Louis the Pious

Louis the Pious (778 – 20 June 840), also known as the Fair and the Debonaire, ruled as King of the Franks and co-emperor alongside his father Charlemagne from 813. He had been King of Aquitaine since 781. As the last living child of Charlemagne and Hildegard, he took sole command of the Franks after his father died in 814 and remained emperor until his own death in 840, except for a brief period from November 833 to March 834 when he was overthrown.

While governing Aquitaine, Louis was responsible for protecting the empire’s southwestern border. He captured Barcelona from the Emirate of Córdoba in 801 and, in 812, secured Frankish control over Pamplona and the Basques living south of the Pyrenees. As emperor, he brought his adult sons—Lothair, Pepin, and Louis—into the government and tried to create a fair division of the realm among them. The first ten years of his rule were marked by several disasters and humiliations, most notably the harsh treatment of his nephew Bernard of Italy, for which Louis later performed a public act of penance.

During the 830s, his empire was torn apart by civil war between his sons, made worse by Louis’s efforts to include Charles, his son from a second marriage, in the succession plans. Although his reign ended on a positive note, with order largely restored, it was followed by three more years of conflict. Louis is usually judged less favorably than his father, but he faced very different challenges.

Louis was born in 778 while Charlemagne was campaigning in the Pyrenees, at the Carolingian villa of Cassinogilum—likely Chasseneuil near Poitiers. He was the third son of Charlemagne and Hildegard and had a twin brother named Lothair, who died young. The twins were given names from the old Merovingian dynasty, possibly to create a link to that line.

At age three, in 781, Louis was crowned King of Aquitaine. The next year he was sent to Aquitaine with regents and a court. Charlemagne set up this sub-kingdom to secure the border after the destructive war against the Aquitanians and Basques under Waifar and later Hunald II, which ended with the disastrous Battle of Roncesvalles in 778. Charlemagne wanted Louis to grow up in the region he would rule. But worried about the local customs his son might pick up, Charlemagne—who had remarried Fastrada after Hildegard’s death—summoned Louis in 785. Louis appeared at the royal Council of Paderborn in Saxony dressed in Basque clothing, along with other youths in similar outfits. This likely made a good impression in Toulouse, since the Basques of Vasconia were a key part of the Aquitanian army.

In 794, Charlemagne gave Louis four former Gallo-Roman villas as winter residences: Doué, Ebreuil, Angeac, and Chasseneuil. Charlemagne wanted all his sons to grow up as natives of their assigned territories, wearing local dress and ruling according to local customs. So the children were sent to their realms young. The marches—border principalities—acted as vital defenses against outside threats. Louis ruled over the Spanish March. In 797, Barcelona, the largest city in the March, fell to the Franks when its governor Zeid rebelled against Córdoba and, failing, handed it over. Córdoban forces retook it in 799. Louis then led his entire kingdom’s army—including Gascons under Duke Sancho I of Gascony, Provençals under Leibulf, and Goths under Bera—over the Pyrenees and besieged the city for seven months, wintering there from 800 to 801 until it surrendered. Louis was formally given his armor in 791 at age fourteen. Still, the princes were not given full independence from central authority, as Charlemagne wanted to instill ideas of empire and unity by sending them on distant military campaigns. Louis joined his brother Pippin at least once in the Mezzogiorno campaign in Italy against Duke Grimoald of Benevento.

Louis was one of Charlemagne’s three legitimate sons to survive infancy. His twin Lothair died young. Under Frankish custom of partible inheritance, Louis expected to share the realm with his brothers Charles the Younger, King of Neustria, and Pepin, King of Italy. In the Divisio Regnorum of 806, Charlemagne designated Charles the Younger as his successor in the Frankish heartland of Neustria and Austrasia, and gave Pepin the Iron Crown of Lombardy. To Louis’s kingdom of Aquitaine, he added Septimania, Provence, and part of Burgundy. But Charlemagne’s other legitimate sons died—Pepin in 810 and Charles in 811—so Louis was crowned co-emperor with the already ailing Charlemagne in Aachen on 11 September 813. When his father died in 814, Louis inherited the entire Carolingian Empire and all its possessions, except for the kingdom of Italy; Charlemagne had ordered in 813 that Bernard, Pepin’s son, be made and called king there.

While at his palace of Doué in Anjou, Louis learned of his father’s death. He hurried to Aachen and crowned himself emperor as the attending nobles shouted “Vivat Imperator Ludovicus.” Arriving at the imperial court in Aachen amid mutual suspicion and anxiety, his first move was to clear the palace of those he considered undesirable. He destroyed the old Germanic pagan tokens and texts that had been kept there.