Charlemagne’s personal life rivals a soap opera. In 773, the beginning of my first novel, The Cross and the Dragon, he is twice divorced, married to wife No. 3, and about to go to war with his ex-father-in-law, the king of Lombardy, who is threatening Rome. I didn’t make any of that up. Oh, and his first cousin, the duke of Bavaria, is married to the sister of wife No. 2. And Charles had two sons named after their grandfather Pepin (the younger originally called Carloman).
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| A coin with Charles’s image from late in his reign (from Wikimedia Commons, permission granted under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License) |
After Fastrada died, Charles married Luitgard, probably
after dating her for two years. Luitgard did not bear Charles any children, and
that was probably why he married her. At the time, the emperor had three grown
sons, each of whom expected a kingdom. If he had any more sons born in wedlock,
it could lead to civil unrest. And that’s probably why he did not remarry after
Luitgard died. Instead, he had several mistresses, who bore children. Those
mistresses proved Charles’s virility and thus his physical perfection, a
qualification for a king to rule. Physical abnormalities were believed to be a
sign of God’s anger.
When a
Frankish king died, each son born in wedlock got a kingdom.
Although aristocrats did try to divorce childless wives, there was also such a
thing as having too many sons as Charles’s son Louis the Pious found out the
hard way. Louis’s first wife bore three healthy sons, and he divided his
kingdom among them. Unfortunately, she died, and he could not remain celibate.
So he married a girl half his age. The problem is she was fertile. And when she
bore Louis’s fourth son, he had to find a way to accommodate the prince. One of
the three older sons did not want to give up his land, and that led to civil
war, the very thing Charles was trying to avoid later in his life.
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| Bertha Broadfoot, 1848, by Eugène Oudiné at Luxembourg Garden, Paris. (copyrighted photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons) |
When Frankish King Carloman died, Charles seized his younger
brother’s lands. But the widowed Queen Gerberga was not about to let her young
sons lose their inheritance (or give up her power as regent) without a fight,
even if it meant forming an alliance with the Lombard king, Charles’
ex-father-law angry over the divorce from wife No. 2.
Queen Fastrada was influential. A surviving letter from Charles to her implies that he counted on her to make sure the litanies to ensure God’s favor in a coming war were performed, very important in an age that believed in divine intervention.
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| A 14th century depiction of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (public domain image via Wikimedia commons) |
Medieval
people bathed. Aristocrats would take a bath once a week. OK,
that is not as often as most of us in 21st century America, but it is more
frequent than my teachers led me to believe.
Baths were a requirement for palaces, and bathhouses
contained hot and cold pools. The bathhouse at the Charlemagne’s palace at
Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle in French) was spring fed and could accommodate up to
100 bathers. Abbeys also had baths for the residents, guests, and the sick.
Some people abstained from bathing but that was to atone for
sin, similar to fasting. (For more, see my post about that misconception.
