Pepin's Rebellion

There was a rebellion against Charlemagne in 792 by a handful of Frankish nobles headed by Charlemagne's eldest son, Pepin the Hunchback.

An anonymous Saxon poet known only as Poeta Saxo, writing in Annales de gestis Caroli magni imperatoris libri quinque ("Annals of the Deeds of Emperor Charlemagne in Five Books"; see the illustration), summed up the plot:

[W]icked men conceived a great crime which almost blotted out forever the shining light of the Franks, for they busied themselves in many ways plotting to put the king to death. For this purpose a cruel conspiracy is said to have been formed among the Frankish nobles. Conspicuous among them, the king's oldest son madly offered himself as the author of this crime, being more ignoble in his own worthless character than in his birth.

The plot was planned while Charlemagne was away from court, but a Lombard named Fardulf learned of it and informed Charlemagne. The co-conspirators were found out and accused of breaking their oaths of fealty to their king. The court found them guilty of oath-breaking and attempted regicide, confiscated their estates, and condemned them to death.

Charlemagne, however, overrode the death sentence on many, including that on his son. Loath to put his eldest son to death, Pepin was (at his own request, according to Einhard and Notker the Stammerer) tonsured and sent to a religious life at the monastery of Prüm (long before Regino of Prüm wrote his Carolingian history).

(And speaking of the religious life, the whistleblower, Fardulf, was given the position of abbot at St. Denis.)

The Lorsch Annals (covering 703 - 803) point out that, the following year, Charlemagne was extremely generous to his loyal retainers. It is possible that Pepin's rebellion was a perfect turning point in his reign. It gave him an excuse to excise Pepin the Hunchback from any chance of royal succession, it brought disloyal retainers out in the open, it made clear that the court would execute rebels, and it prompted Charlemagne to lavishly reward loyalty to ensure no future rebellions.

Pepin died at Prüm somewhere around 810 or 811.

This era of the Franks produced many contemporary chronicles. Einhard, Notker, the Lorsch Annals—all have been mentioned before, as has Paul the Deacon. We actually have a picture of Paul, so let's talk about him tomorrow.

Pepin the Hunchback's Treatment

Charlemagne's first son was named Pepin. Shortly after his birth he developed a spinal deformity that has caused historians to refer to him as "Pepin the Hunchback."

His mother was the concubine Himiltrude, a "noble girl" according to Paulus Diaconus (Paul the Deacon). At one point Charlemagne dismissed Himiltrude from his court, but Pepin remained living there as a royal prince. She was dismissed because Charlemagne was marrying Desiderata, in order to establish an alliance with her father Desiderius, the King of the Lombards.

Pepin, despite his deformity, was important because he was Charlemagne's eldest son and obvious heir. "Pepin" was also the name of Charlemagne's father, and it was a Carolingian custom to re-use names of ancestors, not only to honor them but also to inspire the new generation to emulate them. (Charlemagne's brother and rival, Carloman, had already had a son named Pepin.)

There is no record of discord between Desiderate and her step-son, but then, the marriage lasted only about a year, after which Charlemagne immediately married Hildegarde, a marriage that lasted more than a decade and produced nine children.

Their first child together was named Charles, called "the Younger" for obvious reasons. Their second child was also a son, named Carloman, born in 777. In 781, Charlemagne took Hildegarde and her children to Rome. Carloman was four years old, but had never been baptized. Charlemagne held off because he wanted the pope to perform the baptism. The eldest son, Pepin, was left at home, still living in the palace as a prince.

When Pope Adrian I baptized Carloman, he was given the name Pepin. This younger Pepin was named "King of Italy." 

The elder Pepin's position now seemed precarious. Charlemagne had an heir named for his father who was the result of a legitimate marriage and who showed no physical deformity. The older Pepin still lived at court.

Years later, Pepin was part of a rebellion against his father. It is easy to assume this was simply because he was being passed over, but he couldn't rebel all by himself. If others supported a rebellion, was there a reason beyond trying to reclaim his right as the eldest? We'll talk about other reasons to rebel against Charlemagne tomorrow.

Hunchbacks

In William Shakespeare's Richard III, someone refers to Richard as “that foule hunch-backt toade.” It's the first recorded instance of that term for someone who had a less-than-straight spine, and—putting aside the question of whether Richard was "hunch-backed"—the term gets used in the literature of the next couple centuries to indicate a bad person.

We know what a "back" is, but what is a "hunch"? I once mentioned Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum ("On the Order of Things"), a 1240 work by a Franciscan scholar. It was a popular work that got printed and reprinted and translated for centuries. A 1398 English translation by John of Trevisa uses the word "bunch" to describe what Angelicas said about the back of a camel.  A 1582 re-printing of Trevisa's translation made some changes to "modernize" the English says the Dromedary camel “hath a hunch on his backe,” and "the camele of Arabia hath tweye bonches on the bak."

We have no other source of the origin of the word "hunch" to refer to a lump on someone's back. It might have been a typo, but the term "hunch-back" became the norm in English.

Earlier, the Wycliffe English translation of Leviticus 21:20 lists all the physical defects that prevent a man from being a priest, including "if he hath a botche"; this is translated as a hunchback; presumably "botche" is equivalent to the Trevisa "bunch" which later became "hunch."

Shakespeare shows how the physical deformity excludes a person from a normal life, such as athletic pursuits or romance:

But I that am not shapte for sportiue trickes,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glasse,
I that am rudely stampt and want loves maiesty,

Exclusion from normal life is seen centuries earlier than Shakespeare in the life of Charlemagne's eldest son, Pepin. He was called Pepin the Hunchback because of a spinal deformity. Years after his birth, Charlemagne had another son (Carloman) with a different woman but re-named him Pepin of Italy at his baptism by the pope. It seems obvious that Charlemagne was "replacing" his eldest Pepin with a new one. To be fair, the first Pepin was born with a concubine, and the second with a "church-legal" wife, so Charlemagne might have wanted a "proper" Pepin as a son and heir.

The original Pepin staged an unsuccessful rebellion, and I think he deserves his due. We'll discuss his treatment by his father and the rebellion next time. See you soon.

Pepin the Hunchback

Charlemagne's first known child was Pepin the Hunchback by his concubine Himiltrude. Born about 768, he was raised at his father's court. Charlemagne had strong feelings about his children, insisting that they all be raised well, educated, and given advantageous positions and marriages.

The chronicler Paul the Deacon refers to Pepin being born ante legale connubium ("before legal marriage"), but does he mean Charlemagne and Himiltrude were eventually married? Or that perhaps they had a Germanic form of marriage bond (called Friedelehe, "lover marriage") that was less formal than what we now think of as marriage? Pope Stephen III in a letter to Charlemagne refers to him being married at a time when Himiltrude was the only female in his orbit. Himiltrude disappears from records in 770 when Charlemagne marries Desiderata of the Lombards, and then Hildegarde a year later.

Whatever the case, questions of legitimacy were raised about Pepin. About 781, on a visit to Italy, Charlemagne has another son, Carloman, by his wife Hildegarde, baptized by the Pope and rechristened "Pepin of Italy." This seems to signal that he was "replacing" the older Pepin.

Perhaps anger about being replaced built in the older Pepin, and in 792 he and a group of Frankish nobles rebelled against Charlemagne. 792 saw a famine after a poor harvest, and Charlemagne had been making some legal changes to consolidate his authority and prevent abuse in local courts. He also created a new loyalty oath and insisted that it be taken by all nobles. The Royal Frankish Annals (mentioned here) also cite the cruel Queen Fastrada as a reason to make changes at the top.

Pepin and the nobles planned a coup while Charlemagne was away in Bavaria. A Lombard learned of the plot and informed the king. (The informant was named Abbot at St. Denis for his loyalty.) The plotters had their lands confiscated, and some were executed. Pepin's life was spared, but he was tonsured and forced into a monastery. The Lorsch Annals state in 793 that, post-rebellion, Charlemagne lavishly rewarded all those nobles who were still loyal to him.

Pepin's monastery was Prūm, far from court. When Charlemagne decreed that, upon his death, his kingdom would be divided into three for his three "remaining" sons, it was clear that the still-living Pepin was being completely ignored.

The Royal Frankish Annals list his death as 8 July 810.

The musical Pippin is a highly fictionalized account of his life.

Those three "remaining" sons who would each inherit one-third of the kingdom were Charles the Younger, Pepin of Italy, and Louis. I'll tell you about them next time, and whether they managed to be satisfied with only one-third of the father's realm.

Charlemagne's Wives & Concubines, Part 3

Just because Charlemagne was married doesn't mean he didn't also have concubines. Charlemagne's biographer Einhard describes four concubines whom he says the king took after the death of his last wife, but Einhard was determined to praise his subject. Wetti of Reichenau, on the other hand, refers to Charlemagne's "undiminished and extramarital sexual energy." There seems to be evidence of births, however, that suggests he maintained concubines during his marriage to Hildegarde.

Gersuinda, described by Einhard as a Saxon, gave him a daughter, Adaltrude, born in 774, and then largely disappeared from history.

Madelgard produced a daughter in 775, Ruodhaid, who became abbess of Faremoutiers from 840 to 852, a Merovingian Benedictine nunnery that was a common destination for Carolingian royalty.

After Hildegarde's death in 783, Charlemagne married Fastrada in October of that same year. Fastrada's father was Count Rudolph of the East Franks, and the political advantage of this marriage was an alliance with lands east of the Rhine where Saxons were a problem for the Franks. Fastrada was considered cruel by Einhard (who, to be fair, did not come to Charlemagne's court until after Fastrada was out of the picture). When Charlemagne's oldest son, Pepin the Hunchback (by his first concubine, Himiltrude), tried to rebel unsuccessfully against his father, supposedly it was Fastrada who ordered him to be humiliated by being publicly tonsured.

Fastrada bore two daughters, Hiltrude and Theodrada, who became the abbess of the monastery at Argenteuil. Argenteuil had been connected to St. Denis, but a record in 828 states that Argenteuil became independent when Charlemagne gave her the position, but that Theodrada wanted it to go back under St. Denis, so long as Theodrada were allowed to live there for life.

Fastrada died on 10 August 794 in Frankfurt, where she had traveled with her husband for the Synod of Frankfurt. She was buried in St. Alban's Abbey in a tomb of white marble, but her tomb today can be seen in Mainz Cathedral where it had been transferred after the destruction of St. Albans in 1552.

Fastrada appears in the musical Pippin, a fictional version of the life of Pepin the Hunchback, about whom I have lots more to tell you, but that will have to come after one more wife and a couple more concubines. Stay tuned.