An Empire and Its Handwriting
The Carolingians took the Frankish throne by papal arrangement. In 751 Pippin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king. In 754 the pope anointed him, beginning a key alliance with Rome.
Charlemagne expanded this realm across the West on a vast scale:
- Conquered the Lombard kingdom in 774
- Subdued Saxony across a brutal thirty-year campaign
- Destroyed the Avar khaganate in 796
On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in Rome. Constantinople resisted this new Empire and delayed recognition until 812.
Effective administration held this realm together:
- Counts governed local districts.
- missi dominici inspected these counts in pairs of 12 administrative circuits.
- capitularies carried royal legislation, mandating schools and educated clergy.
This educational drive launched the Carolingian Renaissance. Led by Alcuin of York, this court reform revolutionised written Latin.
Scribes invented Carolingian minuscule, a clear hand with spaced lower-case letters. Roughly seven thousand manuscripts survive from the ninth century alone. Most classical Latin literature survives today only through a Carolingian copy.
Division and Invasions
Frankish custom divided inheritances among surviving sons. Charlemagne's heir, Louis the Pious, struggled to divide the realm fairly. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 finally split the empire:
| Share | Ruler | Territory |
|---|---|---|
| West Francia | Charles the Bald | Roughly modern France |
| East Francia | Louis the German | Roughly modern Germany |
| Middle Francia | Lothar | Low Countries to Italy, with the title |
Middle Francia lacked natural borders and fractured quickly.
A new wave of external raiders soon struck:
- Vikings raided coasts and river valleys from the north.
- Magyars struck from the east until their defeat at the Lechfeld in 955.
- Muslim raiders attacked southern coasts.
Local lords built castles for defence, turning public offices into private hereditary lordships.
Common pitfall: Do not read Verdun as the birth of modern nations. It was merely a dynastic estate settlement between three brothers. Nobody at Verdun in 843 intended to found France or Germany.