Wars of Charlemagne

At issue: Expansion and protection of the Frankish empire

Date: 771-814

Location: Boundary territories of Frankish empire in Spain, Italy, Germany, central Europe

Combatants: Franks and allies vs. Saxons, Lombards, Moors, Basques, Avars, and Bavarians

Principal commanders:Frankish, Charlemagne (742-814); Saxon, Widukind (d. c. 807); Bavarian, Tassilo III, duke of Bavaria (742-794); Lombard, King Desiderius (fl. 756-774)

Principal battles: Roncesvalles Pass, Detmold, Hase River, Barcelona

Result: Charlemagne’s victories pushed the empire’s boundaries eastward and effectively subjugated the Saxons, Lombards, Avars, and other eastern European peoples

Background

The ancestors of Charlemagne (Charles the Great) had established a powerful Frankish kingdom in western Europe by military conquest. When Charlemagne’s father, Pépin III the Short, died in 768, Charlemagne and his brother Carloman shared the inheritance. When Carloman died in 771, Charlemagne ruled the Frankish kingdom alone. His strategic goals were to establish control over the hostile peoples on his southern and eastern frontiers, creating a ring of buffers, or “marches” that protected his ancestral homeland. His desire to spread Christianity to the Muslim Moors, heretical Lombards, and pagan Germanic peoples and Avars also spurred his aggressive military efforts. Historians have also seen one of his goals as the unification of all the Germanic peoples of Europe under his rule. Warfare was the means of achieving all these objectives and was the main occupation of the Frankish king, and later, Roman emperor. Frankish armies were generally small—no more than 10,000 men, commonly half that—and consisted of well-prepared fighting men, rather than the general levy of the male population, common among other Germanic tribes.

Action

Charlemagne’s seizure of Carloman’s eastern territories and his divorce of his Lombard wife created enmity between him and the Lombard king Desiderius. When Desiderius attacked Rome, Charlemagne and an army descended into Italy (773) and captured Carloman’s family, who had taken refuge in Verona, and Desiderius himself after a siege at the Lombard capital of Pavia (774). Thereafter, Charlemagne used the title “king of the Franks and Lombards and patrician of the Romans.” He would have to invade Italy on several other occasions: to put down a Lombard revolt in 776, to install his son as king in 780, and to protect the papacy in 800. He later extended his control over Istria, Venetia, Corsica, and Dalmatia, encroaching on Byzantine territory.

The Franks’ fourteen campaigns against the pagan Saxons were carried out over thirty-two years, beginning in 772. In that year, Charlemagne marched to the Weser River, successfully established frontier forts, and destroyed Irminsul, the Saxon’s chief totem. The campaigns followed the pattern of Saxon raid and Frankish invasion; the mere presence of Charlemagne and his army often was enough to restore order and reassure his allies among the restive barbarians. The Saxons, located primarily between the Em and Elbe Rivers, came to be led by a fierce Westphalian, Widukind, who led the resistance to Frankish control and Christian conversion from 777 until his capture and baptism in 785. In 782, a minor Frankish defeat led Charlemagne to massacre more than 4,000 Saxons at Verden in retribution. At this point, he also incorporated the Saxon territory, declaring the Saxon chiefs to be his counts and outlawing pagan worship. The chiefs rebelled the following year, and Charlemagne fought two major battles, at Detmold (783) and on the Hase River (783). Soon Frankish armies were making annual incursions of great ferocity and destruction. Beginning in 795, Charlemagne deported Saxons and resettled Franks and Slavs in the region. His final campaign in 804 resulted in the surrender and conversion of the last holdouts at Nordalbingia in Holstein.

Lulled by a pause in the Saxon War, Charlemagne invaded Spain in 777. The Muslim rulers were fighting among themselves, but none invited the support of the Franks, and Charlemagne merely sacked a few Muslim towns and parts of the countryside as far as Saragossa. His attack on Christian Pamplona triggered a counterattack from the local Basques, who, with Muslim allies, attacked Charlemagne’s rearguard commanded by his nephew Roland near Roncesvalles Pass (778) in the Pyrenees, an event celebrated in the chivalric poem Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; The Song of Roland). Though Charlemagne himself never again descended into Spain, Frankish forces successfully engaged the Basques and took Barcelona (801), and established a frontier “march” between the Muslims and Aquitaine.

In the west, Brittany remained a reluctant subject region, and in 786, Charlemagne invaded to put down a rebellion. The following year, Charlemagne invaded Bavaria and brought the rebellious Tassilo III, duke of Bavaria, to heel without a battle. By 790, a Central Asian people known as the Avars, who had settled along the Danube, had begun plundering this frontier region of the Frankish empire. In 791, Charlemagne opened a war that ended in 796 with defeat of the Avars along the Theiss River by an allied army—Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Frisians—commanded by Charlemagne’s son Pépin. Troops under Erik of Friuli found and sacked the secret Avar treasure trove, which Charlemagne shared with monasteries in his home territories. Charlemagne could claim complete subjection of these people only in 804.

These victories led directly to papal recognition of Frankish dominance in western Christendom and Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas day, 800. Initially resistant to the idea of a new western Roman emperor, the Byzantines fought Charlemagne for control of Istria and Dalmatia on both land and sea beginning in 803. Emperor Nicephorus I dealt with the Franks in 809, and a treaty that recognized Frankish gains and Charlemagne’s position as emperor was agreed to in 810.

Aftermath

Charlemagne’s conquests resulted in the formation of border frontiers known as “marches” from Denmark south to the Spanish March in the Pyrenees, which protected the Frankish homeland and bounded the non-Scandinavian Germanic people of continental Europe. Charlemagne died at the age of seventy-two with only one son, Louis, still living. Louis the Pious had a fretful reign that saw dynastic struggle and attacks from Muslims and Vikings undermine the military powerhouse that Charlemagne had overseen for forty-six years.

Bibliography

Beeler, John. Warfare in Feudal Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Collins, Roger. Charlemagne. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

Delbrück, Hans. Medieval Warfare. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Ganshof, François. Frankish Institutions Under Charlemagne. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1968.

Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Two Lives of Charlemagne. New York: Penguin, 1969.