Tom Holland
Appearances
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Henceforth, they would be powerful lords, at times rivaling in power dukes, counts, and even kings, but they would never again command that particular power As monopolists of the sacred, this role, along with the lead in cultural life, would pass to monasteries.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Yeah, I think absolutely. And what compounds the impact of this process is that in the south of Gaul, where Roman civilization had been much more deeply planted, it had been there for much longer, urban civilization had kind of survived to a degree that it hadn't in northern Gaul.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
The cities there, over the previous decades, have been absolutely smashed to pieces, first by the Arab invaders and then by Charles Martel's invasion south and his attempt to reclaim these cities. It's not just that the old Roman bishops have been swept aside, it's also that the independence of the cities that had maintained them has also been massively shattered.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
People who've been to the south of France, if you think of Nîmes or Arles or whatever, There are still incredibly impressive Roman remains there. But this is the point where they are really starting to crumble away as well, as Roman cities kind of in the north had already done. They start to be cannibalized. They crumble away. They're shattered by wars.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And as you say, I think this is really the kind of the end point of late antiquity in Gaul. This is where the kind of you want to say the Middle Ages begin. I mean, this is the kind of the start point. And obviously, the bishops, the kind of the Roman old school, the Ancien Régime, they hate this. I mean, they're so resentful.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And there's a perfect example of this in the form of the erstwhile bishop of Orléans, who's a man called Eucharist. And that's a Roman name. And that's really telling because by this point in the 8th century, most Roman names are fading away. They're being replaced by Frankish names. Yeah. People are all called Theodore Wolfe or something. Yeah, exactly. Childebert or whatever. Yeah.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But among this kind of class of, you know, descended from senators and so on, they do preserve their Roman name. So you can tell from Eukaryus that he's kind of very grand figure, you know, with lineage going back to the Roman past. Anyway, Charles turns up in Orléans after the Battle of Tours. Very chipper, very full of himself. He's beaten the enemy off.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And Eukaryus is kind of grumpy and grouchy and snobbish towards him. So Charles Martel just says, piss off. don't want you anymore, replaces him with one of his own henchmen. And Eucharist is furious about this. And in due course, when Charles Martel dies, he reports a vision that he's been shown in a dream by an angel. And this angel leads Eucharist down into hell.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And there he shows him Charles Martel condemned in body and soul to eternal punishment. And Eucharist wakes up, he's absolutely thrilled by this vision, tells everyone, absolutely great news, Charles Martel is in hell. And he says, you know, if you want proof for this, let's go to Charles Martel's tomb, let's open it up and see if the body's there.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Because if it's not there, that will be evidence that the body has been taken away and dunked in the, you know, the boiling vats of the inferno. So a party got together, they go to Charles's tomb, they open it up. And I will quote from a subsequent record of what happens. Therefore, they went to the aforementioned monastery where Charles's body was buried.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
They opened his tomb, and suddenly, Dominic, a dragon emerged. Oh, my words. And the whole interior of the tomb was found to be blackened as if it had been burned. And that actually happened. Well, right at the beginning of this series, in the episode we did on Clavis, I promised people that we'd have a dragon. And there it is. And there we have. Comes rushing out.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It's obviously been burning the tomb. Charles Martel's body has been taken, dunked in hell. What more proof do you need?
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Well, there's one very particular bishop, and that is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. So the Pope from Rome, I mean, he has no particular dog in the fight. He doesn't mind at all what Charles Martel is doing to the bishops in Gaul. And in fact, he's very, very keen to cozy up to Charles Martel.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So in 739, which is two years before Charles dies, the Pope, who's called Gregory III, sends him the keys of St. Peter and a portion of the chains that had bound St. Peter when he was held in prison. before being executed by the Romans. And this is a pretty clear signal that the papacy is interested in doing a deal with Charles and with his family.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And this is quite timely because everyone knows that Charles isn't long for this life. You know, by 739, he's pretty old. And the assumption is that Charles's two eldest sons, one of whom is called Carloman, one of whom is called Pepin, will succeed him. But they will do so, obviously, not as kings, but as mayors.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And I think there's a sense, not just in Rome, but also across most of the Frankish kingdom, that this is ridiculous. I mean, it's mad that you've still got a Merovingian king with his long hair and he's being wheeled out on his cart and all that kind of thing. And this is focused when Charles dies in 741. And sure enough, his roles as mayor are divided up among his sons.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So the elder one, Carloman, becomes the mayor of Austrasia, the Eastern Kingdom. And the younger one, Pepin, becomes the mayor of Neustria, with his capital now based in Paris. And what makes this even more ridiculous and seem ludicrous to people is is that there isn't even at this point a Merovingian king on the throne.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
They've run out of Merovingians. They haven't got one. So Carloman and Pepin, it's difficult for them initially to establish their authority. They're not the hammer. So it takes some time to affirm their authority. They think, well, actually, maybe it would be kind of easier for us if we did have a kind of Merovingian king on the throne.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So they look around and they find a Merovingian and he's a guy called Chilperic. Inevitably. And... They plonk him on the throne and he becomes Chilperic III. But the obvious solution to this whole problem is for him to be deposed, for the Merovingian monarchy itself to be abolished, and for either Carloman or Pepin, or perhaps both, to become kings. But there is a problem, which is...
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
how do you do this? Because Clovis, when he'd become king, this is why he'd proclaimed himself Augustus and why he'd boasted about his long hair and being descended from a weird sea monster.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
If you're going to be a king, you need a source of legitimacy because you need to demonstrate to your people and be confident in your own heart, in your own soul, that God approves of your elevation to the throne. So you need something or perhaps something someone who can provide that legitimacy.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Well, of course, Rome is the home of the papacy. And people who've listened, who've got this far in the series, may have noticed we haven't really mentioned the papacy much. And I guess, Dominic, lots of people may have the sense that the Pope is the key player in medieval Europe and therefore kind of find it a bit weird.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But at this point, the authority and the influence of the papacy are just a shadow of what they will become kind of in due course over the course of the high Middle Ages. So the Bishop of Rome, the Pope... I mean, he is kind of widely acknowledged by other churchmen across the West as being the most senior. He's the most senior bishop. But that's about the limit of it.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So if the pope, you know, he writes to kings, you know, he'll get their respect, they'll hear him out, but they won't necessarily obey him. He can offer them advice, but he certainly can't kind of give them orders. And part of that is because he would never think of doing it. I mean, it wouldn't cross his mind that that's his role. But also, even if he did, you know, he lacks the means to do it.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
As we said, the bishops, say, in Gaul are very independent. They don't see themselves as being under the thumb of the bishop of Rome. So the Franks, I think they respect him, the pope, but not much more than that. And definitely, you know, the bishops in Gaul, these kind of grand descendants of senators, they don't. They don't feel any sense of cultural cringe towards Rome.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
You know, they don't need him. They are their own men. They have their own saints. They have their own traditions. They are what they are. And the truth is that just as the Franks aren't particularly interested in the Bishop of Rome, the Bishop of Rome isn't really very interested in the Franks.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Because in Rome, you still have this kind of inheritance of ancient assumptions that anyone north of the Alps is a complete barbarian. I mean, the Franks, they still see them as these kind of awful people with enormous moustaches and tight pants and stuff.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But it's also because, to be honest, for most of the period that we've been describing, the popes have a lot on their plate. So they have much more pressing things to worry about than what might be going on in Paris or Toulouse or whatever. Yeah. And the reason for that is that they are still a part of the Roman Empire that is centered in Constantinople.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So the Roman Empire in the West has fallen, but there is still an Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, as it's often called. And back in the 6th century, so that's around the time that Fredegund and Brunhilde are being born, the great emperor Justinian, not really a friend of the show, is he? But his wife, Theodora, is definitely a friend of the show. Is he? Okay.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Theodora, definitely a friend of the show. Erstwhile star of Love Island, winner of Love Island, in fact. Anyway, Justinian had sent a great invasion force to reconquer Rome, and that had up to a degree been successful. Rome had been incorporated back into the Byzantine Empire. And this had been quite humiliating for the Romans because they had been...
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
the original imperial capital, and the Byzantines acknowledged Rome as the older city, but they also said that compared to Constantinople, it counts as the lesser city. And so the people of Rome who were once the rulers of this great empire are now themselves kind of subjects. And the inferiority of Rome to Constantinople is institutionalized in the wake of its reconquest by Justinian's armies.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So you have a Byzantine governor installed not in Rome, but in Ravenna to rule Byzantine Italy.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It had. But I mean, it's embarrassing. Rome is not just a provincial capital. It's not even a capital at all. The emperor kind of lavishes Byzantine titles on the Roman aristocracy. Byzantine fashions become all the rage. People speak Greek. There are Greek churches set up in Rome. And Rome becomes essentially a kind of ersatz version of Constantinople.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
For the bishop of Rome, again, there are kind of constant reminders of his inferior status. So every time he celebrates a mass, he prays for his absent master, the emperor in Constantinople. Every time he writes a letter, he's dating it by the regnal year, again, of the emperor in Constantinople.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And meanwhile, as he sits there in Rome, whether he's kind of wandering through the Forum or going for a walk on the Campus Martius, all around him, you get in this very memorable phrase by Peter Brown, the great historian of late antiquity, he hears all around him the crash of falling masonry. So ancient Rome is literally falling to pieces around the Pope.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And I think of all those attributes, being the heir of St. Peter perhaps is the most significant because St. Peter, the apostle whom Christ himself had named as his rock, He has the keys of heaven. So he has the power, supposedly, to bind and loose souls everywhere. And the Pope claims to have inherited these powers. So there's a certain level of potency there.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And what also kind of raises the self-confidence of the papacy, the willingness of the papacy to see itself not merely as a servant of the emperor in Constantinople, but perhaps his peer, maybe even his rival. is the fact that Constantinople, like Gaul, has been coming under increasing attack from Umayyad forces.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And in fact, in 717, so even as Umayyad forces are spilling across Spain in the west, in the east, a great invasion force is advancing on Constantinople and investing it. And this is one of the models for Tolkien's portrayal of the siege of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. There's a two-year siege. By the end of it, in 718, this siege is finally broken.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But it's been an unbelievably close-run thing. The Byzantines have had a terrible fright. And so too in Rome has the Pope, because the emperor in Constantinople is supposed to be the Pope's kind of sword and shield. But of course, when the imperial capital itself is under threat... You know, the emperor and his advisors and his military heads, you know, they're not going to give a toss about Rome.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It's a kind of obscure, you know, kind of unimportant frontier town. And the pope is kind of painfully aware of this. And when in the wake of the siege of Constantinople and the survival of the Byzantine Empire, the emperors in Constantinople try and reassert their authority in Italy, their focus isn't the north.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
it's the south because there they're being menaced by Umayyad forces who are moving up against Sicily and against southern Italy. So that's where Byzantine forces are concentrated. And in fact, they're stripped from the northern reaches of Italy. And that then leaves the north of Italy open and exposed.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And in 751, absolute disaster for the papacy because Italy is invaded by a people called the Lombards. And this is kind of almost like a flashback to the fifth century, the age of the barbarian invasions, because the Lombards, they're a Germanic people, they're kind of ferocious warriors.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And for pretty much two centuries, they'd been parked the northern limits of Italy waiting for their opportunity. And the fact that Byzantine troops have been stripped from the north of Italy to go and fight in the south gives them that opportunity. And they come sweeping down on the north and Ravenna falls to them.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And when the news is brought to the Pope in Rome, he's thinking, oh, goodness, you know, we might be next. And there is really very little prospect that the emperor in distant Constantinople is going to hear, you know, the lamentations and appeals for help from the bishop of Rome. So he has to look around for an alternative saviour.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
This is certainly the hope of the Pope. But before we look at why he might be willing to do this, we should just go back and see what's been happening in Francia. while all these events have been happening in Italy. Okay. So Pepin, as we said, is the younger brother of a guy called Carloman. And Carloman has been ruling as the mayor of Austrasia, the eastern region.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Pepin is the mayor of Neustria, the kingdom abutting the channel. And as we said in the first half, between them, they have installed a kind of Merovingian cipher, Chilperic III on the Frankish throne. And the brothers get on pretty well. They seem to have been fond of each other, kind of quite unusual. That's unusual. Yeah. Yeah. in the annals of Frankish history.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And Carloman is a very distinctive character in that he combines a high level of kind of murderous ruthlessness with a very, very austere level of piety. So his most notorious display of ruthlessness People who listened to our first episode may have remembered that we talked about a great confederation of Germanic peoples called the Alemanni. And they, amazingly, are still on the scene.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And Carloman decides that the fact that they still have this identity is a threat to his own authority. And so he invites them to a kind of conference, an assembly, at a place called Cannstatt. And all the leading figures of the Alemanni come here, you know, very excited to hear what Carloman has to say. And what Carloman has to say is, you're all doomed.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He gives a signal, his servants, his aides, his men step up, slit the throats of all the Alemanni noblemen, and that is them wiped out. And the claim is that thousands of them are killed. So Timothy Reuter, the great historian of Frankish Germany, he wrote that, Canstatt did for the Alemannic landholding class what Hastings did for the Anglo-Saxon landholding class, i.e. wipe them out completely.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So that's got rid of the Alemanns from the scene. But the other project that Carloman has been pushing in the eastern regions of his empire is to sponsor a man from Devon, a guy called Winfrith. To convert all the pagan peoples who lined the eastern borders of the Frankish Empire. And Winfrith is a remarkable man.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He's, as far as I know, the only Anglo-Saxon missionary ever to have had a power station named after him. Power station? In Germany or in England? It's in Dorset.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Winfrith Power Station. So he comes over to Germany and he's very, very effective, you know, with his, I bring you the good news of Christ.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And he does so well that he comes to be called Boniface. So good deeds. And he's hailed as the apostle to the Germans. And actually, to this day, he's the patron saint of Europe. He has an amazing impact. He converts huge numbers of people. And Carloman thinks this is brilliant. He's got rid of the elements. He's converting all these pagans to Christianity. It's all looking good.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But then, weirdly, in 747... He goes to Rome and he prays before the Pope and he says, I don't want to be a king anymore. I want to become a monk. And the king shaves off his hair, you know, the emblem of power among the Franks, gives him a tonsure, the tonsure of a monk. And Carloman retires to the monastery of Monte Cassino. He's gone mad. He's had a breakdown.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Or he's had a religious vision, Dominic. His piety has won out against his worldly ambitions. And there is actually, there's one chronicler who suggests that he felt guilt about what he'd done to the Alamans. So he said he felt contrite. And because of this, he abandoned his kingdom. But the truth is, we don't know. Wow. We don't know.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Yeah, it is a bizarre twist. I mean, people, I think, felt at the time that it was bizarre.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And obviously it's great for Pepin. It's absolutely brilliant for Pepin because he is now the sole master of Frankie. He's got the lot.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And he decides because of this, you know, enough is enough. It's mad that I am not the king. But of course, he wants the reassurance that God approves of this. And so he turns to the Pope, who's a man called Zachary. He's of Greek descent. So you can see there kind of, you know, evidence for the abiding influence of Constantinople in Rome.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But this is a key moment because effectively, the Pope is about to turn his gaze from Constantinople northwards to the kingdom of the Franks. And he gets this, Zachary gets his letter from Pepin. And in it, Pepin asks, is it right or not that the king of the Franks at this time has absolutely no power, but nevertheless possesses the royal office? And Zachary replies, no, it is not right.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Yes. And effectively, Pepin can now feel that God wants him to do what he wants to do, which is to make himself king. So in 751, which is the same year that the Lombards invade Italy and capture Ravenna, Pepin finishes off the Merovingian dynasty. So as Einhard described in the opening of this episode, Chilperic is kind of dragged out of his estate. His hair is cut off. He is tonsured.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He is sent off to a monastery. And that's the end of him. That's the end of the Merovingians. The line of Clovis is extinct. Unless, of course, you're Dan Brown, in which case you think it's continued into the present day. But I think it hasn't happened.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So Pepin now faces the challenge of kind of setting himself aside as someone of royal status, someone who is kind of elevated above the common run that the Merovingians had never faced because the Merovingians could claim that they were descended from this kind of weird sea monster. They had their long hair. They had all this kind of stuff. Pepin doesn't have any of this.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So what he does is he turns to the Bible. And in the Bible, he reads of people who had not been of royal stock being elevated to the throne.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Saul and David being the classic examples. And the mark of their becoming kings is that they are anointed with holy oil. And so this is what Pepin has done to himself. He goes to Soissons in Neustria, northeast of Francia. And there the holy oil is put on his brow by a bishop. He feels it kind of impregnating his skin and he has been elevated to a kind of sacramental level.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And then three years later, he goes one better and he gets the Pope himself to come to Francia to repeat this ceremony. And by this point, Zachary is dead, but there is a new Pope called Stephen II and he is more than ready to do as Pepin wants, basically to answer the Frankish king's bidding. And the reason for this is that the Lombards are still very much on the scene.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So in the autumn of 754, he sets off from Rome northwards towards the Alps, and he is the first pope ever to travel to Gaul, to travel beyond the Alps. And there's a very dramatic account of his journey. I mean, it really does read like something out of Lord of the Rings, some kind of fantasy novel.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
There's descriptions of him climbing the Alps amid gusts of snow, and he's following a kind of ancient Roman road. that's been left all cracked and overgrown by centuries of disrepair. And he travels through a great wilderness of kind of sickening mists and ice. And finally, he reaches the summit of the pass. And this is the gateway of the kingdom of the Franks.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But below him, so below the road, there is this great frozen lake. And beside it, there's the ruins of a long abandoned pagan temple. And You know, for Stephen II coming from Rome, this is, you know, he thinks, what am I doing? This is a terrible mistake.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But then he continues down the road into the land of the Franks and he very soon reaches an abbey that had been sacred to an entire legion of Romans. Christians who had been martyred by the Romans back in the days of the Roman Empire. And his hosts tell the Pope that there is no people in the world who are more devoted to the cult of the martyrs, to the cult of the saints, than the Franks.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Yeah. He was also a very short man, Dominic. So like Benjamin Lay.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And the Pope is told, "...the bodies of the holy martyrs which the Romans had buried with fire and mutilated by the sword and torn apart by throwing them to wild beasts, these bodies they had found and enclosed in gold and precious stones." So it's actually pretty passive-aggressive, because what they're doing is saying, we don't really need you. We've got our own saints.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
We are kind of holier than the Romans. And you know, you're the bishop of the Romans. So, you know, just remember.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
I don't think the Pope really notices what he's being told, because I think he's so relieved that he's managed to get across the Alps. He hasn't fallen into a ravine. He hasn't been attacked by the phantoms of pagan gods, that he's just glad to be among civilized Christian people. And so he continues on his way. It takes him six weeks.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He gets to Paris and there he meets Pepin and he sees Pepin and he immediately kind of bursts into ostentatious floods of tears. And he begs Pepin to come to the protection of St. Peter. And then he goes with Pepin up to the great abbey of Saint-Denis, which is where Charles Martel had been buried, obviously where the dragon had been hanging out.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And there in Saint-Denis, he anoints him a second time. And just for good measure, he salutes not just Pepin as the anointed king of God, but the Franks themselves as the new Israelites. He hails them as a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. So essentially the Pope is now lending his prestige to the self-conceit of the Franks that they are something special.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Well, so the thing that's unusual about this is that it's a biography in a kind of Roman style. It echoes Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars. And that's not a coincidence because Einhardt as a young boy had been sent by his parents to a monastery, not to become a monk, but kind of rather like being sent to a boarding school or something like that.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He is. He absolutely lives up to his side of the bargain. So 755, one year after he's been anointed by the Pope, he crosses the Alps, he invades Lombardy, he smashes the Lombard king, gets the Lombard king to submit. Two years later, the Lombards are causing trouble again. So Pepin returns to Northern Italy, inflicts an even more crushing defeat on the Lombards.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And this time, all the territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium are given by Pepin to the Pope, or rather to St. Peter, but effectively to the Pope. And Pepin then goes down to Rome, and he has all the keys of the cities that he's conquered, and he lays them on the tomb of Saint Peter, on the tomb of the apostle.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And of course, as Saint Peter's caretaker is the pope, so effectively the pope is now the master of this great swathe of lands that previously had been ruled by the emperor in Constantinople and then had been purloined by the Lombard king. And the news of this when it reaches Constantinople, I mean, the emperor is absolutely furious. He says, these are mine. But the Pope, he doesn't care.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He's shifted his loyalty. He's no longer Team Constantinople. He's now very much Team Frank. And the reason for that is that Pepin and the Franks have plucked him and the papacy from the absolute jaws of disaster. And God's hand is also evident in the greatness of Pepin in the wake of his anointing.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Because following Stephen's arrival in Paris and his hailing of the Franks as a holy people, everything goes absolutely brilliantly for them. Absolutely amazingly. And in fact, by the time that Pepin dies in 768, he has set the Frankish monarchy and the Frankish empire free. on even more solid and impressive foundations than Charles Martel has done.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So the taming of the Lombards is only one of Pepin's triumphs. He also effectively clears the Arabs from the south of Francia, kind of expels them beyond the Pyrenees. Aquitaine is also absolutely and definitively reduced to obedience.
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So I said that Odo, the great Duke of Aquitaine, who'd fought with Charles Martel at Tours, he's retired to a monastery, but his son and his grandson had tried to continue the struggle, Pepin not having any of it. The last Duke of Aquitaine, Odo's grandson, gets murdered by his own followers because they think he's such a loser. And after that, there's no more talk of an independent Aquitaine.
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The whole while, Pepin has continued Charles Martel's devotion to military discipline. He's recruited more heavy cavalry. He's dragooned his infantry so that they're an absolute peak of discipline and fitness and expertise. He continues to sponsor missionary work on the eastern flank of his empire among the pagan Germans. And all of which means that when he dies, he leaves to his two eldest sons
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at a place called Fulda on the east bank of the Rhine. And this monastery had a complete collection of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars. And this included a biography of the greatest of all the Roman emperors, Augustus. And Einhardt read it. And so when he came to write his biography of Charlemagne, he modelled it on Suetonius' Life of Augustus. And this is very deliberate because
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The elder one is called Charles. The younger one, confusingly, is called Carloman. Absolute waves of Carlomans in this episode. But he leaves to them a kingdom that's not just the foremost power in Western Europe, but is obviously absolutely primed to become even more formidable.
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So Pepin and the elder Carloman, they got on well. Carloman, the guy who goes off and becomes a monk. But the younger Carloman and his elder brother Charles, so the sons of Pepin. They don't like each other at all. And Pepin's lands have been divided up between the two of them. Charles gets this kind of half donut and Carloman gets the kind of lump in the middle.
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They really don't get on well at all. And Einhard, in his account, he blames this on Carloman's advisors. So he says that harmony between them was maintained, but only with difficulty. For many of Carloman's advisors did their best to foster divisions between the two brothers to the degree that some of them were actively maneuvering to precipitate an open conflict between
The Rest Is History
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But then, in December 771, so that's only three years after the death of Pepin, a dramatic development. Carloman dies of a nosebleed. Can you die of a nosebleed? I mean, well, clearly you can. I mean, was there foul play?
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There doesn't seem to be in the sources any suspicion of that. And I think most historians accept that it wasn't a nosebleed. I mean, he seems to have died of natural causes. And that means, of course, that Charles is now really the only kid on the block. And he gets unanimously elected as king of all the lands of the Franks. His father and his grandfather, he alone holds the reins in his hands.
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And the question is, you know, as we said, what's he going to do with it? He's so primed, so ready to go on the offensive. And the question is, how far will he go? And I guess that there's a clue to the answer to that question.
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in the name by which this new young king of the Franks, Charles, is best known today, because he is known by us, not as Charles, not as Charles, but as Charles le Maine, Charles the Great, and... In the next two episodes, we will be looking at how Charles earns that name.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Are you a fan of The Rest Is History, but yet to dive into the weird and wonderful world of The Rest Is History Club? Or is there someone dear to you who won't stop banging on about the show?
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
The extraordinary thing about Charlemagne, who is this descendant of barbarian warlords, is that on Christmas Day, AD 800, he had been crowned as a Caesar, as Augustus, in Rome by the Pope himself. And you said how Charlemagne is a titanic figure in the history of Europe.
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Hello, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook here. And I'm Tom Holland.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
and we will be bringing you a brand new show, and this time discussing two more of history's most extraordinary, fascinating, and iconic classical composers, in this case, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. And these extraordinary lives will be brought to life thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by the celebrated Oliver Zeffman.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And these tickets will be available from www.patreon.com. royalalberthall.com on Thursday the 19th of December with a pre-sale for the Rest Is History club members and Royal Albert Hall friends and patrons 24 hours earlier on Wednesday the 18th of December at 10am.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
If the history buff in your life is always regaling you with the same old facts about Churchill or Napoleon, why not get him or her, and let's face it, you, a present?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It is packed to the brim with the most bizarre historical questions you never thought to ask, like what was the most disastrous party in history? Which British politician plotted to feed his lover to an alligator? And why was a Brazilian emperor mistaken for a banana?
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simultaneously a kind of dominant but also shadowy i think and this is the key moment in his reign and again it's a moment that is simultaneously epical yet also hard to get a sense of exactly why it matters the kind of the meaning seems to slip as you try to grasp it because even the empire that he ends up in a vertical was ruling the holy roman empire
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Actually, I think it was holy, I think it was Roman, and I think it was an empire for reasons that we'll come to. But you're right. So this is looking back to the age of the Roman Empire, to the age of Augustus, but it's also looking forward to the medieval empire and the empire that will endure right the way up to the time of Napoleon, who is the guy who abolishes it.
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So you could say, I mean, I said that You know, the story of the Franks, it's a kind of hinge moment in European history. This perhaps is the key hinge moment. This is the kind of the middle point in the emergence of Europe from antiquity, from the world of ancient Rome into what will become the Europe of the high Middle Ages.
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And it's kind of the ultimate promotion, a Frankish warlord becoming a Caesar. And so the question is, how had this absolutely jaw-dropping event happened? And this is the story that we will be telling. We'll be starting on it today and completing it in the next two episodes. And we'll be finishing this story, of course, on Christmas Day. So the anniversary of Charlemagne's coronation.
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And that reflects the fact that Clovis is very much a kind of self-made man. He has been given the title of a consul by the emperor in Constantinople. But the idea that he's an Augustus, I mean, this is a self-promotion. And it reflects the fact that he is casting himself out. simultaneously as the heir of Roman power in Gaul.
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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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You know, this is what he's laying claim to, but also that he is a kind of barbarian warlord. So he's not interested in ruling a global empire as Augustus had done, as Charlemagne will aspire to do. He's content with being king of the Franks, but I mean, that's still an absolutely massive deal. And to justify his authority, he's casting himself as the equivalent of a Roman governor
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But also, you know, he's the descendant of a weird sea creature. He's got his long hair. He's got all this kind of stuff. He's got his very tight pants over his enormous genitals. All this stuff that marks him out as being simultaneously Roman and Frankish. And that passage that you read, I mean, Einhard mentions some of the things that Clovis had worn and which the Merovision kins have inherited.
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The beard, the carts. The long hair, particularly. Yeah. So the reges, criniti, the long-haired kings, this is what kind of defines them. But the thing is that by the time of Einhardt's writing, so he's doing that kind of, what, maybe 820, 830, these attributes are cast as kind of grotesque, as rustic, as embarrassing.
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And it reflects a sense that the Merovingians themselves, as the generations have passed, as their power kind of bleeds away, have become mere shadows of Clovis, the founder of their dynasty. They've become kind of phantasms, what French scholars have always called fainéants, the do-nothing kings, kings who play no role in the functioning of the Frankish state.
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And the obvious question is, why has this happened? How is it that the heirs of Clovis are just ciphers? And Einhard, in that passage you read, I mean, again, he gives the answer. He says that they've been put in the shadow by officials known as mayors of the palace.
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And these are posts that by the beginning of the 8th century have become, like the kingship of the Merovingians themselves, a hereditary post. And in the previous episode, the episode we did on the Battle of Tor, we met one of those kind of domineering mayors of the palace. And that was Charles, who in Einhard's time would come to be known as Martel, the Hammer.
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And this redounds greatly to his reputation. But the thing is that long before he wins that battle, he's already won, you know, a name for himself as the most formidable warrior, not just in the lands of the Franks, but in the whole of Christendom. He's used his expertise in war to fashion a really quite coherent empire. So he's the master of Austrasia, where his forebears came from.
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So that's the eastern Frankish kingdom stretching in beyond the Rhine into Germany. He's the master of Neustria, which is the Frankish kingdom that extends along the line of the Channel. He has, in the wake of the Battle of Tours, he's moved southwards to start trying to bring Provence and Aquitaine under his rule.
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So for Charles, the defeat of the invading Emmaids, the invading Saracens, I mean, this is brilliant. It's excellent for his reputation. But the thing he really cares about is fashioning a proper empire out of all the disparate parts of the kind of the Regnum Francorum, the kingdom of the Franks.
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And Tor helps him, particularly with subordinating Aquitaine, because Odo, the Duke of Aquitaine, who had been Charles's rival, he had been smashed up by the invading Saracens. Odo had come to Charles to ask for help. Charles had agreed, but Odo had had to submit to him. And in 735, actually, Odo retires to a monastery.
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Now, his son and his grandson will continue the fight, but basically they're on a losing wicket by this point. There's no way that they're going to ultimately be able to hold out against the might that Charles and his heirs can bring to bear on them. And this is also in the long run true of Muslims in the south of Gaul. So Charles targets them as well. So he advances southwards.
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He drives them out from the great fortresses of Arles, of Avignon. He annihilates a massive seaborne expedition of Umayyad forces outside Narbonne. There's descriptions of the Muslim fugitives trying desperately to swim back to their ships, being pursued by the victorious Franks, being speared in the shallows and the lagoons like tuna. Fabulous stuff, if you're a Frank.
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And by 741, which is when Charles Martel finally dies... His armies, so the Franks under his leadership, pretty much have the range of lands stretching from the Pyrenees all the way to the Danube. So a vast, vast expanse of territory. So the Frankish lords of southern Gaul and the Emmaids, these are people who've been comprehensively hammered by Charles Martel, but they're not alone.
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So too have a very distinctive class in Frankish society. And these are the bishops. And we talked about this in the first episode we did on, you know, the age of Clovis. The bishops, almost without exception, are the heirs of the kind of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy.
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The kind of senatorial figures who had been the wealthy elites of Roman Gaul. And these families still preserve their authority. through the institution of the episcopate, through having themselves elected by their local cities as bishops. If you want an example of a class of people who preserve the traditions of the vanished Roman Empire, Frankish bishops are your guys.
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So they're very learned, they're very scholarly, they're kind of educated in classical poetry as well as in the Bible and all that kind of stuff.
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They may well play a kind of part on the great national stage, but ultimately their real loyalty isn't to the kind of the distant Frankish king or, you know, in the case of Charles Martel, the distant Frankish mayor, but to the local city, the local community that they represent on the stage of Gaul and whose peoples have elected them.
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And for the vast majority of Franks, it's the bishops who kind of mediate between the mass of Christians and the dimension of the divine. And they're able to do this because they are almost invariably the descendants of saints and bishops whose tombs are in the cathedrals where they sit. So it's a kind of family project.
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And the effect of this is that all across Gaul, wherever you go, there are these tombs of martyrs, of holy men, of bishops. I mean, Saint Martin is the most famous of these, but he's by no means the only one. And it enables the Franks, when they look at their bishops,
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to feel not just that they have living links with the vanished realm of Rome, I mean, they don't really care about this by this point, but they can look at their bishops and feel these are venerable representatives of a very, very ancient Christianity. And it enables them to feel that Gaul is like a kind of holy land, a Christian holy land.
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They don't really need, for instance, the sanction of the papacy or whatever.
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Yeah. Essentially, they're spiritually self-sufficient. And this has been the case ever since the first emergence of the Frankish monarchy. But the thing about Charles Martel, he doesn't like this at all. He won't tolerate an alternative power base, presumably. Yeah, basically. He doesn't like these bishops. They're too independent. They're too able to defy his will.
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And so what he wants is to replace them with his own kinsmen, with his own trusted allies. And it doesn't matter to Charles if the bishops he appoints you know, kind of know Virgil or whatever.
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He doesn't care about their educational standards or whether they have local links to the cities that they are going to serve as bishops for, or if they have family connections to the saints whose tombs lie in their cathedrals. So that class of person is being elbowed aside and Charles is putting in their place, you Effectively, this is, I think, the final extinction of Roman Gaul.
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This is where Gaul, if you like, becomes Francia. And Francia is the word that will give us the name of France. So you can see Gaul becoming France at this point. under the rule of Charles Martel. And Patrick Geary, who's one of the great historians of this process, it's so interesting. So I'll read what he says in full.
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Charles Martel accomplished what no other secular power had been able to do in the previous two centuries by his manipulation of ecclesiastical office. So, you know, getting rid of all these bishops and replacing them with his own men.
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By the confiscation of the wealth it controlled and by the appointment of ignorant and entirely worldly lay supporters, he finally succeeded in destroying the religious basis on which had long rested the independent power of the Frankish bishops.
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Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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And there were two boys, right? Two boys. And the last we heard of them there in Verona. So they ended their lives literally as two gentlemen of Verona. Yeah.
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Right. Well, that's the end of them. What's going on in Pavia? The siege there is still continuing, right?
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And to put that into context, he is the first bloke, presumably, to rule unchallenged in Gaul and certainly the top half of Italy for what, 200 years, maybe? Oh, I mean, even longer.
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Charles the Prince, girded boldly with gleaming arms, tamed this people through numerous blows and a thousand triumphs. He crushed it down and subjected it to himself with brandished sword. He dragged the battalions of those who in the depths of forests worshipped stock and stone into heavenly kingdoms.
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But his real focus is Central Europe, right? Yes, it is. So Central Europe, there's another people who are called the Avars, who are based in what's now Hungary on the great plain of Pannonia. They are horse lords of the plains, aren't they? They are. So they're a bit like the Huns, you know, they fire bows and arrows from horses. That's their thing. They are not a Germanic people, are they?
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Aren't they kind of Turkic or something like that? Maybe nomads from further East. Anyway, they're causing all kinds of trouble in Northern Italy, in Germany, they're kind of ranging around and, raiding and doing all this kind of thing. And Charlemagne decides they're his focus. He's going to deal with them.
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Afterwards, he poured over with the salvation-bringing Jew of baptism the untaught Saxons and sent them to the stars of heaven and led the new children of Christ into his hall. So that was a fellow called Paulinus. He was a scholar from Northern Italy. Lovely poem. I think it's a banger. And Paulinus, not just a bishop, but a saint, Tom.
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Is that because the Saxons don't have a capital? They don't have state structures? Right. They're tribal confederations. So how can you ever beat them, I guess?
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So if you're behaving in a biblical way, that's fine, isn't it? So.
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He becomes one in due course, not when he's written that poem, to be fair. But it's all in the future. Exactly. You get your sainthood partly as a reward for that beautiful poem. Yes, like the poet laureate. So he writes this poem in the year 777. And we are in the realm of Charlemagne, Charles the Great, warlord of the West, great king, great emperor, as we will discover as this story continues.
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What if? Well, let's find out after the break whether he is going to get eternal life or whether he's going to hell. See you then.
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Faith, as St Augustine said, is a voluntary thing and not a matter of coercion. A person can be drawn into faith, not forced into it. A person can be forced into baptism, but that person will not advance in faith unless he be an infant. Even after people have received the faith and baptism, their weaker minds should be offered instruction with gentleness.
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For as the Apostle Paul said when he wrote to his followers among the Galatians, I have fed you not with meat, but with milk. So that was a letter written in 796 to a courtier in Charlemagne's train at the time when he's absolutely smiting the Saxons. Tom, about four seconds before I was about to read that, you said, oh, please, can you read that in a Yorkshire accent?
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Explain to the listeners why you wanted to hear that.
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So, Tom, give us a little bit of context. Charlemagne has been joint king of the Frankish Empire for nine years with his brother, Carloman. But a terrible thing has happened to Carloman. Carloman had a nosebleed, as listeners will remember, and has died. So, Charlemagne is the last man standing. He is. So, give us a little bit of context. We're in the aftermath of the Roman Empire.
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Right. And this is because he thinks Charlemagne's let himself down a bit by being so savage, by being so repressive, is it? Essentially, yes.
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This is Alcuin's feeling. So when Alcuin, he looks at this, he tells Charlemagne, doesn't he? He has this image of an infant being given milk. Yeah, he loves that. Let peoples newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner as infants are given milk. If you instruct them brutally, the risk then, their minds being weak, is they will vomit everything up.
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I mean, that's a pretty bold thing to write to this guy who's so powerful, to basically say your entire policy is misguided and is actually counterproductive because they will vomit back up the faith that you're forcing down their throats.
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Right. And not just among the Saxons, Charlemagne also believes that his own people worthy of, is correction the right word here? I think it is. Okay. There's this line, let men be chosen for the task of improving knowledge, who have the will and ability to learn and also the desire to instruct others. So basically it's a huge pedagogical educational program among his own people.
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He's genuinely very, very appalled by this. To be fair, it's what so many English writers down the centuries have said about the French, isn't it?
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And the great powerhouse of this process is Alcuin's monastery in Tor, isn't it? So Tor, obviously, St. Martin, we've heard loads about St. Martin, how important he was for the Franks. So this is a real sort of hub of scholarship. They're copying out all these classical texts to try and improve the standards of Latin. And they're producing all these collections of scripture.
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So the first, actually, these are the first Bibles. Is that right? Explain to people who may be baffled by that how these could possibly be the first Bibles.
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I'd never thought of a question mark as a lightning bolt over a full stop, but that of course is kind of what it is. A slightly wobbly lightning bolt. Yes, so questioning the full stop. Exactly. So they're basically pumping these out, all these Bibles. Yeah. They're readable. They're in a very beautiful, user-friendly kind of format. And they are presumably a tool of uniformity, right? Exactly.
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Across Charlemagne's empire. That's what he's after.
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Because in every village, every town, every hamlet, there is going to be some parish priest or something who sits standing there with his little book. You know, this is the prayer for this occasion. This is what Jesus would do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in a way that wasn't the case 100 or 200 years before this.
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No, he ends up with a much grander title. He does. So maybe we will explore the story of that grander title, his Imperial title, in the final episode. And because we're feeling festive, Tom, we will explore that story. The climax of this mighty series is... It will be out not on Thursday, as usual, but it'll be on Wednesday, Christmas Day, the 25th of December.
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And there is actually a very good historical reason for that, isn't there, which we will explore next time. Because, obviously, you could listen to it straight away if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club. And you can always join that club at therestishistory.com. But the best time to listen to that episode is definitely going to be Christmas Day.
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It's one of the most – I read in your notes – one of the most iconic moments in in the whole of European history. The scene is Rome, the year is AD 800, and the date is Christmas Day. So please join us for that. And on that bombshell, goodbye. Bye-bye. Hello, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook here. And I'm Tom Holland. And we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we, Dominic? We do.
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So we often say we've got exciting news, but this is genuinely very, very exciting news. We are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year, The Rest Is History will be returning to the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May to perform live once again with an orchestra.
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For Charlemagne. Oh, that's nice. So people who might be a little bit confused, these are Saxons in what is now Germany. This is not Anglo-Saxon. Yes, so Saxony. Yeah, in Saxony. So Lower Saxony. To give people a sort of sense, that's the northern bit of kind of Western Germany at this point. Saxony then. Yeah, kind of below Denmark. Yeah, exactly. Right. So Charlemagne, Tom. Charles the Great.
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So that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience. And we are hoping that this, too, will be an unforgettable night. There'll be great music. We'll be telling great stories. We'll be delving into the history. So you had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can. And these tickets will be available from www.patreon.com.
The Rest Is History
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That is the Rest Is History live with the Philharmonia Orchestra Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It's at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May. Now, the tickets are available for members on Wednesday, the 18th of December and for the general public on Thursday, the 19th of December. And please make sure that you don't miss it.
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Well, here is a reminder that we at therestishistory.com offer gift memberships. So if you're good at dropping hints or if you're short on a present for a family member, for a friend or for a partner, Tom and I would like to remind you of the ultimate Christmas stocking filler. And it is, of course, a subscription to the Rest Is History Club, which is full to the brim with bonus episodes.
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It's got access to the much-loved Discord chat community. It's got newsletters. It's got all kinds of goodies. Simply go to therestishistory.com and look for gifts.
The Rest Is History
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After all, Christmas is just around the corner. And a very happy coincidence, our first official Rest Is History book is now out as the perfect storybook. stocking-sized paperback.
The Rest Is History
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It's sure to make the festive period much more entertaining for all involved, and it is available in bookshops everywhere now.
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He's a funny character, isn't he, Charlemagne? Lots of people have heard of Charlemagne. But I think it's fair to say that a lot of people know no more about him than his name. So he is a new figure. He is an entirely sui generis, an exceptional figure in European history because he's different from all the warlords who've gone before him. Am I right? He's not radically different.
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Sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power, and only one person can stop them. Indiana Jones. Adventure Calls.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
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The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
So sort of sticking labels on people, very Roman thing to do to kind of classify people and say, these are these people and they have red hair and these are their habits and all that kind of thing.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
On the Franks, presumably now at this point, Charlemagne very much sees himself as the heir, doesn't he, to the Roman inheritance, do you think?
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And is that you or is that Paulinus? Well, very hard to tell us apart, I think.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
But Saxony is not the only place that he's looking at, is he? Because he's looking beyond the frontiers of what was once Gaul, which is now Francia. And he's also looking to Italy, isn't he? Because Italy is still a bit of a lodestar for people who are living in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the inheritance of Rome and so on. So what's going on in Italy?
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Italy is now under the sway of the Lombards, is that right?
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
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The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And Desiderius also is harbouring a rival claimant to the throne of Francia. So basically, when this bloke died of a nosebleed, Charlemagne's brother, Carloman, his wife and sons had gone off and taken refuge with the Lombards, hadn't they? So that's a bit of a worry for Charlemagne that the wife and the sons... hanging around in what's now Lombardy.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And she speaks the truth there. Do you think that's plausible? I mean, Charlemagne is a man of real politique and so is Desiderius. Do you think Desiderius really is thinking, oh, I'm just really bitter about this family row? And that's the single biggest thing in his decision making.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Or do you think he thinks, no, I'd rather keep a hold of these boys because they're such a powerful political pawn for me?
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And these are the guys who had got together to overthrow Brunhild. They'd betrayed her. And so she'd ended up being captured by Clothar and very horribly executed. So Arnulf serves the young Daggerbert as his kind of preeminent counsellor and Pepin serves him. Kind of off and on, sometimes he retires, sometimes he comes back.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But he is basically not just the kind of the leading magnate in Austrasia, but he is also the leading official in that kingdom. And his status is in Latin, mayor domus, which, you know, you could anglicize that to be major domo. His mayor, he's the leading official. And these officials are very, very ambitious. So powerful, ambitious and resolute were the mayores.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
who stood at the most important junctions of Merovingian polity. So that's how Yitzhak Han, scholar of the Merovingian kingdom, describes them. And I guess traditionally, so going back to the time of Clovis, the role of these mayores, these mayors, let's call them that, was to kind of mediate between the king and the local magnates, the local lords.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But Pepin is so able, so powerful, Dagobert is so kind of inexperienced and young, that Pepin is able to make himself into something more than that, effectively the power behind the throne. And Pepin's achievement is to set up what effectively is a kind of shadow dynasty to the Merovingian dynasty.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So Pepin's daughter goes on to marry the son of Arnulf, the bishop, who's the kind of the chief advisor. And this couple, they have a son who is absolutely kind of in every sense a chip off the old block. So he, like his grandfather, is also called Pepin. So he's called Pepin of Hairstyle by the chroniclers to distinguish him from his grandfather. he becomes the mayor of Austrasia in 680.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And, I mean, he's not just the power behind the throne. He puts the throne in his shadow. He is an absolutely domineering figure. And he's able to do that because, for the Merovingians, very unfortunate series of circumstances. They're a succession of kind of children who succeed to the throne, die, succeeded by another child. You know, if they grow to adulthood, they're absolutely useless.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And so... In the shadow of Pepin of Herstal, this great overweening mayor, the Merovingian king is reduced effectively to a kind of cipher. And by the time that Pepin of Herstal dies in 714, he's made himself the master not just of Austrasia, where he's the mayor, but also of Neustria, that northern kingdom of Burgundy. And he's also been pushing eastwards.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So under his leadership, the Franks have begun conquering swathes of what today are the Netherlands and central Germany. Pepin of Herstal is no longer content just with the title of mayor. He wants something more. And so he has given himself an absolutely brilliant title. Dux et Princeps Francorum, the Duke and the Prince of the Franks.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And he has established this title, as though it was a kind of kingship, as hereditary. And his son, Pepin of Herstal's son, is Charles Martel.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He is battle-hardened, cunning, and absolutely does not want to submit to the rule of Charmartel. He wants to effectively maintain his kind of independence. He's Frankish, but he's able to draw on the kind of the ancient traditions of the Roman province that had been there. So it's a kind of independence that he wants to uphold.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And this has been fine while he's only had to deal with Charmartel and the kind of the Franks to the north, north of the Loire. The nightmare for Odo is the arrival of the Saracens, as he calls them. He is sandwiched between these two terrifying enemies. So he's got the Frankish kingdom to the north and he's got the Saracens who are kind of riding up from the south.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And so unsurprisingly, Odo tries to kind of play these two menacing enemies off against one another. So in 721, the Umayyad forces have completed their conquest of the Visigothic stretches of Gaul. And so then they turn their attentions to Aquitaine. And the spring of 721, they lay siege to the greater city in Aquitaine, which is Toulouse.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Odo turns to Charles Martel and he says, look, we're all Franks together. Can you come and help me? This is a nightmare. And Charles Martel, far from rallying to the cause of Christendom, he says, no, I'm not interested. You're on your own. So poor Odo has to kind of basically deal with this crisis under his own agency. And he does it very, very effectively because he gathers his forces together.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He approaches the besieging Arabs around Toulouse by stealth and he takes them completely by surprise and he wipes them out. And this is the first great defeat suffered by the Umayyad forces in Europe. And Odo is absolutely triumphant. He writes a letter to the Pope saying, I'm absolutely brilliant.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
I've killed 375,000 Saracens, which is possibly an exaggeration, but clearly it is a crucial victory. For the moment he has saved Aquitaine, from invasion. And he's won a breathing space, not just for himself, but also for Shah Martel up in the northern lands, basically to prepare for the storm that they know is going to come. They know the storm clouds of war are gathering.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And so both men prepare for the invasion that is coming. And they know this because even though the Umayyads have been defeated before the walls of Toulouse, they have not been expelled from Gaul.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Right. So Autun in Burgundy, which Brunhild in the final years of her regency had made her capital, a kind of very beautiful ancient Roman city that gets put to the torch. Lots of other towns do, particularly monasteries. You compared the Arab invaders to the Vikings.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
For the same reason, they target monasteries because they're full of kind of riches that can be carted off. And so this is looking really bad. So Odo, his strategy is to try and kind of pick Arab warlords off and enter into an alliance with them. And he succeeds in doing this with a Berber warlord called Uthman, who has been given the command of what today is Catalonia.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So for the Umayyads, it's a kind of border region, a marcher region. And Odo wants to stabilize his southern frontier. And Uthman wants to carve Catalonia out as a kind of independent fiefdom. He wants to rule it under his own steam rather than in subordination to the Umayyad governor in Toledo. And the alliance is signed in 730. And to seal it, Odo gives Uthman his daughter in marriage.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
No, because what matters to both men, Odo and Uthman, is power politics. That's much more important than any sense of a kind of titanic clash of civilizations. And to begin with, it seems to work. There is stability along the line of the Aquitanian border. Uthman is able to establish himself as independent, but... Trouble is brewing.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
The storm clouds of war continue to gather because back in Toledo, the news of this alliance goes down like a cup of cold sick. And unfortunately for both Uthman and Odo, the governor in Toledo, he's a new governor, is exceedingly able and also exceedingly devout. And this is a man called Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi. He is from Arabia. He's from the Red Sea. He comes from the heartlands of Islam.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He, probably far more than most people in Spain, is completely on top of what is becoming Islam. And he is not prepared to put up with this. So his response is completely devastating. 731, he invades Catalonia. He defeats Uthman, has him killed, captures Uthman's wife, who is the daughter of Odo. And Pax are off to Damascus to live in the colorful Harem there.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So, you know, that's bad news for Odo and indeed probably for Odo's daughter. And you were saying that there's no real sense of a kind of clash of civilizations going on. While Abdulrahman is doing this in Catalonia, Charles Martel is signally not helping the Christian cause because he has crossed the Loire and is taking advantage of Odo's state of despair at the collapse of his alliance by
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
launching an attack on Aquitaine and carting off loads of loot northwards to the Raya. So that's not helpful at all. Then the following year in spring, Abd al-Rahman invades Aquitaine. He sweeps northwards through Gascony. He descends on Bordeaux. He captures it. He sacks it. Odo has been frantically marshalling men to try and resist this attack.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He meets the army of Abd al-Rahman on the banks of the Garonne, beyond Bordeaux, and the result is a completely devastating defeat for Odo. And we have a chronicle that was written by an anonymous Christian priest back in Spain. It's called the Chronicle of 754 by scholars, and it's essentially our main source, our most contemporary source for what's going on.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And he records of this battle that Odo's army was scattered into flight, and only God could know the number of those who died or were slain. So this is terrible for Odo. He survives the battle, but essentially he must fear that Aquitaine is lost. So he musters what troops have survived the disaster, recruits what more he can from the outer reaches of his duchy,
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And then he rides with them northwards to the Loire and crosses into the lands that are ruled by Charles Martel. And he comes to the Duke of the Franks and, you know, his great rival humiliating for him, but he has no choice, you know, and he begs him for assistance. And Charles is still driving a hard bargain.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
You know, it's not as though he feels, well, we're all Christians together in the face of this terrible threat. He drives a really hard bargain. He demands that Odo submit to him, that he acknowledge him as Odo's superior. And Odo has no choice. So reluctantly, he gives his submission.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Meanwhile, back in Aquitaine, Abdulrahman's men, they've won this great victory and they are keen to profit from it all that they can. So they are spilling out across Aquitaine. They're falling on towns. They're falling on monasteries. They're stripping them bare. They're loading wagons high with loot. And they rumble northwards.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
You know, the army spilling up the Roman roads that lead towards the Loire, the wagons full of gold and treasure accompanying them. And the further north they go, the closer they come to the lands ruled by the Duke and Prince of the Franks, Charles Martel. And I think for the Umayyad forces, there's a definite sense that they're venturing into unknown territory here.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
You know, it's a long, long way from Toledo, let alone from Africa. They don't know much about Charles Martel. They don't know much about the people that he rules. They don't really have a sense of what might lay ahead. But there is one thing, of course, that they are alert to, and that is the prospect of plunder. And again, in this, they are like the Vikings.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And of course, the nearer they head to the Loire, the more they are picking up the rumors of, I mean, not just a wealthy shrine, but a fabulously wealthy shrine, the wealthiest shrine in the whole of Gaul, rich in every kind of treasure.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And this shrine, of course, is the shrine of Saint Martin of Tours, the great patron saint of the Merovingian monarchy, but also more generally of the Franks themselves. And there is no way that the Duke of the Franks can possibly allow the invaders, if he can in any way help it, to strip the shrine of Saint Martin bare.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Okay, so we are still in our series on the Franks, and Charles, who Gibbon in that passage is very careful to specify, is not a king, but a mayor or a duke of the Franks. He is perhaps... the greatest of all the Frankish warlords since the time of Clovis, the king who founds the great kingdom of the Franks as the Roman Empire is falling.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He's pretty good. He's the guy who comes up with our dating system.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
I think that's probably the generally held theory. And if he did that, then it's witness to the fact that his sense that this is an amazing episode, it's something that's worth recording. And also it bears witness to the fact that the news of... this great battle that's been fought, this great Saracen invasion has kind of crossed the channel.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
It's spread up all the way through England up to Northumbria. So this is something that really resonates. And if Bede is writing about this invasion of 732, then this is the earliest witness that we have to it. And it is indeed very dramatic. It's not surprising that Bede, who's kind of obviously very attuned to the flow of great events, would have heard of it and been interested in it.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
because we have two great and formidable generals coming up against one another. So, Abd al-Rahman, the Umayyad general, the governor of Spain, I mean, he's already proved himself very, very formidable in battle. He's overthrown Uthman. He's defeated Odo. He's now heading northwards towards the line of the Loire.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
We don't know how large his invasion force is, but it's evidently, you know, I mean, it's large enough to have defeated Uthman, to have swatted aside Odo. And it is also much, much better equipped than the Frankish army. I mean, I always remember I had a children's book of history that had an illustration of the Battle of Tours. And the Franks in that were kind of knights on armor.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And the Arabs all had, you know, they kind of loosely, you know, wearing their kind of flowing robes.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Yes, exactly. But actually, it's the other way around. It's the Umayyad forces that are very much heavier in cavalry than the Franks. And they're also much, much better equipped. So a quote, Bernard S. Bachrach, whose book on early Carolingian warfare is brilliant on this whole campaign.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And he writes that the Arabs had acquired by conquest the arms manufacturing infrastructure of what had been a large part of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. These production resources were far better developed than those found during the early 8th century throughout the Empire's Romano-German successor states in the West. So basically, you know, their kit is loads, loads better.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But we're now in the early 8th century and Charles will be known from the following century onwards as Charles Martel, the Hammer. So a tremendous name for a guy who has a very mailed fist. The Saracens are an army in the service of the Umayyad Caliphate. So that is the first great Arab empire, the first great empire of Islam. And this is why Gibbon is casting it as a peculiarly decisive clash
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And also, the Emeads, they're just much richer. You know, they've had a century and more of plunder behind them. They can afford better armor, better helmets, better swords than the Franks have. And on top of that... They're also much more technologically advanced. So there's one key technological development that the Franks can't rival.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And again, to quote Bachrach, finally, the Muslims had the technology to construct the composite recurve bow, which was made from various layers of bone, horn and wood. These weapons were far superior to the wooden self-bows available to the Northerners. In addition, the shorter and more powerful recurve bow could be used effectively by mounted troops.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And I read that because I don't really know what a recurve bow is.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
It's the kind you get in the Arabian Nights, isn't it?
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And also apparently it can go further than the Frankish bows can. So it's basically a brilliant bow. It's a great bow. It's a top bow. So basically, this is not a kind of ragtag desert army. This is a very, very formidable force. And one that effectively is a kind of worthy successor to the Roman armies.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Because it's drawing on those traditions. Now, people who've listened to the first two episodes will remember that The Franks too are drawing on a Roman inheritance. So they were trained to fight in a Roman way. And that's a tradition that's endured for the two centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And on top of that, they have Roman military manuals, which we know that they read. So like the Romans, they have an emphasis on infantry. At this point, the Franks do not have the kind of the heavily armored lorikati, they're called, the kind of the armored horsemen that are the precursors of the Western knight. They are very, very much focused on fighting on foot.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
I think in part, although I gather that this is hugely debated by military historians because they haven't yet adopted the stirrup. The stirrup is just kind of being introduced to the land of the Franks at this point. So Charles would have had horsemen with him, and these were called palatini, so people who are, you know, his elites who surround him in the palace.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And this is where the word paladins comes from, which is kind of very King Arthur. Lancelot and Gawain are the paladins of King Arthur. So he does have some of them, but the main focus is on, as I say, on infantry and specifically the Franks fight in a phalanx. So like the Romans had done, very close order, shields locked together.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
If they are faced by archers, as the Romans had done, they're able to kind of form a testudo, a tortoise. So you put the shields up and over your heads and the arrows just kind of bounce off your shields. And they fight so closely together that there's a Frankish report of a battle that was fought a century before the Battle of Tours.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
that describes how the slain had nowhere to fall but stood in their battle lines, corpse supporting corpse, as though they were still alive. So very, very close formation.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Yeah, the use of the stabbing sword rather than the slashing sword. And I guess people would associate kind of Frankish knights as using a massive, great, heavy slashing sword. But at this point, again, they are using the gladius, as the Romans called it, the kind of the stabbing sword. So they approximate to a Roman legion more than to anything else.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And of course, Roman legions were dependent on relentless training. And this seems to have been what Charles had given his troops. So, you know, that breathing space that Odo's defeat of the Arabs before the walls of Toulouse had brought Charles, he doesn't seem to have wasted it. He seems to have essentially put his troops through their paces, drilling them and drilling them and drilling them. And
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Even if his men are not as well equipped as the Umayyad forces, they are as well trained. And I think that this is what Charles is relying on to defeat them. So those are the armies. What about the strategy of the two commanders? So Abdulrahman's strategy is very plain. He wants to sack the shrine of St. Martin. And there are various reasons why he would be particularly keen to do that.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
The obvious one is loads of his troops are following him in the expectation of loot. Most of them, I suspect, are not motivated by a passionate commitment to the teachings of the Quran. They want to get loot. as rich as they possibly can. And St. Martin's Shrine promises them all kinds of goodies. I think Abdulrahman recognizes the kind of significance to Frankish prestige of the Shrine of St.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Martin. If he can sack it, you know, it'll be a real body blow to the prestige of Shah Martel and his regime. And I think, you know, we've said Abdulrahman, you know, he comes from the heartlands of Islam. He definitely has a kind of a doctrinal motivation. He wants to strip the shrine of St.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Martin Bear, not just because it's full of treasure, but because as he sees it, it's full of kind of idols. He wants to humble the pride of the cross worshippers into the dust.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He's framing it as a battle between Christianity and Islam. And he's suggesting that had it gone the other way, had the Franks lost to the Saracens, to the Muslims, to the Arabs, then perhaps we might have seen the interpretation of the Quran taught in Oxford. And there's a bit of a joke here because Gibbon had been a student at Oxford and had absolutely hated it. He despised all the dons.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But to do that, to reach the shrine of Saint Martin, you know, he's going to have to wipe out the army of the Franks, Charles's army. And the reason for that is that Charles's strategy essentially is to block his access to Tours and force him to attempt a decisive battle.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And this for Abd al-Rahman is going to be a real challenge because even though his men are superior in kit and in military technology, The Franks, as we've said, are at least as well trained, and they're also probably numerically superior. And that's because Charles's forces have been swelled by the troops that Odo has brought with him from Aquitaine.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And of course, they are absolutely resolute in their determination to defend St. Martin's Shrine, just as Abdulrahman wants to strip it because it's so precious to the Franks. Obviously, for that reason, the Franks are determined to defend and protect it.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Charles is confident that this is a potentially winning strategy because he can rely on his men to hold their ground, not to break, not to flee, but also should the Arabs be defeated, not to run after them, which would potentially then open them up to attack by the Arab cavalry. So this strategy effectively means the late autumn of 732 that a battle is going to be inevitable.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Charles is going to block the road to Tours. Abdulrahman is going to have to engage him if he wants to break through. And the reason for that, he can't really... retreat because that would be very damaging to his prestige. And also if he retreats, there's a risk to his baggage train with all that kind of golden stuff. So effectively, there is no choice but to engage.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So there's essentially a kind of week of shadow boxing. And then finally, the moment comes. The Arabs are on the Roman road. They see the Franks lined up ahead of them. There is no choice now but to engage in battle. And again, the best account of what happens is this Chronicle of 754. And the Christian priest writing that, he describes the Frankish battle line in an incredibly memorable way.
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The Northerners held their position like a glacier from the frozen north. I mean, amazing description. Yeah.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But also icy cold and dangerous. He describes how the stabbing swords of the Franks, the gladi, inflict terrible damage on the invaders. And among the dead is Abdulrahman himself. So again, the Chronicle of 754. The Austrasians, so that's the Franks, with a terrible strength in their limbs and an iron hand throughout the hard fight. killed him when they found him.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
And as evening comes, it's clear that the victory is the Franks. But what is perhaps the most impressive witness to their discipline is that they hold their line. I mean, as I said, it's the only way that they could have lost at this point would be if they'd kind of go, whoa, we've won, brilliant, and piled off. They don't.
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They hold their positions and then they retreat to their camp, pretty confident that the next day they're going to have to fight again, that the battle will continue.
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And I'll describe what then happens and what they find when they wake up the day after this first engagement by quoting the Chronicle of 754. So this priest writes, rising from their sleeping bags at dawn, the Europeans, and it's such an interesting use of that. I mean, I think it's the first use of that phrase in any medieval chronicle.
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The Europeans beheld the tents and camps of the Arabs canopies located and ordered as they had been. Not knowing that they were all empty and supposing that the Saracens' phalanxes were prepared for battle within, they sent scouts and found that all the Ishmaelites' columns had escaped and that all of them were secretly fleeing home, passing the night in tight formation.
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The Europeans were anxious lest they might have concealed themselves on a hidden path as a stratagem. Stunned in every way, they hunted the surrounding area in vain. Making no further effort to find the aforesaid people, they returned to their own countries rejoicing with their booty and the evenly divided spoils.
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I think they leave some of it behind and this is what the Franks pick up.
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who at the time were Anglican priests. And so I think he's slightly tweaking the noses of his old teachers and suggesting that they might have been circumcised followers of Muhammad. But it's obviously, it's not just a joke because Gibbon has a genius for, well, Byron referred to his solemn sneer. When he makes a joke, there's often a kind of very serious purpose.
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But the Franks don't pursue them. I mean, that's what's striking. They let them go. Right. And it's indisputably for them a great victory. St. Martin is safe. St. Martin is safe and his shrine will never be threatened again. But this leaves open the question that we began this episode with. What is the significance of this battle? Is it world historical in its moment?
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And I guess the first question is, what do we make of this attack that the Umayyad forces have launched on the Loire? Is it a raid? Is it a maneuver in a kind of factional battle between assorted Christian and Muslim warlords? Is it a Muslim attempt to humble a Christian shrine? I reckon the answer to that is that it's all of those. I mean, they're not mutually exclusive.
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You know, the desire for loot, the ambition that Abdulrahman had to punish the treachery of Uthman and to kind of humble Odo into the dust, his zeal for Islam. I mean, all of these are clearly part of the mix of motivations, I think, that are encouraging him.
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It isn't. But I think that doesn't mean that it's not significant. Let's do a counterfactual. Abd al-Rahman wins. Charles Martel is killed. Odo is killed. They march on the shrine of St. Martin. They strip it bare. And then they cart all the treasure back. And what happens next? We can never be sure in any of these situations. There are so many kind of intangibles.
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But the balance of probability would be that Aquitaine would definitely fall to the Umayyad forces. I mean, if Odo is dead, if his men have been wiped out, there's no real prospect of the Umayyad forces not occupying it and kind of making it a forward base beyond the Pyrenees.
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They do, but then the Straits of Gibraltar are also a pretty significant barrier, and they've managed to take Spain.
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And I think part of the reason for that is that success attracts followers, and there would undoubtedly have been people in Aquitaine who would have wanted to side with the winners, and that would then have provided a kind of reserve of manpower that the Mayid occupiers could have drawn on. And if they do that... then the consequences of that for Southern Gaul are pretty clear.
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I mean, Southern Gaul will become part of the Umayyad Caliphate. And that in turn, I think, would have put Italy in peril. And Italy, of course, is the home of the papacy in Rome. And the Byzantine forces there are you know, under attack.
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Well, if Southern Gaul falls, then the Franks can't come to the rescue of the papacy. And as we will see in our next episode. Essentially, in this century, the papacy is dependent for its political survival on Frankish support. So I think it's improbable that the papacy that Rome would have held out against Muslim domination had Tor gone the other way.
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And the implications of that would have been pretty significant. I mean, what about the implications for the independent Frankish kingdom? I mean, it's got huge reserves of manpower. It could easily have rallied. It could have held out. It could have launched a reconquest of the South.
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That, after all, is what, you know, in the long run, the Spanish Christians do over the course of the Middle Ages. But I think that there are two episodes from early medieval history that suggest that it would have been a challenge. It would have been difficult for the Franks to do that. And the first, of course, is what we've just been talking about, the defeat of the Visigoths.
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And he's making a serious point here. He's saying, this is one of the great decisive battles of world history.
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Because if you say, you know, the attack on Tor was just a raid, well, essentially the invasion across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain was just a raid. But because the invaders won this massive battle and killed the Visigothic king, within a decade, pretty much the whole of Spain had fallen into their lap. And, you know, with Aquitaine as a base...
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I think the potential for a kind of campaigns of jihad against the Franks in the North would have been considerable, which isn't to say that the same thing would have happened, but it might have done. We don't know. But the other event that I think, you know, had the Shrine of St. Martin been sacked...
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There is then an obvious parallel later in the century, which you alluded to right at the beginning of this episode, and that's what the Vikings do when they launch their campaigns against particularly England. And that begins with the sack of a famous shrine, the shrine of St. Cuthbert on Holy Island, the island of Lindisfarne.
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And what that demonstrates is that to loot a shrine that has a kind of a special holiness is never just to loot it, because As well as the financial loss, there is also the shock that it delivers to people for whom this shrine is a kind of central part of their spiritual identity. So the sack of the Shrine of St.
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Cuthbert on Lindisfarne sends shockwaves not just across Britain, but across the whole of Europe. And I think it gives a pretty devastating blow to Northumbrian morale, and the kingdom of Northumbria falls to pieces. fairly soon afterwards. And I think that the sack of the shrine of St. Martin would have had probably an even greater impact. St.
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Martin is the great patron of Frankish royalty, but by the 8th century, it's become much more than that. So St. Martin, he's the first, he's the most celebrated of all Gaul's monks, of all Gaul's holy men. And he has become the emblem of a kind of common identity that has joined Franks and Romans. They all share a kind of common devotion to this saint. And so you could say that the sack of St.
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Martin's Shrine would have been a blow, not just to Frankish prestige, but to the very spiritual identity of this emergent Frankish nation. And of course, at the same time, it would have offered evidence for those with eyes to see of the truth of the message that is being proclaimed by the invaders. And it's absolutely true that this is not kind of at the forefront of the Umayyad campaign.
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It's not particularly what they are proclaiming. And therefore, very few people at the point where the Battle of Tours is being fought really have a sense of anything approximating to Islam. So this is why it's not couched by contemporary chroniclers as a great clash of civilizations or anything like that.
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So Bede, who we've referenced, the great scholar and historian writing in his monastery up in Northumbria, He has only the vaguest sense of who the Saracens, as he calls them, you know, vaguest sense of who they are. He thinks that they're pagans, that they're worshippers of the morning star. There are others who are closer to them who think of them essentially as Christian heretics.
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Right. And I think right the way through to the Middle Ages, I mean, Dante is still kind of, you know, that's still how he's framing them. I mean, they don't really have a sense of Islam as a religion. I mean, that's a much later kind of conceptualization. And maybe because of that, maybe because Islam in some ways is very close to Christianity.
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You know, Jesus is in the Quran, Virgin Mary's in Quran. Both Christianity and Islam have a respect for the Hebrew prophets. That is a big difference, I think, between the Muslim invaders of Spain and Gaul and the Vikings. Because there are doubtless people in England who do end up abandoning their Christianity and turning to the worship of the Viking gods.
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But it's not a sophisticated framework of belief. And the kind of structures of imperialism that the Vikings bring, it's basically kind of grab it and settle. And that's the limit of it. But the evidence of Muslim Spain shows that Islam is very, very different, that it has a very sophisticated relationship to Christianity.
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It has a framework for subordinating Christians and Jews and kind of, you know, putting them within an empire. The Quran mandates how they should be taxed, how they should be subordinated, all these kind of things. It's a program for imperial rule. And that is an obvious point of differentiation between the Vikings and the Arabs.
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And that's why Spain, it's not just that it is ruled by Muslims, it becomes Muslim over the course of the centuries that follow its conquest. And I think you could suppose the Muslims hold on to southern Gaul. You could see the same process happening there. you know, that would have pretty seismic implications for the future course of medieval history.
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And I think, ultimately, to think that the annihilation of Charles Martel's army has no real significance, that it's just a raid, that it's, you know, nothing very important. And I think, ultimately, that to suppose that had Charles Martel lost the battle, had he died, had his troops been wiped out, had the Shrine of Saint Martin been attacked, that it was just a raid.
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I think that to kind of believe that, it's effectively to argue that Islam and Christianity, and specifically the distinctive form of Christianity that emerges in Western Europe in the centuries after the Battle of Tours, that they're essentially the same. There's no real difference between them. It doesn't really matter if you're ruled by Christians or by Muslims.
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And I just don't think that's true. I think that there is a very, very profound difference between the two ways of seeing the world. And so therefore, I think that the Battle of Tours is significant. I mean, I don't think it's a kind of peripheral clash. I think it is momentous, perhaps not quite as momentous as Gibbon suggested, but pretty important.
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And Charles Martel's victory in that sense is pretty seismic in the long run, but it's seismic also in the short term because it has very important implications for the future of the Frankish kingdom and for his own dynasty.
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I think it is, for reasons that we'll look at in the next episode, because it means it's not just the Franks who've won, Charles Martel has won. The kind of the glory of his victory kind of resonates to his prestige. And as we will see, he is now in a position where not just to defend his kingdom against the invaders, but to go on the offensive. And his son in turn will be able to do that.
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And his grandson, who is Charlemagne, will definitely be able to do that.
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Right. So most of the historians in the 19th and 20th century who are pushing this case, they see the possibility that Christian Europe might have become Muslim as a disaster. So Gibbon refers to it in that passage he read as a calamity. But one person, he said, who thought it was a great shame that the Franks had won was Adolf Hitler.
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No, I don't think so because what also then happens after that is that, and we've did this in our history of Baghdad, is that the Umayyads are overthrown by the Abbasids. But one of the Umayyads is able to get to Spain where he establishes himself as its ruler and in the long term as its caliph. And this is the great golden age of Umayyad Spain. And it's ferociously and impressively formidable.
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It's a very potent military power. And it's a very great kind of civilizational power. And this is the period when you see large numbers of Christian Spaniards converting to Islam because it has this kind of great force of appeal.
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It's culturally, militarily, politically more appealing than Christianity, which seems a kind of defeated and superseded way of seeing the world, way of explaining man's relationship to God.
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And had that realm that the Umayyads take over in the wake of the Abbasid revolution, had that extended to southern Gaul, had it extended to northern Italy, then that would have been an even larger power base for the Umayyad caliphate.
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So coming up next, it's the son of Charles Martel and his relationship with the papacy, which is, again, a development of seismic impact for the future history of Europe, and therefore, in the long run, the world. And this man, Pippin, who overthrows the Merovingians, makes himself king. He is the father of a much greater and more famous king, Charlemagne.
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And so at the end of our next episode, Charlemagne will be entering the story.
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Are you a fan of The Rest Is History, but yet to dive into the weird and wonderful world of The Rest Is History Club? Or is there someone dear to you who won't stop banging on about the show?
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And the reasons for this, he spelt it out in his table talk, and I'll read it. Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers, he said. Already you see the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity.
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Hello, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook here. And I'm Tom Holland. And we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we, Dominic?
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And we will be bringing you a brand new show, and this time discussing two more of history's most extraordinary, fascinating, and iconic classical composers, in this case, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. And these extraordinary lives will be brought to life thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by the celebrated Oliver Zeffman.
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And these tickets will be available from www.patreon.com. royalalberthall.com on Thursday the 19th of December with a pre-sale for the Rest Is History club members and Royal Albert Hall friends and patrons 24 hours earlier on Wednesday the 18th of December at 10am.
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Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so. Crikey. Because to Hitler, Christianity is a kind of weedy, wet religion that encourages peace.
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If the history buff in your life is always regaling you with the same old facts about Churchill or Napoleon, why not get him or her, and let's face it, you, a present?
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It is packed to the brim with the most bizarre historical questions you never thought to ask, like what was the most disastrous party in history? Which British politician plotted to feed his lover to an alligator? And why was a Brazilian emperor mistaken for a banana?
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Yes. So that's one argument that is, I would say, is pretty much the consensus now among academics on the status of the Battle of Tor. That it's not an invasion, that it's a raid. Also that it's not a clash between Christianity and Islam because no contemporary really seems to frame it as such.
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And also that, in a way, it owes more to faction fighting among various Frankish warlords, of whom Charles Martel is one, than it does to Muslim dreams of world conquest. But, you know, there are plenty of other scholars who do hold to the kind of Gibbonian view. And it's a debate that's been rumbling away now for decades.
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And it is a debate that has kind of echoed beyond universities in a way that is unusual for debates about Frankish history. Because this, I would say in general, you know, the period that we've been discussing, these centuries of Frankish history, are among the most obscure in European history. It's not a period that people know a great deal about. But the Battle of Tours does have cut through.
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And there's an obvious reason for that, which is basically the kind of political context in Europe today, and specifically the fact that over recent decades, the growth of the Muslim population in Europe has been considerable. And this particularly... in France, so the ancient Frankish heartland, it has generated quite a far-right reaction. But, you know, not only in France.
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So in Britain, for instance, there are now Muslim scholars preaching the Quran in Oxford. And there are people in here, in Britain, as in France, as in other countries in Europe, who regard this with extreme hostility. And I think the implications of this for discussion of the Battle of Tours in far-right circles is... I mean, is unbelievably toxic.
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So you can see this in the way that it's been used by far-right groups. So as early as the 1970s in France, in the wake of the Algerian war, de Gaulle's settlement of that, and the growth of Algerian immigration into France, In the 70s, there was an anti-Algerian terrorist group, so far-right terrorist group, and it called itself the group Chalmatel.
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So drawing its direct inspiration from the Frankish duke who had won the Battle of Tours. Then in 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, you know, so the publishers of the historical magazine in France who were kind of shot by an Islamist gunman, Jean-Marie Le Pen... who was leader of the National Front at the time, father of Marine Le Pen. There was this slogan, Je suis Charlie.
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So people saying, you know, identifying themselves with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But Jean-Marie Le Pen said, no, Je suis Charlie Martel.
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And perhaps the most brutal manifestation of the way in which the far right have identified with Charles Martel is that in 2019, people may remember, there was a terrorist attack in New Zealand of all places, so the opposite end of the world from France, done by an Australian terrorist. And he attacked a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, killed 51 people.
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And on his gun, he had inscribed the name of Charles Martel. So you can see that for academics, this is very difficult, I think, to kind of banish this from what they're doing, wouldn't you say? Yeah, of course.
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I think equally you could say that those who say that it's unimportant, that it's a minor border skirmish, also tend to be of a particular political persuasion, which is simply to say that it is difficult, I think, to remove discussions of this battle from current political contexts. So just as there are people on the right who say this was the saving of Europe,
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So on the other hand, on the left, occasionally you will get the sense that basically it was kind of racist of the Franks not to have surrendered to the invaders at all. And I think it reflects the fact that maybe of all the battles we've discussed so far on The Rest is History, this is politically the most sensitive of the lot.
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So that's why I think before we get into the details of the battle itself, it's really important to explain the context for what is going on here in some detail.
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Yeah, it's really difficult to know what word to use to describe these invaders for the reasons that you said. I mean, and certainly the Berbers in the army, probably the majority, I mean, loads of them would have had only the haziest sense of what Islam was. And as you say, Islam itself is still in the process of evolution at this point.
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Islam at this point is best thought of as a kind of franchising system. So groups of people beyond the kind of the heartlands of the Umayyad Empire back in Syria and Iraq and Arabia are licensed by the caliph in Baghdad to form their own kind of posses, their own groups. And essentially the license that the caliph is giving these groups of people
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is to go out and proclaim the revelations of Muhammad to the limits of the world. But the reason that lots of people kind of buy into this isn't necessarily because they are kind of passionately committed to spreading the message of the Quran. It's because they want to go out and grab stuff and strip and loot monasteries and towns or whatever.
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I think you're right. And again, that kind of parallels with this in the Viking period is something we might come to kind of later on in the episode. And so what you have going over the course of the late 7th going into the 8th centuries is war bands who are kind of nominally Muslim spreading westwards from Egypt along the northern coast of Africa all the way to Mauritania.
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And then in 711, there's a kind of exploratory raid across the Straits of Gibraltar. So a war band of Berbers, of Arabs, of Muslims, whatever you want to call them, they land in Spain and they have spectacular success. So they meet the King of the Visigoths. This is the kingdom that had given the Franks Brunhild. and wipes the king and his army out.
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They go on, they capture Toledo, which is in the center of Spain, the main Visigothic city. And it's a spectacular victory. It's a kind of Hernan Cortes type victory, the overthrow of a great and wealthy empire. And the loot that gets sent back to Syria is so overwhelming. that Spain comes to seem to the eyes of the Umayyads back in Syria, a kind of land of wonders.
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It's a place of talking statues where cities are fashioned entirely out of brass, just full of treasure and also full of slaves. So a massive coffle of 30,000 Visigothic slaves are sent back to Damascus. And again, this is seen as being something extraordinary. And so it's not surprising in the wake of this success that the invaders press onwards.
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And by 719, so that's just eight years after they'd landed in Gibraltar, the invaders have crossed the Pyrenees. And in 720, they capture the great city of Narbonne, which there's still a kind of tiny strip of Visigothic territory on the coast of southern Gaul.
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Narbonne falls to the invaders, and then they fan out to conquer the remaining Visigothic strongholds in southern Gaul, so Béziers, Agde, Nîmes. They all fall. And essentially pretty much the whole of the Visigothic kingdom, with the exception of kind of the northern reaches of Spain, have fallen in the space of basically a decade to these invaders. I mean, it's a spectacular feat of conquest.
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contained in this very success. So yes, as you say, Clothar II had patched together all the various parts of what had been Roman Gaul. So, Neustria, which is the kingdom abutting the channel. Austrasia, which is the eastern reaches of the kingdom, stretching beyond the Rhine, deep into Germany. Burgundy, which is the southeast. And Aquitaine, which is the southwest.
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And Clothar II has managed to rule them all. But the reason why this ultimately is not good for the Merovingian dynasty is that basically it's too large, it turns out, for Clothar II and his son and heir, Daggerbert, to rule. So what Clothar ends up having to do is to essentially send his sons out to rule as kind of sub-kings. So one goes off to Aquitaine. He's absolutely useless.
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A chronicler dismisses him as simple-minded.
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Dagobah, Clothar's son, he's sent off to rule Austrasia. He's slightly more efficient. But when he arrives, he's young, he's inexperienced. And this means that he is very malleable in the hands of the two greatest men in Austrasia who we have already met. We met them at the end of the previous episode because these are a lord called Pepin. Yeah. and a bishop called Arnulf.