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Ancestors of Robert JOHN Bradford

Generation No. 38

      179553996928. King of Germany CHARLES, born 772; died Dec 4, 811. He was the son of 179553996936. Holy Roman Emperor CHARLEMAGNE and 179553996937. Princess of Swabia HILDEGARD. He married 179553996929. JULIANNA.

      179553996929. JULIANNA She was the daughter of 359107993858. ROWLAND.

Child of CHARLES and JULIANNA is:

89776998464

Gov. of Flanders INGLERAM or Roland, died 824.

      179553996936. Holy Roman Emperor CHARLEMAGNE, born Apr 2, 742 in Ingelheim, Rheinhessen, Hesse-Darmstadt; died Jan 28, 813/14 in Aachen, Rhineland, Prussia. He was the son of 359107993872. Pepin and 359107993873. Bertha Broadfoot. He married 179553996937. Princess of Swabia HILDEGARD 771 in Aix-la-Chapelle.

      179553996937. Princess of Swabia HILDEGARD, born 758 in Aachen, Rhineland, Germany; died Apr 30, 783 in Thionville.

Notes for Holy Roman Emperor CHARLEMAGNE:
Charles had a direct hand in a number of innovations and im portant developments regarding law, of which I emphasize tw o here. He created a body of imperial law that has served a s an important source for our knowledge of his manner of go verning. And he fostered the collection of tribal laws tha t likewise have been an invaluable source for historians.
Local Law The different peoples of the Carolingian empire c ontinued to live according to their own national laws. Ever yone understood law to be something that was peculiar to ea ch nation, each people. It was unthinkable that a Saxon sho uld be tried by Frankish law, even though they both had th e same king.
In order for his margraves, especially, to rule the conquer ed peoples, Charlemagne had their customs set down in writi ng. He sent scholars to interview those who knew the law - - shamans, tribal elders, and the like -- and they recorde d the answers. He then had the laws published and enforced.
Because of Charles' work, we still possess the law of Salia n Franks, for example. We know the fine imposed when a fre e man stole from another, as opposed to when a slave stol e from a free man. More importantly, we know from such docu ments something of the social structure and how those peopl e thought about law and justice. Charles was thinking onl y of providing a clear set of guidelines, not of creating s ources for historians, naturally.
Imperial Decrees Over and above these local laws, Charlema gne began issuing laws that affected everyone and that wer e imposed throughout his realm. These are called capitulari es, after the Latin word for chapter. They were often brief , a page or less, and treated a wide variety of subjects. W hatever their topic, however, a capitulary always supersede d the local law.
Many of the capitularies concern the business of the king : terms of military service, for example, or the administra tion of royal estates. The capitularies are the primary sou rce we have for the entire system of the missi dominici. Bu t the capitularies could and did range widely, and Charle s issued decrees even concerning the conduct of the clergy.
We know a good deal about Charles the Great because we hav e two biographies of him written by men who were close to h im. The more important of these is by Einhard. Einhard des cribes Charles as being moderately tall (around six feet ta ll) and powerfully built with a thick neck and deep chest . He had the red hair and blue eyes of his tribe and was po ssessed of both strength and stamina.
He was typical of the Franks in his love for hunting and fo r feasting, but Einhard notes that his king drank in modera tion--a mere three cups of wine with a meal.
Charlemagne was an ambitious king, aggressive and ruthless , but equally notable was his perseverance, his ability t o carry through on a plan. He was not a great general, bu t he was a dogged campaigner and was often able to wear th e enemy down through sheer force. Indeed, one of his more i mportant attributes was his physical energy. Einhard note s that Charlemagne was able to work longer and harder tha n his commanders or his secretaries. He was no intellectual , but he had a keen mind and appreciated literature, whic h he had read to him by others. He was a patron of scholar s and brought many of them to his court. All these accompli shments created a wide net of loyalty. Charlemagne had admi rers within the Church and among his nobility. His enemie s feared both him and his armies. He did not command perfec t obedience among his vassals, but none defied him successf ully or for long. Charlemagne had one other virtue that i s needed if a king is to be called "Great" -- a long life . He ruled the Franks from 768 to 814, creating an empire t hat would be the envy and model for many an ambitious monar ch after him. Charlemagne was married to the daugher of th e Lombard king. He was not interested in maintaining the ma rriage, however, and while still a young man he repudiate d her and sent her away, claiming the marriage was not vali d. This enraged the Lombard king, Desiderius, who immediate ly began conspiring to harm Charles however he might. To th is end, he plotted rebellion with some Frankish lords. Whe n this plot was discovered, Charles had all the excuse he n eeded to go to war. Charles invaded Italy in 773. He defeat ed Desiderius at the Battle of Pavia that same year, captur ing the king himself, whom he sent off to a monastery for s afe-keeping. Charles proceeded then to claim for himself th e iron crown of the Lombards and with this the Lombards fad e into the background.
Remember this. Charles, king of the Franks, was now also ki ng of the Lombards and thus lord of northern Italy. Centra l Italy was not his because Pepin had given it to the Pope . Southern Italy was still in Greek or Moslem hands. But th e Kingdom of Italy, as it came to be known, was ruled b y a northern prince. This is why later German kings will cl aim to have rights and powers here. The story of Saxony wa s quite different from that of Lombardy. Saxony (which is t oday northwestern Germany and parts of the Netherlands) wa s still ruled by the Saxons, who had remained pagan. They w ere a semi-nomadic people who lived in part by preying on f arming communities and they were a sore thorn in Charles' s ide.
So, in 772, he decided that it was in the interests of bot h realm and Church that he do something about the Saxons. H e gathered an army, marched into Saxony and defeated the ar my that was fielded against him. He pushed forward as far a s the <../audio/weser.au> <../audio/weser.au>Weser River , receiving the submission of local chiefs. Then he went ho me again. The next year he was pre-occupied by the busines s in Lombardy, and the Saxon chiefs quickly ignored their o aths to receive missionaries and to send tribute payments t o the Christian king. In 775, Charles again invaded Saxon y and again defeated the army that was sent against him. Th is time he scoured Saxony from one end to the other, to mak e sure there were no chieftains left undefeated. To make do ubly certain of his new subjects, he forced the chiefs to c onvert to Christianity. This worked, for a while.
When Charles was busy elsewhere, the Saxons rebelled again , killing the Christian priests, rebuilding their pagan tem ples, and refusing to pay the tribute money.
So, in 782, Charles returned again to the swamps and forest s of Saxony. Once again he devastated the land, defeated th e armies, converted the chiefs. The Saxon rebellion was mor e serious because the Saxons were nominally Christians no w and so were guilty of apostasy, a crime that justified th e use of any sort of force against them. Thousands of Saxo n warriors perished and many villages were destroyed. Again , Charles returned home, taking his army with him, leavin g priests behind. He was not gone long before the Saxons re belled yet again. This time, their leader is recorded: a wa r chief named <../audio/widukind.au> <../audio/widukind.a u>Widukind led the whole people in rebellion.
Back came Charlemagne, in 785. He defeated Widukind and s o thoroughly destroyed the Saxon army that further resistan ce was impossible. Charles now embarked on a policy to elim inate the Saxon threat forever.
Once again he imposed Christianity at sword point, but he w ent much further. He founded monasteries and filled them wi th Franks. He founded villages and filled those, too, wit h Frankish peasants. He carved up Saxony into administrativ e units and gave them to his nobles to rule.
Charles went further yet. He destroyed the pagan temples, o f course, as he had done before. He destroyed hundreds of S axon villages, as before. But now he actually removed the S axon peasants, resettling them into other lands. It was a S axon diaspora, a scattering of a people. The Saxons were de stroyed as a culture, and they would never again rebel.
Lombardy shows Charles in rivalry with another king. Saxon y shows him at war with the pagans. Bavaria is a case of wa r within the realm.
Bavaria was technically part of Charles' realm. The duke o f Bavaria nominally owed allegiance to the king of the Fran ks, but in reality the Bavarian dukes had long gone their o wn way and obeyed no one. Charles determined to insist on h is rights.
Not surprisingly, the duke disagreed with Charles' view o f matters and a brief war ensued. Charles won, and he divid ed Bavaria among his counts.
With victory in Bavaria came a new obligation, however. Bav aria had been serving as a buffer between the Christians i n the West and a fierce, pagan tribe of horsemen known as t he Avars. Since Charles now ruled Bavaria, the task of figh ting the border wars with the Avars fell to him.
He was completely successful in his role. In 791, Charles m et virtually the entire Avar nation in battle and so thorou ghly defeated them that they virtually disappeared as a tri be. Charles now had eliminated three whole peoples: the Lom bards, the Saxons, and the Avars. Little wonder that few Fr ankish nobles dared to risk rebellion.
The final area of conquest was Spain, and here again the is sues and outcome were different. Here, Charles was not so s uccessful. The great threat from this quarter was Islam. Ch arles' grandfather had defeated a couple of raiding armies , but he had not met the full brunt of Moslem invasion. Spa in had, and most of the peninsula had fallen. The few Chris tians who remained were in the north and they appealed to C harles for help. In 778, Charles led a great army over th e Pyrenees. He did manage to win back a couple of cities, a nd he established an outlier of his realm known as the Span ish March. But he was unable to win any great victory, wa s unable to negotiate anything substantial, and finally ha d to return to Gaul with not much accomplished.
The whole affair is not of great significance except for Ib erian history, except for one rather trivial incident durin g the retreat that came to have an importance all out of pr oportion to the event itself.
During his retreat over the mountains, Charles had in his t rain a good deal of booty. The Pyrenees were a perfect plac e for an ambush, not least because they were infested wit h both Moslems and Basques, neither of whom cared much fo r the Franish invaders.
So Charles set a rear guard, to cover his retreat. Their jo b was to ensure no Moslem army should advance suddenly an d catch Charles on the march. Once the Franks were safely o ver the mountains, then the rear guard could catch up and j oin the main force. The captain of these defenders was a yo ung Breton prince named Roland. Charles had assessed the ri sk correctly, of course. The covering force was indeed ambu shed and Roland and his men died while the rest of the Fran ks won free.
Such incidents surely happened more than once--some hero sa crificing himself and his men for his king. But this incide nt somehow found a poet. The original author of the tale i s unknown, and the Song of Roland was not actually writte n down for another two centuries, but it survives to this d ay. The Song of Roland is a major work of medieval literatu re, but it is the story of an insignificant action durin g a retreat after an expedition whose success was mixed a t best. Hardly the stuff of legend, you might think, but Ro land became the center of not one but countless legends. H e is to the Franks what Arthur is to the Britons.
The territories conquered were important and affected the s hape of politics throughout the rest of the Middle Ages an d beyond: the tying of northern Italy to the Empire, the cl aim of French kings to Navarre (the Spanish March), the eli mination of the Saxons and Lombards and Avars, the claims o f French kings to parts of what would later be Germany. Bu t the campaigns carried a more immediate result, too. 772 : Saxony 773-774: Lombardy 775-776: Saxony 778: Spai n 782: Saxony 785: Saxony 787-788: Bavaria 791: Avars
That addes up to twenty years of campaigning, and this shor t list overlooks the lesser battles that occurred almost an nually. Any one of these campaigns would have sufficed fo r another king; taken together, they mean a whole generatio n grew up with Charlemagne as their (ever-victorious) comma nder and king.
The wars gave Charlemagne immense prestige among his barons . It brought him land and tribute money and plunder with wh ich to satisfy their greed and ambitions. And 20 years of w arfare forced Charles to rely on a governmental structure t hat could support not only the wars but the victories. Th e Frankish royal tradition had not much to say about rulin g foreign peoples and vast territories. Charlemagne found i t necessary to improvise as he went.
Charlemagne ruled more territory than any other Frankish ki ng. The institution of monarchy among the Franks was not eq uipped to deal with this situation. The Merovingians had si gnally failed to rule other peoples, or even themselves, an d it was this system that Charles had inherited.
Charles either created new offices, or adapted old ones t o new purposes, to meet the challenge. Typical of the chang es he made were those that concerned the governors of his v arious provinces.
Within the Frankish realm, he relied on his counts. A coun t was appointed by him to rule a particular region within F rance, these regions being still defined more by the people s living there than by any specific geographic boundaries . These were areas that were settled and on whose loyalty t he king could usually rely.
Newly-conquered territories, however, were another matter . The ruler here had to be a warrior, whose principal dutie s were military. Such a territory was called a March. Thus , the territory won by Charles when he invaded Spain is cal led the Spanish March.
Most such marches were on the eastern borders, in German te rritories. The German word for count is graf, and the wor d for march is mark. Long after Charlemagne, and even lon g after the Middle Ages, there were lords in Germany calle d margraves, still reflecting the administrative inheritanc e from the early Middle Ages.
Above the counts were the provincial governors, whose dut y it was to govern the principal divisions of the realm. Th ese took the ancient Roman title of duke. The dukes were ei ther members of Charles' own family, or else were trusted c omrades. These titles, too, long outlasted Charlemagne. Yo u should not picture this system as being rigid or consiste nt. Not all counts reported to a duke; some regions a duk e ruled directly, with no counts under him; some regions we re ruled by Charles directly and were known as royal lands . And some lands were ruled by none of these, but by the Ch urch. Jurisdictions overlapped; some duties and powers wer e military only, some were administrative or fiscal or judi cial. And sometimes a lord exercised power as he saw fit o r until Charles intervened.
It was not efficient. It reflected the history of Carolingi an conquest rather than any carefully considered plan of go verning. But, as noted above, much of it survived its creat or and gave shape to the political geography of medieval Eu rope.
Charles knew that his system was inefficient. More importan tly, he knew that there was a constant tendency for his duk es and counts to act independently of him, to do as they wi shed and for Charles' own decrees to be ignored or circumve nted. To counter this tendency, Charles invented new cour t officers.
These were called missi dominici, or servants of the lord . Their purpose was to act as inspectors general, investiga ting the behavior of royal officials and reporting back t o the court. As direct emissaries of the king, they carrie d all the prestige of Charlemagne and the implied threat o f his power.
They were appointed in pairs, with one being drawn from th e Church and one from the laity, so that neither one side n or the other should have its interests predominate. They we re always posted to places outside their native lands so th ey should have no local ties or loyalties. And lest they de velop such, the king shifted them about, neither leaving th em long in one place nor posting them to the same place con secutively. They were to serve Charles, not local interests.
The system worked quite well under Charles. The missi wer e able to keep Charles informed as to what was going on i n all his scattered lands and among all his vassals. More i mportantly, their mere presence and frequent visits serve d to remind an ambitious lord that there was a limit to hi s ambition, so long as Charles and his mighty army was arou nd.
And that, of course, was the system's great weakness, an d a weakness shared by all medieval monarchs. It worked onl y on the prestige and accomplishments of the king himself . So long as he was strong, the system was strong. But le t a weak king come along, or a child king, or no king at al l, and the system could evaporate almost over night.
Charles had a direct hand in a number of innovations and im portant developments regarding law, of which I emphasize tw o here. He created a body of imperial law that has served a s an important source for our knowledge of his manner of go verning. And he fostered the collection of tribal laws tha t likewise have been an invaluable source for historians.
Local Law The different peoples of the Carolingian empire c ontinued to live according to their own national laws. Ever yone understood law to be something that was peculiar to ea ch nation, each people. It was unthinkable that a Saxon sho uld be tried by Frankish law, even though they both had th e same king.
In order for his margraves, especially, to rule the conquer ed peoples, Charlemagne had their customs set down in writi ng. He sent scholars to interview those who knew the law - - shamans, tribal elders, and the like -- and they recorde d the answers. He then had the laws published and enforced.
Because of Charles' work, we still possess the law of Salia n Franks, for example. We know the fine imposed when a fre e man stole from another, as opposed to when a slave stol e from a free man. More importantly, we know from such docu ments something of the social structure and how those peopl e thought about law and justice. Charles was thinking onl y of providing a clear set of guidelines, not of creating s ources for historians, naturally.
Imperial Decrees Over and above these local laws, Charlema gne began issuing laws that affected everyone and that wer e imposed throughout his realm. These are called capitulari es, after the Latin word for chapter. They were often brief , a page or less, and treated a wide variety of subjects. W hatever their topic, however, a capitulary always supersede d the local law.
Many of the capitularies concern the business of the king : terms of military service, for example, or the administra tion of royal estates. The capitularies are the primary sou rce we have for the entire system of the missi dominici. Bu t the capitularies could and did range widely, and Charle s issued decrees even concerning the conduct of the clergy.
Charlemagne was no scholar, but he had a great respect fo r them and he genuinely desired to revive learning at his c ourt. He loved listening to the classics, such as Augustine 's The City of God. He studied Latin and Greek, though he s poke only Frankish. But he recognized that learning in hi s day was in disrepair, and he deliberately gathered the le ading intellectual lights of his age at his court. Charles ' court at Aix-la- Chapelle was a beacon for men of learnin g, and the king funded their activities. It was from these , and others, there originated a burst of activity that wou ld have a strong influence on medieval intellectual life.
Many of the scholars came from monateries. One of the prima ry and stated purposes of monasteries was to preserve learn ing, primarily through copying books. The greater ones ha d schools attached to them and these trained the sons and d aughters of the local nobility
One of the greatest accomplishments of the monasteries of t he Carolingian era was the preservation of manuscripts. No t only did the monks copy the Bible, the works of the Churc h Fathers, and other sacred writings and commentaries, the y copied works of classical authors as well. Almost 90% o f the works of ancient Rome that we possess exist in thei r earliest form in a Carolingian manuscript, and almost not hing that survived up to 800 has subsequently been lost.
The illuminated manuscripts were beautiful, but these coul d be found in other than Frankish lands. What was notable n ow was the conscious revival of classical learning and an a ttention to preserving classical documents.
All this copying activity led to and was caused by a refor m of handwriting. Merovingian script all but unreadable, an d each copying led to new corruptions in the text. With th e Carolingian Renaissance there was a new emphasis on accur acy, and this drew attention to the need for better handwri ting.
The most long-lasting result was the invention of Carolingi an miniscule, developed at abbey of Corbie. This script i s characterized by clear, neat letters, with each word clea rly separated from one another, rather than all run togethe r as Merovingian script often was. Alcuin formed a scriptor ium, a writing office, which produced many books in the ne w script and influenced writers far and wide. One of Charle magne's capitularies is entitled "On Scribes - That They Sh ould Not Write Corruptly". Carolingian miniscule was revive d during the Renaissance and has survived as our lower cas e letters (the capital letters come from ancient Rome). Alt hough this "renaissance" was not much, it was never complet ely extinguished, and without it the thread that leads fro m Greece and Rome to ourselves would have been completely b roken.
In the late 790s, Pope Leo III (795-816) was in serious tro uble. The office of the papacy had become the prize to be w on in the feuds and battles among noble Roman families, an d these feuds had often affected the fortunes of the popes.
In 799 a rebellion against the pope broke out, led by his f amily's rivals. Leo was attacked while in a procession, wa s beaten and imprisoned for a time. When he escaped, he fle d Rome and appealed for aid to Charlemagne's court. The fac tion that rebelled brought criminal charges against the pop e to Charles, who was now in the position of arbitrator bet ween the two sides. There was no authority in Rome competen t to judge a pope, but the king had great prestige.
Charlemagne went to Rome in person, and brought Leo back wi th him to settle the matter. On 23 December 800 Charles con voked a council of prelates and nobles. Leo took an oath af firming his innocence and the council absolved him of wrong doing. With a royal army nearby, no one could dispute the f indings of the council.
Charles went to Christmas mass at St. Peters. The pope hims elf said the Mass, and Charles' nobles, plus a number of lo cal Romans, were in the church at the time (this was not th e big one that stands today, but a smaller predecessor). I t was a very great affair--the greatest king of the day an d the greatest prelate, together at one of the most importa nt Christian festivals.
As the king arose from prayer before the altar, the pope pr oduced a crown and set it on Charlemagne's head. The peopl e in the church - the high clerics of the Church plus the g reat nobles of the realm - cried out the traditional acclam atio that greeted a new Roman emperor: "To Charles Augustus , crowned by God, great and peace-giving emperor, life an d victory!"
By this act, Charles was made emperor of the Romans. He wa s the first in the West to claim this title since Odacar th e Goth did in Romulus Augustulus in 476. It was a momentou s event and it has caused controversy from that day to this.
The principal question was that of motive. Who's idea was t his coronation: Charles? The Pope? Who stood to benefit? Th ose who claim it was Leo's idea point out that he neede d a permanent protector against his enemies. Moreover, onl y a friendly Roman emperor could legitimize papal rule ove r the Papal States, which had belonged to the Byzantine emp eror until Pepin had snatched them away.
Others say that Charles arranged the affair. They note tha t his advisors had wanted the imperial title for Charles. W e have writings that refer to the "Christian empire" for th e first time in history, and his advisors had repeatedly ar gued that Charles could treat with the Byzantines only as e quals.
Charles himself showed sympathy with these ambitions. But a ll the evidence is that he was surprised that Christmas day . It seems most likely that he came to Rome expecting to b e made emperor, but that he did not at all care for the man ner in which the title was conferred. He had expected onl y the acclamatio; the coronation at the pope's hands angere d him, as it implied that he could receive the title only a t the pope's hands. Einhard notes in his biography that Cha rles once declared that, had he known of the coronation, h e never would have entered the church that day.
It appears that Leo made the most of the situation as it wa s handed to him. To be protected from his enemies, he woul d have to agree to Charles being made emperor. But by crown ing the emperor himself, he further insinuated the papacy i nto the business of making kings -- or, rather, making empe rors. From that Christmas day on there would be a tension b etween pope and emperor, and a tension over how an empero r was created.
The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor goes beyond the co nflict between Church and state. It is a symbolic event , a convenient point to gather some separate threads.
It marks the arrival of a new inheritor of Rome and a compe titor to the Byzantines. This inheritor would come to be ca lled the Holy Roman Empire, and its existence meant that th e West as well as the East would inherit the classical trad ition. It also marks the union of the Roman and the German , of the Mediterranean civilization and the northern. Unti l now, these two civilizations had been separate, though in tertwined. Increasingly, the dividing line would be betwee n east and west, and the lands west of the Elbe and the Adr iatic would be regarded by others as a single society.
It marks the emergence of Western Christian society: that s ociety with its religious capital at Rome and its militar y center north of the Alps. It was still in its rough infan cy under Charlemagne, this new society, but it proved stron g enough to withstand some terrible trials in its immediat e future. It was a society clearly distinct from both Byzan tium and Islam; it was truly a civilization.
In this sense, the coronation of Charlemagne marks the begi nning of "European history" in the strict sense, for only n ow do we begin to have something like a Europe. The peopl e of the Middle Ages called it Christendom, a term that cou ld include or exclude the East depending on the usage. Bu t it is the immediate ancestor to Europe

Children of CHARLEMAGNE and HILDEGARD are:

		i.		Aupals of the Holy Roman Empire, died in Y.
		ii.		King of Germany CHARLES, born 772; died Dec 4, 811; married JULIANNA.
		iii.		Princess Hrotrud, born 773; died Jun 6, 810; married Roricon I Count of Maine.
		iv.		Adelaide, born 774; died 774.

Notes for Adelaide:
"Here in this mound lies a tiny little girl...
Born beneath the soaring walls of Pavia
While her father was subdueing the realms of Italy,
She was snatched from the threshold of life
As she approached the Rhone...
She left before she could witness her father's triumphs,
But now she lives in blessed realms with her eternal Father

Hildegard, born 777; died 777.

Notes for Hildegard:
"Bitter death, Hildegard, has suddenly snatched you wawy
Like north wind carrying off privets in early spring...
Dear little maiden, you leave no little grief
Stabbing your father's heart with a dagger.
Bearing your mother's name, you made her grieve anew
When you died at scarcely forty days..."

	89776998468	vi.		Emperor of France LOUIS I the Pious, born Bef. Aug 15, 778 in Chassanuiel, Aquitaine, France; died Apr 30, 840 in near Mainz and Ingelheim, Germany; married JUDITH of Bavaria Feb 15, 818/19.
		vii.		Lothair, born Bef. Aug 15, 778; died Feb 8, 778/79.

Notes for Lothair:
"As twin flowers rise from one root,
So the mother produced from her heart
Two equal ones.
As fields turn green in spring
the remaining one flourished
While the other one, flying heavenward,
Sought the golden ages...
Before the year had turned twice six months
The little flowerbud vanished..."

		viii.		Bertha, born 779; died Jan 14, 852/53.
		ix.		Gisela, born 781 in Milan, Italy; died Bef. 814.

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