Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. The Middle Ages lasted for a really, really long time. A thousand years, give or take.
Events at their beginning are more distant from those that they're in than we are from the close of the medieval period. They're further away from one another than Alexander the Great was from the Bronze Age collapse. That's plenty long enough for the general public to skip over some of the truly crucial people and events of that era. The Carolingians are at the heart of the European Middle Ages.
While the name of Charlemagne certainly hasn't been forgotten, it's certainly not as well known as that of Richard the Lionheart or Henry V and some other historical figures who frankly mattered far less. That's despite the massive empire Charlemagne built, the transformative reform program that piggybacked off his political success, and the intellectual and religious ferment we call the Carolingian Renaissance. In short, without Charlemagne, the Middle Ages would barely be recognizable.
On top of that, the doings of Charlemagne's sons, grandsons, and descendants are even less familiar than those of Charlemagne himself. That is absolutely not because there's nothing to say. Thank you so much for joining us.
that shattered an empire and made medieval Europe. I really enjoyed reading it, and I highly recommend it to you all. Dr. Perry and Professor Gabriel also co-authored The Bright Ages, A New History of Medieval Europe, which I also really enjoyed, and they jointly write the newsletter Modern Medieval on Button Down.
Dr. Perry, thank you so much for talking with me today. Patrick, it's just great to be here. So without going into exhaustive detail, who were the Carolingians and how did they build an empire? So the Carolingians are the second major Frankish dynasty. So I guess we got to, again, without exhaustive detail, jump back a little bit to the Franks, right? There are peoples living in northwestern Europe.
connected to the Western Roman Empire and in the transitions of the 5th and 6th century emerge as a major independent power in Northwestern Europe and then much of what we might today call France. leader. Clovis famously converts to Catholicism, which allows him to build alliances with the sort of Roman-identified powerful families in the region. They team up against the Visigoths and against other people and carve out this...
this sort of post-Roman but also Roman legacy state under what becomes known as the Merovingian dynasty. Flash forward into the 750s, the Merovingians are really not... significantly in power anymore, but there's a powerful family under the leadership of a guy named Charles Martel, who is Charles the Hammer, which is also a very good wrestling name. And Charles is the mayor of the palace, but it's really sort of the military.
and to some extent political leader of the late Merovingian dynasty. He starts running the show. He doesn't actually ever take the title of king, but he is functioning as king. But then his son, Pepin, does depose the Merovingian dynasty. and becomes anointed as king, like the kings in the Old Testament, oil poured over his head by religious figures, and he becomes the new king.
historians call it the dynasty, the Carolingians named after Charles, Carolus in Latin, Charles Martel, but then also Pepin's son, more famously, Charles the Great, again, Carolus Magnus, the Carolingian dynasty. So we're talking about the family of Charles Martel. Pepin and Charlemagne as the Carolingians.
Yeah, I just have to say Charles Martel is the perfect name for like a French Canadian wrestler who works at the local circuit. Like Charles the Hammer, like that guy has been in some amazing matches in like Union Halls in Lower Quebec. Yeah, I think. if he doesn't already exist, he should. I mean, Charles Martel is really interesting in part because he is really important, but also because he fights this famous battle in Tours against an Islamic force moving up out of Spain.
that is both important and not as important. there's this whole legacy. Oh, if it wasn't for Charles Martel, we would all be speaking Arabic, not Latin. And that's just not true. Um, you know, there's complicated Christian and Muslim alliances on both sides, but also it is important. So it's just one of these things where as a historian, you want to say this battle.
matters, but not as much as you think, but no, it still matters. Right. So, you know, this is all background to the story we're telling in Oathbreakers, but it's definitely, it's important background and it leads into sort of the ideas of who these people are. Yeah, I mean, the Battle of Tours...
If you are of a certain age and you were studying history and kind of current politics writing about 20 years ago in the aftermath of 9-11 and the lead up to the Iraq war, when there was so much talk about clashes of civilizations, the battle.
of tour played a really important role among some, I would say like right-wing intellectuals who were trying to define that clash of civilizations. Like the battle of tour came up all the time. Like Victor Davis Hanson talked about the battle of tour all the time back in that timeframe. I'm old enough. to remember that but me too and so like you may have heard that name but it was not a clash of civilizations i think we could pretty safely say that yeah i mean absolutely like like
This is about there are multiple Islamic factions jockeying for power and multiple Christian factions jockeying for power. And they lie across religious boundaries and within religious boundaries. And it's really interesting. Again, this is not what Oathbreakers is about.
It could be. It's a good, I mean, Charles Martel is a book. And it's a book that has been written and has been looked about a lot. But again, often I think in these ways that we're just talking about, to distort rather than to reveal. From Wondery, I'm Raza Jaffrey. And in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the case file on Mons Klöben, the spy who gave London its Christmas tree.
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So what made the Carolingians so successful? Because they start off as mayors of the palace. Pepin becomes king. His sons also follow in his footsteps. But how do they go from being mayors of the palace to rulers of a kind of a... trans-European empire. Yeah, I mean, so at least when I was studying history in high school and college, which was some time ago, I really had this notion that the Merovingians were this sort of decrepit...
you know, flawed kingdom and then the Carolingians come in and they were the good Franks. And my sense is a lot of Merovingian, there's a lot of revision. being done around the Merovingians as a vibrant, important kingdom. That really laid the foundations for Frankish success, that they expanded where they could expand, they built alliances where they could build alliances, that the structures of the Merovingian Frankish kingdom are aligned.
lot of what enabled the Carolingians to continue to build on it. There's a brand new book that just came out from James Palmer at St. Andrews called Merovingian Worlds. It came out like a week ago or something, so I don't have it in my hands. But I think there's a lot of work being done there that I think is going to really revitalize the Merovingians a bit. And part of that is because the Carolingians themselves, as they took power, told a story about the Merovingians.
being worthless and the Carolingians being God's, you know, chosen kings. They were very good propagandists. They were very good military leaders. They had enemies around the fringes who they could fight and... beat. So they had kind of a military triumphalism, but they were not particularly threatened by outside invading forces in the 9th century. They had an alliance with...
The church, I mean, when we say the church in the 9th century, or the 8th century, rather, my co-author Matthew doesn't like me to say the church because it's not true in a fundamental way. There are many important... clerical figures that the Frankish secular nobility aligned with, and then also a lot of them were Carolingian elites, just who happened to be in the church. And then this Frankish papal alliance, Pepin goes to Rome, really gets... PayPal backing, they help.
He and his son, Charlemagne, help the popes defeat the Lombards in northern Italy and establish more papal independence in the region. And so they have very effective propaganda. And I don't mean propagandists. obviously pejoratively, right? If you're going to rule, you have to tell a story. And they were very good at it. And there were a lot of people doing that. So they had a strong foundation. They had weak enemies, but enemies they could fight. And they had these connections across.
secular and religious boundaries to the extent those boundaries even existed that were really helpful. I mean, I think it's hard to overstate from a layperson's perspective how much of what we take for granted about the Middle Ages is...
Carolingian or grows out of that context. I mean, everything from the stereotypical handwriting that you imagine when you see a medieval manuscript is almost always Carolingian minuscule, the script that spreads in this period, the linguistic reforms that give us the idea of.
of romance languages as being something separate from Latin, probably grew out of a Carolingian context. All of this stuff that, I mean, the idea of the papacy as being something that you have to care about, even that comes heavily. through the Carolingians. So, like, what kind of story did they tell and what made that compelling to people? Like, what got people to buy into this idea of the Carolingians? Yeah, so we write about...
The empire has built on a foundation of lies. Actually, we say all empires are built on a foundation of lies, right? Which... is negative in the sense that lies eventually crumble. And certainly Matt and I are spending, my co-author Matt and I are thinking a lot, as I think we all are, about what it means when societies that seem stable start to fall apart very quickly in our own. time. But also, like...
Telling stories about yourself as a people is one of the things that states do and that states need to do in order to succeed. So really the Franks built a story around themselves as the new chosen people of God, the new Israel. using that language very explicitly, and selling that story across Frankish society, and then doing the important thing that many successful sort of expansive empires do, of making Frankishness.
accessible to people who were not Franks, right? They bring the Aquitanians in, and the Aquitanians continue to think of themselves as Aquitanians, but also Franks. That being Frank, being part of the Frankish... project as God's chosen people, um, is available to, to those who are being brought into the empire. And that, that really does work. Uh, that kind of storytelling really does work, especially when paired with, right. We were just talking about Carolingian minuscule, this hand.
writing reform and this thing we call the Carolingian Renaissance. And as you know, I'm opposed to renaissances in general, but there definitely, there are... beyond sort of that phrase, there are intellectual and cultural reforms that are done, that take place and are done on purpose, right? It's not just something that happens out of nowhere. The leadership of the Frankish empire...
build these reforms in, in order to spread the story, in order to make sure that it's accessible across society and not just in, you know, so that everyone can, can read the same handwriting. Everyone can tell the same stories. Part of it is bureaucratic, making sure that like. Taxes can be collected and people know how big the empire is. There's this really important moment where there's a treaty at the end. They want to, you know, spoiler alert. The grandsons of Charlemagne want to split.
Well, they don't want to. They have to split the territories in three. And the first thing they have to do is they say, oh, well, what are our territories anyway? And so they send out people to find out.
But it only takes a year, right? Like, I actually think it's remarkable how fast they come back together and say, okay, we got that data. Now let's draw some lines on the map, right? They have bureaucratic reforms. They have these cultural reforms. We don't know what peasants thought, but we can certainly imagine. that
the visual art, and then the oral storytelling that by definition doesn't survive is communicating these things throughout society, these stories throughout society. And as long as they're winning, as long as things are stable, the idea... that you're God's people and that all the good things are happening because of this.
Seems very compelling. It seems to really work. Especially when your enemies are largely pagans or polytheists. Like, I mean, they're like, so one of Charlemagne's probably not quite so positive acts in hindsight is, I mean. like slaughtering, like what, 5,000 Saxons after a battle? I mean, I don't have those numbers at hand, but it certainly is not a small number of people. Yeah, it's like, I mean, what is by modern standards an atrocity, but fit quite neatly in a context of Christian renewal.
and a hyper-Christian particularism on the part of the Franks and their ruling dynasty. Fighting the Avars, sacking the Avar fortress, again, polytheistic people, fighting the Frisians. So it was not that hard, even if they also did a lot of fighting against Christians, it was not that hard to paint them as Christian particularists. And then the problem, though, is that no one wins all wars forever.
Right. So what happens at the fringes of the Carolingian Empire when they start to lose? And that's sort of the not it's not particularly his fault, although it may not not be his fault. But a lot of that starts to happen during the reign of Louis the Pious.
in soul surviving sun and air. And so they've got this story of triumphalism, but then you start to lose. So now what do you do? And that really sets up kind of the, how we come into the heart of the book. We open with Charlemagne trying to lay that. exactly the groundwork we've been talking about. But then we move into Louis the Pious and they start to lose. And that's a real problem.
So Louis the Pious has a number of sons. How do they eventually come into conflict with one another? What's the mechanism that pushes them into this internecine conflict? So the core of our book is about the civil war fought between Louis the Pious. eldest son, who is... Lothar, and then his second eldest son, Louis, known as Louis the German. He then has another son named Pepin, who dies in the 830s before Louis, but Pepin has a son named Pepin, so this nephew is also... involved in...
Or the nephew of the brothers is also involved. And then Louis has a later marriage to a woman named Judith, who is also very important in our story. And Judith has a son who they named Charles, which is, you know, a super loaded name in Carolingian context. The Carolingians, they named their youngest son Charles. He's like half the age of his brothers. His brothers are in their...
I don't have the ages sort of at my fingertips, although I should. But his brothers are in their sort of late 30s and 40s. And at the big battle we get into, at this Battle of Fontenois, Charles is 18, right? So there's this big generational split. But so it's really... Louis, Lothar, and Charles with then this guy Pepin around, and very important. They come into power because on the one hand, the Carolingians had been lucky. They had no... real mechanism for coherent succession.
But that when Pepin died, Pepin the short, the first king died, he had two sons, Charles and Carloman. But Carloman dies, not of mysterious causes. He dies. Now his sons vanished mysteriously, and we think that was probably murder. But that leaves Charlemagne, or Charles, then soon Charlemagne, the only son. So now he's the emperor, and that's pretty easy.
Charlemagne lives a long time and has many children, but by the time he dies, his only legitimate son is Louis the Pious. So again, it's pretty easy. But by the time Louis the Pious dies, he still has these three adult sons, and there is no clear solution.
There are, however, decades of document writing. They weren't stupid, right? They come up with a plan. They write, you know, the Ordinatio Empiri. This is how succession is going to work, and everyone swears to agree to it. But they have no real practice of that.
They have no tradition of sort of a clean succession. And so Lothar wants to be emperor, the eldest son. And everyone by the time Louis the Pius dies more or less agrees on that. But what they don't agree on that is what it means to be emperor. What kinds of authority... will he have over his brothers his brothers want to be kings they are going to be kings but what does that mean there is no fundamental agreement there
And so that's part of what brings them into tension. There's no agreement about what that's going to mean. I mean, there's no way of really resolving it other than at least staging towards military conflict. But the other thing is that, and this is.
sort of the second chunk of our book before we get into the Civil War, the reign of Louis the Pious was incredibly unstable. There were multiple coup attempts, and in some ways successful coups, but then successful coups to get immediately rolled back, but then the people who perpetrated the coup... kind of continue in power these suns. So there's this model that you can...
disobey the king or the emperor, raise an army, go into battle, win or lose, negotiate a settlement. No one really ever fights. Even when the armies are lined up against each other on the field, it's all just sort of posing.
And it's all just, you know, there's no terribly negative stakes in seeking power with your army at your back. Because, of course, no Franks are going to fight Franks. There's not going to be a big battle. It's just going to be a lot of—no one's going to execute each other. It's just going to be— a lot of negotiation. And that works right up into the point when it doesn't. And then we get civil war. So there's a lot I want to unpack there. I mean, but the first thing is kind of...
There's a broad historical pattern, I think, that this set of incidents falls into. It's not just because I've been doing Alexander the Great lately and the successors, but this way in which when you have a conquest state, where you have the ruler who... effectively...
builds this kind of ramshackle collection of territories and no matter how committed they are to state building state building is a process that takes generations to carry out it doesn't happen overnight no matter how dedicated and well suited you are to doing it so when The... leader of the conquest state dies, in this case, Charlemagne, the structural tensions that were built into the political culture that they're blowing up in scale don't go away. Right. So they're playing out the same kind.
of succession disputes and internal conflicts that had riven Merovingian Francia going all the way back as far as we have written sources. It's just that now, because this is a conquest state that covers... half of Europe, like the scale of the disputes is much larger and the potential consequences of those are much larger in the same way that like.
You know, the Macedonian successions were always bloody and painful and not particularly pleasant. But when that was a fringe kingdom north of Greece, it didn't matter that much when that empire encompasses half of the known world. All of the sudden. you're playing with fire.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think it's really important to understand just how big the Carolingian Empire got, right? It's a huge territory, and it's a huge territory that's hard to rule for really boring reasons like mountain chains. and rivers, right? I mean, boring in the sense that like...
It's really obvious when you look at a map. It's really hard to rule both Central Europe and Italy at the same time because the Alps are in the way. This is a structural problem for both the Carolingian empires, then later the Holy Roman empires, emperors rather.
Like Frederick Barbarossa, he has a problem that he can only be on one side of the Alps at any one time. And it's just not a solvable problem. I mean, it's only solvable to the extent that you have really loyal and trustworthy lieutenants or kings. major nobles, and sometimes they do, and then it works pretty well, and sometimes they don't. Lothar, he's really king of Italy the whole time, and it just sort of means that...
Whatever is going wrong for him, he always has Italy, and Charles and Louis are never going to get to Italy. But Louis the German has Bavaria, which is not just the modern... German province of Bavaria. I don't know anything about 21st century German provinces, so if that's the wrong thing...
It's, you know, it's literally 900 years after my period and 1,200 years after this book. So forgive me. But Bavaria is a big region, right? And it's a big region that is bounded by the Rhine River and the Danube and then some mountains as well. And, you know, the Alps as well. And every time things get really bad for Louis, he can run back to Bavaria.
Could they have chased him there? I mean, maybe, but they never do. And they probably never do because they don't think it's safe, right? So, like, it's just really big and it's hard to move armies around and that people have their areas of strength they can retreat to. So, you know, that... that continues to be a problem for those who want to exercise authority broadly.
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If you want more laughs, stories and more of us going on script, be sure to follow Everything To Play For wherever you get your podcasts. Are yours going to be all about Wales? Yes. The Battle of Fontenois in 841 is the central...
event of the book. And as you mentioned, this is the turning point. It's the rough equivalent of the Battle of St. Albans and the Wars of the Roses, where all of a sudden the gloves come off and people realize that whatever untruths they had been telling themselves about the nature of...
their political system, those untruths couldn't stand anymore, that now violence is a real thing. But what meanings have modern people attached to that? Why does the Battle of Fontanois kind of reverberate down through the ages for modern people? What's interesting about the Battle of Fontainebleau, I mean, if you like battles, if you're the kind of person, which I suspect many people listening to this podcast are, I am, it's just an amazing battle in the sense of, like, you get...
six armies or three and three sort of facing off each other we know a lot of the players we know a lot of the details but also there are big mysteries about what actually happens in terms of like troop formations and things like that it's a massive slaughter there's a big
cultural reaction, and it has reverberated down through the ages while at the same time being kind of unknown, which is for people like you and me trying to figure out what stories can be tell, what books can be write is sort of a sweet spot, right? It has...
obvious impact, but is also like, if you're writing as people about Agincourt, um, you know, this great new book about Agincourt from Michael Livingstone, but like, he's got to deal with 500 years of writing about Agincourt in a way that with Fontainebleau, you don't. So. Fontainebleau is a big battle that then gets remembered in the 19th century. If you go there today, and I did not get to go there, but Matt did this summer, last summer, there's a...
an obelisk, you know, the Washington Monument shape set up there for 19th century reasons that sort of says this is where France was created, right? This is when France started to be France. That is not true. But it is sort of how it's talked about. These 19th century historians doing their nation building, look at Fontenois as this moment where you have a Carolingian empire, you have this battle, and then afterwards you have France and Germany.
and they go their different ways. I really want to emphasize that is not true in fundamental ways, but is really important in terms of the stories being told, not just about that battle, but about... the Middle Ages, right? This is where we talk about the making of the Middle Ages. It's not because we end up with France and Germany, but we end up with a moment that then people...
almost immediately thereafter, but then certainly a thousand years later, can point to and say, aha, this is the origin story. It's right here. But it didn't have to go that way. They didn't have to fight the battle. the side that one could have lost. And honestly, although it's an astounding battle in terms of the death toll and the reaction to the death toll, it doesn't actually decide.
the Civil War, which continues on much as it had for another year. So on the one hand, it is this climax, but it isn't a climax that we can point to and say, aha. Charles the Bald was a military genius, and then he won, and now the war's over. That would be a neat story, but it's not true.
One of the things that occurred to me as I was reading this is the Civil War in general, and Fontainebleau in particular, are great examples of what a historical institutionalist would call a critical juncture. These are things where...
like the deep structural forces that produce the moment are like something like this was eventually going to happen, right? That when you have tectonic plates rubbing up against each other for long enough, eventually people are going to come into conflict in ways that are kind of overdetermined. But the outcomes are not.
Right. Like that. There's always a chance that people can step back, that the battle doesn't have to happen. The battle doesn't have to go a particular way. People don't have to respond to the outcome of a battle in a specific way. But from that perspective, like I was really fascinated.
by the way that you talked about this is like, it doesn't have to go like this. This doesn't have to lead to those particular outcomes. What outcomes does it lead to? And what outcomes does the civil war lead to? Yeah, so both Matt and I, in The Bright Ages, as well as in this, in our essay writing, we really like to talk about contingency, and we're obviously not alone. But because there tends to be this narrative of inevitability... sort of people sort of casually looking at the past.
We really like to say, look, these are humans. They have agency. They make choices. Almost always the choices are constrained, right? It's not that we have universal choice, but we have choices and we can do different things. And this isn't necessarily like, oh, they could choose not to go to...
war. They could be peace-loving people. That is true. But also, like, sometimes they could kill each other with more abandon, right? They could capture their enemy and chop their head off, right? We talk about the Mongols. One of the reasons they're successful is they don't leave. threats behind them. That's not laudatory in a modern sort of human rights sense, but it's strategically wise at the moment. There are lots of moments in which...
So the level of hostility and violence is just enough to make sure the war doesn't resolve, but never sufficient to actually end it. There's never a moment in which it's debated by military historians whether the Carolingian princes or king, the grandsons of Charlemagne ever actually went into, did they ever charge into battle? We don't really know. We have sources that describe them.
charged into battle, but there are also sources that use language from, like, Virgil to describe them. So, you know, it's a trope. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but it's a trope. But, like, you could get an arrow in the head, and then you'd be dead, and then the war would be different. There's a moment in which...
there's an army tasked with keeping louis the german in bavaria and out of the battle and that's all they have that's their one job but instead uh the ruler of of the the general of this this seems not to like louis the german and Chases him around. Honestly, it's a big meteor crater. It's another one of these really cool sites. Crosses a river, gets ambushed, and dies. And suddenly, Louis the German, first of all, he has all the equipment of the army that he just slaughtered. But then he can...
hook up with his brother Charles, and that's how we get Fontenot. That didn't have to happen at all. They could have spent five more years chasing around. Once they do, though, enter into this combat... It sets up a situation where there is not going to be a return to the status quo of Charlemagne.
and Louis the Pious. And that status quo is an emperor that everyone more or less acknowledges as the leading authority figure with major nobles with lots of independence. And those nobles have different titles, including king when they're proper Carol. Indians, but they're still clearly in kind of in a structure connected to the emperor, and everyone more or less agrees on what that is. By the time we leave the Civil War...
We still have an emperor and we still have kings, but they are much more independent. There is really no sense that the emperor Lothar has any authority over his brothers. And what ends up happening is... what we call kind of the too many Carolingian problems. When it's just Louis the Pious, he's the only legitimate heir. Well, there's lots of cousins and illegitimate people out there, but it's clearly, he's the guy.
Now we have three and they have kids and those kids have kids. And so very quickly, we just have lots of people who have really good claims at being Carolingians. And that leads towards a situation where the empire just cannot hold itself together. in anything like the pattern that we get before. And it's a long time before we start to see something that looks like France.
Again, a great book called House of Lilies just came out about the Capetians. Everyone should look at that for that story, where we get to start to see the Atonians and what becomes the Holy Roman Empire. Again, that's much later, right? There's this period in which...
There's just a lot of Carolingians all with good claims on power. And it's there's sort of no real resolution there. What you mentioned right there is a really essential thing to understand about the Middle Ages is that there are claims to rights. And those claims are always malleable and always enforceable. And that it is almost always violence that ends up enforcing those claims.
What separates a good claim from a bad claim is mostly your ability to enforce it. Or these threats of violence. I mean, I actually think one of the really, really interesting things about the 830s, which is a very tumultuous time. is there are no big pitch battles among the Franks. Even to the point where there's this event called the Field of Lies, which is a great title. It's a field in Colmar, right? Louis the German and Lothar and his armies and the Pope.
and Louis the Pious on the other side with his armies, and the Pope's going back and forth negotiating, and then one night, basically all of Louis the Pious' forces desert to the other side, right? That could have been Fontenois, right? That could have been the, you know, brother versus brother, but it isn't. And there's an expectation that it isn't, right? It's about...
demonstrating that if it came to blows, you would win. So let's just assume I have one and then negotiate from that status. And so it's much more about the threat of violence than actual violence. And again, like at one point, Louis the pious.
at two points in some ways, he's functionally deposed. He's, at one point, actually deposed. He's surrounded by his enemies. His enemies could choose to cut off his head. His enemies could choose to shave his head and send him to a monastery under guard. Like, there are violent things that...
could happen there, and they don't. And if they had, we'd be telling a different story. And it's not hard to imagine that they had, but the problem is to do that to the king violates the bigger meta-narrative of... who the Franks are and their purpose. So, I mean, there's lots of reasons why people don't make those more drastic choices. But yeah, you have to be able to enforce it. But you also, I think, have to believe that trying to enforce it is not going to lead to total societal breakdowns.
all-out civil war. And they're right about that until one day they aren't. I have a question about that. Do you think that that kind of dragging and dragging and dragging is more common in these civil conflicts where there are accepted norms and ideological parameters within which people are operating that that are kind of incentivized?
them not to break it and that that ends up extending the conflict or like i'm curious as to what you think about that yeah that's interesting i mean i don't i don't
I don't know that I've thought about it in terms of the big sweep of history, in part because I don't do the kind of work that you do, which, again, I love, you know, trying to think about these big patterns across hundreds and thousands of years. I definitely think that there are few... incentives for the major players in our book to say, well, I could pursue a maximalized vision of what I want, but.
I mean, I have Bavaria. That's pretty good. I could just stay in Bavaria. There's no real reason. I don't need to push it. Whereas... you know, the downsides of pushing it seem few and the upsides seem many. Because if you lose, you just retreat and sort of reorganize and you're no worse off than you were started. And if you succeed, well, now you control both sides of the Rhine River, which for one gives you...
This is what Louis wants. He wants more control over the Rhine River and the major cities there because they produced a lot of revenue, as well as being an excellent barrier to invaders. And so, you know, he keeps trying to get that, and he thinks he can get that without... risking his life particularly and without risking, you know, if you told him, well, everything's going to break down, there's going to be, you know, mass slaughter on the fields of Fontenot.
he might have not done it. It's clear that the winners are very upset by what happened to the extent that they try to say, well, no, it didn't really happen. Or it did happen, but it was all Lothar's fault and God is okay. And continuing to say that for...
They protest too much. It's clear they're very upset about it. So yeah, it's a situation where the downsides seem minimal and the upsides seem great. So you might as well keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. And that's not a good long-term recipe for stability. Yeah, I'm just I'm thinking about the comparison with the Wars of the Roses here, where it's clear from a very early date that Henry VI can't rule. And yet Henry VI sticks around for a very long time. Right, right.
of Henry VI is part of what keeps this round of conflicts going and going and going and going periodically for a couple of decades, where it's like, looking back on it, probably should have just gotten rid of Henry in the first place and had a new king.
But if you do that, then you have to admit on some level that the whole structure that you're working within is in some way questionable. If you go around killing kings, well, who's to say you can't kill another king? And what would-be king wants to be the guy who's putting him?
in danger there. Yeah, yeah. I think it's actually really telling that at only one point in this whole civil war do Charles and Louis, so Lothar's emperor, Charles and Louis are kings, Charles and Louis... are mostly allied, although there's big questions from their own supporters at how serious, like they never, they never threaten each other, but you know.
Just because you're an ally doesn't mean that they're going to show up when you need them, right? And so that's a big tension. At only one point do they even put in writing, we're going to get rid of the emperor entirely. It's always no Lothar. You get to be emperor. It's that you're not going to have any say over us and that we're going to get this. We're going to, you know, Charles is going to get the sort of the Frankish heartland and Louis wants the Rhine river. And there's only.
this one moment in which they write an agreement saying, we'll just split it in two. Forget Lothar. It's always we're going to split it in three. It's a question of how they just can't conceive of pushing it to that degree. Again, they might have been wiser to just say, let's get Lothar out of the picture. Let's chop it in half. Let's get him captured and sent off to a monastery or even executed.
That might have been a smarter move, but it's just not really on their radar. And it's pretty clear that the moment they put it in writing, it's just a negotiating tactic to make sure that Lothar comes back to the table in the process that actually leads to the sort of... end of this war.
One of the things that I really love about the book is, as you guys have written it, is that these concerns and these constraints on behavior, these ideas that people have about how they're supposed to behave in this context, it seems really tangible and real.
And you can understand why when you write it the way that you do, why people make the decisions that they do. Their kind of thought world of like how things are supposed to work and how these figures are supposed to interact with each other. It's just so clear and so real. serious accomplishment. I want to compliment you on that.
Thank you. We tried to do that. Part of the reason we can do it is, I mean, first of all, as always, there's generations of scholarship that we get to read. So that's super helpful. But also because the Carolingians wrote a lot of these things down, right? They were a highly literate culture. that prize literacy and learning across elite society, but not just religious elite society. So that when we see these texts, first of all, there are just a lot of them that survive that are, I mean.
There are lots that are missing too, but there's a lot of things that survive in which they talk about these things in different kinds of ways. Never sort of nakedly where you can just, you know, read the words and say, oh, that's what they thought because they were savvy political actors. But there's just a lot of sources of lots of different.
kinds of sources as well in terms of allegory and history and sermons and diplomatic documents and visual art and all these different kinds of things that once you really do the scholarship deeply. And I want to say the person who has done this scholarship deeply in this team is Matt, right? I am trained as a Venetian historian. I'm trained on the 13th century. Matt is the one who spent his whole sort of adult life thinking about.
these questions of, of who the Carolingians are. And I've learned a lot from him in part because he gave me a reading list. And the first thing that I did for this book was. do the reading, which is what we learn how to do in graduate school is, oh, here's a reading list. I'm going to read 80 things. Okay, now I'm ready. It's not like I didn't know about the Carolingians, but I think there's a really important difference between someone who...
sits down to write a book and reads very seriously, which is me and someone who has spent decades thinking about how the Carolingians think about themselves. Right. And that's, um, that's Matt, my coauthor, but then also a lot of other people who, who have written it down, but it's.
only possible to the degree that we that we can get to it because the Carolingians themselves were very interested in these things and they just did a lot of writing there's this moment there's an incredible chronicle of the Civil War by a guy named Nithard who is a from an illegitimate line of Charlemagne's. So he's a Carolingian but illegitimate. He's a noble.
And at one point, sort of this war starts and Charles the Bald, according to Nithard, calls him up and says, hey, we're starting a big civil war now. This is going to be important. You need to start writing the history of it today. Does it happen exactly like that? No, but it kind of does happen like that. I mean, Nidard writes this history because Charles says, hey, we're going to need some history. Let's start it right now, long before they know the outcome.
That's just incredible that that kind of thing is done. And if there's one, there probably were 30 others that we just don't have. It's hard to overstate. If you study the Middle Ages, what a treasure trove the Carolingians are of written source material in comparison to the preceding period, certainly. But even in comparison to like the 10th century that comes after, like there's just a huge array of available.
sources that you can use to dive into the Carolingians in a way that is not possible for the Merovingians of, say, the 7th century, which is almost a black hole of source material. Like, there's just not that much. I mean, it's what happens when you create...
a literate class that shares a common intellectual culture, right? And there are interesting things like all of the Carolingian generals are reading the same two military manuals and are training by the same sort of... roman and late roman military techniques so it's not you know it's not just about like how they read the bible although that's a big topic too but it's like how you use cavalry right how you count
population and agricultural produce. And they just, there's a shared literary culture across elite Carolingian society that really makes a difference. And it's not just men. I think that's really important too. We talk a lot about this, this woman named Duoda, who is... the wife of one of the, if not villains, certainly rascals of our book, this guy Bernard of Septimania.
really fun to write about. Bernard's son gets taken as a hostage late in this period. And Duoda sits down and writes this phenomenal text. It's an advice manual, but it's also kind of a, it's a family history. It's a, it's a how to be. good ruler. It's lots of things. To me, it's one of my two or three favorite texts surviving from the entire Middle Ages, so I don't say that lightly. Again, Duoda's text is unusual, but... The fact that she's doing it means that we have to assume...
equal literacy across that class of women throughout the Frankish world. Cause there's no reason to think that she's the only one or that she's some kind of genius. We think she's typical of her class. It's just, this is the source that survives. Yeah. It's again, like. You said it, but...
That text by Duota is one of the absolute coolest ones to survive from the Middle Ages. Absolutely. I think it's also in my top three. It's right up there with, like, The Murder of Charles the Good. Yeah, yeah. Like, those are probably my two favorites from this whole period.
me to list my top three um because it might change by the second but but dwota is very i mean when i when i teach big surveys of the middle ages and the bright ages too right we tried to do a thousand years and 80 000 words um and dwota got a lot of time in it because we just think she's so important.
Yeah, super cool text. And just and that's the kind of text that survives for the Carolingians that doesn't elsewhere that allows you as a historian to get inside the brains of these people in ways that that is difficult earlier and later. But it's what makes this book so. Well, Rich, I mean, it's about a time and a place that doesn't get as much attention as it should. Again, I can't say this too much. It's really good. Thank you, Patrick.
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I want to fast forward kind of to the end of the story. So we have the Battle of Fontenois. What happens in the aftermath? What is the settlement that eventually emerges from this civil war? Yeah, so there's this famous thing. To the extent that people know about the Civil War, and I can remember this from my sophomore year of college, the first medieval history class I ever took, which for me is kind of an origin story in my whole life career.
this is what I do now. So I remember that class very well. And I love that professor. I'm still in touch with him. You know, the thing that we learned about the Carolingians in the three days we spent on it was, you know, a lot of Charles Martel and Pepin, then a ton of Charlemagne. Oh yeah. And then it broke down. and there's this thing, the Treaty of Verdun, that splits the empire into three. That's not untrue. In 842, the three brothers agree.
that they will divide up the empire. As I said, they send out people to figure out what the empire is so they can make good maps. They meet at this place called Verdun, which is really just a very convenient spot kind of in the middle, and they divide up the empire. This, again, in the 19th century becomes origins of France and Germany. And part of it is because...
I am pretty sure I was told there was an actual treaty document that survives and there were copies in like French, Latin, and German. And I don't know who told me that or if I made it up, but it's not true. What there is, is a moment in which Charles and Louis come together. at Strasbourg in 842 and they swear oaths to each other and those oaths are preserved in Latin, French, and German. Which is not a sign, which is...
can be taken, again, by 19th century historians. I really hate 19th century historians. I think they made a lot of mistakes. So if I say that a lot, it's because I'm angry at them. You know, as sort of, oh, evidence that Europe is dividing. That's not it at all. It's evidence of a multilingual society in which people were very comfortable talking in each other's languages as a matter of routine.
But we do end up with this thing where we have Lothar with this big territory stretching kind of like a thousand miles, but in a very narrow strip. We have Charles with Aquitaine and... with what we can consider roughly the borders of what turns into France. Again, that's a later story. But it includes Aquitaine, who that he has to immediately go back out and fight for and sort of try to conquer, even though he rules it. And Louis the German with Bavaria and Saxony and these other.
kind of Central European, east of the Rhine, north of the Danube territories. And those do turn out to have a kind of longer life as regions. But nobody knew that in 843. What they knew in 843 is that no one was going to win the Civil War in the short term. They knew that Muslims were raiding from the south, that Vikings were raiding from the north and the west, that...
The Byzantines were saying, the emissaries saying, hey, there's all these problems going on, that there's a real concern about external threats as well as that the weather was bad, that the harvests weren't good. They knew that they needed to sign a ceasefire and to come up with an agreement. But there was no reason to believe that...
a year later or five years later or 10 years later, there wasn't going to be another round of this. It doesn't happen. There are reasons why it doesn't happen. But that's not something that they know in 843. There have been a lot of agreements. There have been a lot of times where they had come together and said, okay, this is the... plan and that plan lasted only until it didn't it just so happens that the treaty of verdun with hindsight
does actually start to draw some lines that have longer historical significance. Yeah, I want to talk about the language thing real quick, because I actually did a lot of work on this in grad school. I worked with that text. And the best explanation I've heard, because yes, people call this... People say it's the first document in French. It's one of the first documents in the Romance languages. And it's not.
It's just odd, yeah. Yeah, the best explanation I've heard for it is that it's basically a pronunciation guide. So there's no distinction in people's minds between their spoken Latin language and the written Latin language.
Over time, they have diverged a great deal. So if you want to read a Latin text aloud, it's a lot like modern English where the pronunciation doesn't match the orthography at all. It doesn't match what's written on the page. So if you want to read... a Latin text in such a way that it makes sense.
to your audience, you need to have a pronunciation guide and that that's what the quote-unquote French text of the Treaty of Verdun is. Yeah, I mean, what I like is I like the previous moment at Strasbourg because...
First of all, our book's called Oath Breakers because a lot of people break oaths, but that chapter's called Oath Makers because they're making oaths, so that's just sort of fun as a writer, right? But, like, it's just clear that everyone there... the elite, you know, the nobles, they're all just sort of, they're writing in Latin and they're talking in French and they're talking in German and they're very comfortable crossing these linguistic norms.
In ways that should be very familiar to anyone who lives in a bilingual or trilingual or multilingual society. No one in Switzerland would think that was weird. But certainly a lot of people in America find that unusual and think it's a big. bigger deal. It's not. And I think that this kind of orality.
must be happening all the time with these oaths. It's just that this moment, it seems worth writing down in this way. It becomes sort of a formal way of ritually bonding these groups of people together so that they can present a united front to Lothar. are and demand an end to this war and a favorable peace treaty, which works. So that's good for them.
So I have one more question for you that I want to ask. It's a totally different vein, but you've mentioned you wrote this book with Matthew Gabriel. What is it like writing a whole book with another person? What is that process like? How does that work?
function we've done it we've done it twice now um and it's 100 true that when we started out doing it we don't really feel we had guides to it and actually one of the things matt and i are talking about is we'd like to see a lot more of this kind of collaborative work and most importantly
We'd like to see people in grad school being given the opportunity to learn and practice collaboration as a discipline, as a humanities discipline, because what we learn in grad school is how to sit alone and write alone.
And that's important, too. I mean, no one should have to collaborate. You know, there certainly have been phases in my life in which I didn't want to talk to anyone. But, like, when in grad school do we say, okay, you guys should write a paper together. You know Arabic. You know Latin.
you know, go, go do it together. And I wish I'd had some opportunities like that. And we'd like to see more of that. You know, Matt and I were friends and, you know, we are friends from showing up at conferences. We are friends from. drinking bourbon and beer together late at nights and talking about politics and arguing about baseball. He's a Yankees fan. I'm a Red Sox fan. This is really the only tension in our friendship.
So we were just friends, and we had written some op-eds together, and we just had this idea of how we would do the Bright Ages, and we just sort of started doing it. And our plan was to write alone. as we had been trained for three months or so, and then rent a cabin somewhere and fly to each other's houses or fly the cabins and go fishing and drink bourbon and write some more together and then go back our separate ways. And that happened once.
because we are writing in 2019 and then in 2020. And so when COVID happened, we had to invent a whole new way of working together. And honestly, the key is trust. The key is real trust. And the key is not sort of...
verifying with each other that everything is okay. The key has to be trust. One of us writes a draft. The other person opens the draft and just writes on top of it. There is no track changes. There's no checking in with each other. You just write on top of it as if it was your first draft. And that process can... continues until we have something we like. Then we put on track changes and work slowly and check in with each other. But it's really about trust so that you end up with a common voice.
The Bright Ages in some ways was easier because The Bright Ages, if anyone has read it, is sort of 17 different stories. Each chapter is a story. So it was very easy to say, okay, you take these eight. I'll take the other eight stories. I'll write the introduction. You write the epilogue. And then we traded back and forth. And that is how every chapter had kind of an individual first draft behind it. And I know who they are, although.
I don't think you can tell. I've heard from other people who tried to guess. They did not guess right. Whereas this... Oathbreakers has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a linear story. You can't write the last chapter until you've written the first chapter. So it was a very different kind of process that I don't know that we could have done as a first book.
But by now, it's just so comfortable, Matt and I. We have this relationship as writers where we just kind of slip into each other's writing without noticing. We write a newsletter together a couple times a week. Sometimes I know who wrote the newsletter, but often like sort of I'll write three paragraphs and say, hey, you take it here. And then he does. And then, you know, by the time it's done, we just we're just very it's very comfortable process. And I got to say, it's great because.
We always have a second reader on hand, right? You've written books. You don't know if your book is good until you show it to someone else. And even then you don't know if it's good. But you need beta readers. You need trusted beta readers who can tell you this isn't working. This is working. Here is good. Here we can add something, right? We always have that. We have that guy, you know.
We talk in every day all the time, and it's really special. There's a lot I want to get into there, but if you've never written something like that... I can't overstate how easy it is to go horribly wrong if you have no feedback from anyone. The book I just finished and submitted a draft for, I wrote about the first 20% of it, and then I realized that structurally...
It couldn't hold together. I had to go back and rewrite the first 20% of the book. And it added literally a year to my writing time for the book because I didn't have feedback at the start. I had to go back through and fix that whole section.
Before I could go on to write the rest of the book, it was not like it wasn't like just just go ahead and then you can go back. No, I had to redo that whole thing. So having someone else there from the beginning is like that. That's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. And that 100% happened to me and Matt. But instead of losing a year, we...
Again, we got together. We went fishing. We, you know, made steak. We drank bourbon. This is very typical guy stuff, but it is who we are because fishing, bourbon, and steak are delicious and fun. But then we, you know, what's less typical is we then sat up late at night talking about writing and how to restructure our book because what we were doing in our very first passes, we didn't feel like it was getting there. And so...
It's a lot faster when you have two people inside the project who trust each other. And I feel really lucky. That's it's awesome. I mean, and like one of the cool things over the past five years or so, I've gotten to talk to a ton of archaeologists and archaeologists are used to working collaboratively. Right. Because it's normal. It's 100 percent normal. It is absolutely baked in.
to the discipline and getting to see their work and talk to them about their work. It is so clear to me the ways in which historians could benefit from doing that. But to your point, you mentioned this, we're just not trained to do it. We're not trained to think in those.
terms we're not trained to think of projects as being collaborative from the get-go um and that there are huge benefits to it not least because sometimes it makes your life easier i mean for me it makes my life easier but also like Graduate school is getting shorter. Funding is getting more limited. And if you are pre-modernists, there's just a lot of languages and no one can learn them all. And to me, that's like when I when I focus in on the real tangible thing, it's like.
I learned Latin and Greek. I did not learn Arabic and Hebrew, but I want to write about the Mediterranean. The solution is a partner, right? That is the solution. It's right there. So I think we can do a lot more of that. Yeah. Well, again, the book is Oathbreakers, The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. Dr. Perry, like I said, I really, really liked this book. I highly recommend it. Everybody go out and buy it for all of the history readers in your life.
life. Thank you so much for your time. And I really hope we get to do this again soon. Yeah, I hope so, too. If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
Thanks so much for joining me today. Be sure and hit me up if you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on Tides or something you'd like to see. You can find me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Wyman or on Facebook at Patrick Wyman MMA or on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick. I write on other topics at patrickwyman.substack.com. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe.
From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. Hey, it's Dan Taberski, and my team and I are excited to share that our series, Hysterical, has been named Apple Podcasts Show of the Year for 2024.
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