Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T10:18:19.658Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - ROYAL POLITICS AND REGIONAL POWER IN THE LATE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2009

Simon MacLean
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Get access

Summary

In the last chapter the case was made that Charles the Fat ruled the empire in much the same way as had his predecessors. However, this observation cannot hide the fact that there was one major difference between the empire of Charlemagne and that of his great-grandson: its political geography. For generations the mental landscape of the Frankish elite had been dominated by political centres in Francia, the middle Rhine, northern Italy and eastern Bavaria, those regions where the Carolingians were best endowed with palaces and estates. Under Charles the Fat, thanks to a series of dynastic accidents, the traditional order of things was turned on its head. His home regnum of Alemannia was very much a political backwater in Carolingian terms. Although other fringe zones such as Provence and Aquitaine had historically hosted resident royal courts, that had been in times of Carolingian numerical strength. Charles never visited Aachen, the old seat of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, and ruled from Alemannia during a period of dwindling numbers of kings: after 884, it became, along with northern Italy, the centre of the empire. The marchio, a type of regional middle-man who under Charlemagne had been mainly deployed in less-visited frontier regions such as Bavaria, now became a key player in what had previously been the heart of the empire. The political core had become peripheral, and the periphery had become the core.

Type
Chapter
Information
Kingship and Politics in the Late Ninth Century
Charles the Fat and the End of the Carolingian Empire
, pp. 81 - 122
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×