Killing in the Name (of Pepin)
An Empire that was Always Trying to Murder Itself (an excerpt from Oathbreakers)
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
We’ve been a bit radio silent for a few weeks but not because we haven’t been busy! Indeed, we’ve been hard at work on our new book Oathbreakers. We’ve found this writing to be a bit different from The Bright Ages but in the same neighborhood - filled with rich, compelling stories about families, the decisions they made (or didn’t make), and how those decisions rippled outwards for generations. We can’t wait to share it with you.
For now though, we offer just a little taste - an hors d’oeuvre. This is a story about a quashed rebellion by a disillusioned son, a theme that is as much a characterization of the eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian empire as anything else out there.
Enjoy.
The priest lay beneath the altar in the darkened church, listening to men plot the murder of his king. He knew their voices. Charlemagne (Carolus magnus - Charles “the Great”) and his court had spent over a year residing in the Bavarian capital of Regensburg, using it as a base of operations for military expeditions against the Saxons to the north and as a base from which to assert authority over the fiercely independent Frankish nobles in the region. But now some of those very nobles had gathered in the priest’s church and only the grace of God had given him a moment of warning - an instinct to hide - before this group of nobles had seen him. Now only the thin altar cloth concealed him from the conspirators.
He bit his lip to stifle a gasp as he recognized yet another voice, that of Pepin, King Charles’ eldest son. He almost fainted when he heard why they were in the church - the son organizing a plot against his own father. The priest prayed silently, eyes screwed shut, as Pepin told his allies that they would seize the king and then murder him, placing Pepin on the throne.
Maybe the priest gasped a little too loudly at these revelations. Maybe Pepin was just paranoid. In any event, as the meeting came to its conclusion, Pepin ordered the room searched and the conspirators, poking into every corner, eventually looked under the altar. When they found the cleric, he was sure his days on earth had come to an end and resolved to try and face it bravely.
But in the ninth century it was one thing to plot the murder of a king, but quite another to slaughter a priest in his own chapel. What’s more, should such a blasphemy be discovered, if the priest were missed, the ensuing investigation or alarm could endanger the conspiracy. So, two men-at-arms grabbed the priest and held him tightly as Pepin offered him a choice. The priest could die, right here, right now, or he could swear a sacred oath – which of course as a priest he would be expected to keep – to keep silent about the conspiracy. Ashamed and terrified, the priest swore the oath and then collapsed into himself a wreck as the violent men left his church.
But is an oath made under duress really an oath, the priest asked himself? Would it not be a greater sin to keep quiet than to cling to sacrilegious words forced from his lips? The priest decided, as soon as he was sure the conspirators had really departed, to be an oathbreaker. He decided that it was worth risking his soul to try and save the king. He ran to the palace. But by that time it was late at night and one does not simply walk into the king’s bedroom. In fact, the priest discovered that the chamber lay at the heart of the building and was guarded by seven locked doors. The great Charlemagne may not have suspected his son’s perfidy but security mattered because plenty of people might try to harm the king and his family. By God’s grace, so the story goes, the priest found a way in though, wriggling through windows and drainage ditches, ripping his vestments, until clad only in a linen shirt and undergarments, filthy from head to toe, he found himself at the threshold of the king’s chamber. He began to bang on the door.
Within a few moments, some of the women who served the queen and the princesses arrived to see who would dare disturb the royal household at this late hour. They laughed to see such a seemingly deranged individual demanding an audience with the king. They mocked him, then slammed the door and re-locked it, intending to simply leave the matter there. But the king was ever vigilant, ever wakeful. He heard the commotion and wanted to know what was happening. When he heard about the wild man, Charlemagne ordered the man brought before him. The priest threw himself at the king’s feet and told him everything. Charles, in his wisdom, understood this was a matter to be taken seriously. And so the conspiracy was revealed. The plotters were captured and swiftly punished. Some were exiled, all had their property confiscated, and his son Pepin was forced to take monastic vows - sent away to the monastery of Prüm in order to live the rest of his life in penance and seclusion.
This attempted coup against Charlemagne that was launched by his son Pepin and other Frankish nobles in the year 792 CE was recorded in several contemporary sources, but the version recounted here comes to us from much later, written in the 880s by a monk and historian called Notker the Stammerer. This is by far the most detailed and dramatic account of the plot we have but also one of the most distant from the events in question. Indeed, it’s so vivid that we can almost be certain it never happened this way. As we said in the Introduction, our sources can at times tell compelling stories but it’s our job to try to understand motivations and implications - to not assume deception but to never be naive readers about the past.
There absolutely was an attempted coup in 792. Those remembering it later, such as Notker, with the distance of several generations between them and the event, described it as serious but quickly squashed. Charlemagne, as king and father, had no need to make an example of the conspirators by drenching Regensburg (and the rest of Bavaria) in blood, but could instead use the occasion to demonstrate wisdom and mercy. So in Notker’s version of this story, as was noted above, several high-ranking Frankish nobles lost major tracts of land, some were also exiled, and Pepin - who by the time Notker wrote was remembered as an evil, ill-tempered, physically disabled bastard son of a concubine - was packed off to monastic seclusion. And also in this telling, Charlemagne was described as the wise king, betrayed by his son, but ever watchful (even late at night!) and temperate enough in judgment to seek restoration rather than retribution once the danger had been averted.
But scholars have shown that this coup attempt was much more serious than Notker was projecting. What’s more, this type of maneuvering was not out of the ordinary. The Frankish kingdom was prone to moments of volatility. Frankish sons of the royal household had a tradition of plotting against their fathers. But the story of the Franks, the story of a chosen people building an empire, required concealing how tenuous the whole enterprise actually was, both at the moment of the threat and for generations afterwards.
The ripple effects continued for years, though not always badly for the conspirators. Those not maimed or killed could, with the passage of time and if they had sufficient wealth and political influence, be restored to Charlemagne’s favor. The kings of the Franks needed their nobles, in some ways more than the other way around. The same, however, cannot be said for Pepin, who largely vanishes from our sources and into the realm of the imagination -- save a notice of his death in 811, then a miracle story from 839, and a Broadway musical written in 1972.
When civil war erupted two generations later in the time of the sons of Louis the Pious, violence leaving fields full of dead Franks killed by other Franks, their bodies food for the crows, we find shock rippling through the surviving sources. Sometimes, as we will discuss, our authors absolutely were shocked by what they were describing. But at other times, that shock was used as a rhetorical argument for why this violence was different from other types of violence that had been relatively common in previous generations. When this latter rhetorical move happens, we need to pay attention to it because it alerts us to these authors’ overall point (about who should control the empire in this civil war). Our job as historians is to sift through those rhetorical poses, to understand not only what happened by what it was portrayed in the way that it was.
The real story of 792, as much as the real story of 841, is about jealous brothers, marginalized sisters, and domineering fathers, as much as it’s about religion and empire…
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