion in Aquitaine in 769,
with no assistance from Carloman. The queen mother, Bertrada, intervened and
worked to ensure peace between her sons along with their cousin, the duke of
Bavaria, and Lombard King Desiderius, one of whose daughter was the Bavarian
duchess.
This
was a time when marriages were a means of diplomacy, and in 770, Bertrada was
arranging a marriage between Charles and a Lombard princess. In the summer of
that year, Pope Stephen III wrote an impassioned letter to both brothers urging
them not to marry her. In 770/71, Charles divorced his first wife, the mother
of his eldest son Pepin (also called Pepin the Hunchback), and married the
Lombard princess.
Shortly
after Carloman died (December 4, 771), his widow, Gerberga, fled to Italy with
their two young sons. Meanwhile, Charles divorced the Lombard and married
Hildegard, whose father ruled over land that used to be in Carloman’s kingdom.
Like his father, Charles seized land from his nephews.
In
772, the same year as Charles’s first war in Saxony, Desiderius was trying to
get Pope Stephen’s successor, Hadrian I, to anoint Carloman’s sons. The Lombard
king seized papal cities and threatened Rome. The pope asked Charles to fulfill
his father’s oath as patrician of Rome and come to his aid.
After
attempts to bribe Desiderius failed, Charles crossed the Alps in the fall of
773. Desiderius fled to Pavia, while Gerberga and her sons fled to Verona,
accompanied by Desiderius’s son, Adalgis. Charles laid siege to Pavia, then
took a smaller force to Verona, where Gerberga surrendered voluntarily. Adalgis
escaped and became an official in the Byzantine court, and years later, he
would cause trouble for his ex-brother-in-law.
Charles
returned to Pavia. As the siege wore on, he visited Rome at Easter, presumably
seeking divine intervention. He finally won after a year-long siege, seized the
Lombard crown, and sent Desiderius, his wife, and a daughter to the cloister.
History
is silent on the fate of Gerberga and her sons, yet one can reasonably
speculate they, too, ended up at an abbey. After all, it is how Charles’s two
other family feuds ended, one involving his eldest son, Pepin; the other with
the duke of Bavaria and his family.
A
1493 miniature from the Chronicles of France, printed by Antoine Verard,
depicts Pope Hadrian I meeting Charlemagne. (From Wikimedia Commons, public
domain image)
Sources:
Charlemagne:
Translated Sources,
P.D. King
Carolingian
Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories, translated by Bernhard
Walters Scholz with Barbara Rogers
Charlemagne:
Empire and Society,
edited by Joanna Story
This is Kim's first guest post at Unusual Historicals, and we are delighted to feature her contribution!