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The Collapse of the Carolingian Empire - Echoes of History - Extra History (Patreon)

Published:
2017-09-29 17:00:02
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Charlemagne built an empire, only for his descendants to tear it apart. Does its collapse still echo today? 

We will wrap up Great Northern War with a Lies episode next week.

Files

Previews only

The Collapse of the Carolingian Empire - Echoes of History - Extra History

The empire built by Charlemagne would end up divided by his grandsons, all of whom wanted to rule their own piece of it. But the division worked poorly, and may have set a precedent that shaped wars in Western Europe for centuries to come. Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon (--More below) Grab your Extra Credits gear at the store! http://bit.ly/ExtraStore Subscribe for new episodes every Saturday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC Play games with us on Extra Play! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ____________ ♪ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1EQA5N7 *Music by Demetori: http://bit.ly/1AaJG4H ♫ Get the background music here! The Land of Vana'diel (Album): http://bit.ly/1t2OT9L *Music by Tweex ♪ Get the outro music here! http://bit.ly/23isQfx *Music by Sean and Dean Kiner: http://bit.ly/1WdBhnm

Comments

Martin Verran

Hang on a Minute ~ this is going Backwards in Time from the Subject we were Discussing! The Carolingians were the Frankish Dynasty of Pepin the Short and of Charlemagne.

Andreas

time for charles the bald and the pressure of the vikings!

Colin

All this talk of inheritance law and the boarders between East and West Francia is giving me some serious CKII vibes right now.

Franz

Only some types of Primogeniture favor men over women (such as Agnatic or Male-Preference). Absolute Primogeniture (like what they now have in England) is always the oldest child, regardless of gender.

Brian Rose

Yay, something I suggested got a video! Louis the Pious (the son of Charlegmagne mentioned) is an important and interesting figure in his own right; and the geographical implications of his empire holding together are (or should be) only the beginning of conjecture, since there's also other matters, like how the Carolingian Renaissance and the Viking Invasions are affected.

Jason Youngberg

We're seeing a similar thing in the mideast with Iraq, Palistine, Israel, etc. Borders are drawn without respect for the people living there. I solidly believe Iraq would have been better off split along ethnic lines when it was formed. Instead, we had people like Sadam engaging in oppression against Kurds with Turkey wanting to help but unable due to border issues.

Moarice
>>7475570

My favourite stupid border is still Rwanda. "Let's put those two tribes whose members are obliged to kill each other into one state, what could go wrong?"

SpoonofEvil

Borders? THIS TWISTED GAME NEEDS TO BE RESET

Daniel R.
>>7475570

Problem with splitting the Sunni and Shia Iraqis is that Iran would have nipped in and possibly come out as a challenger to the western-leaning Saudis. That being said, the Kurdish part makes sense.

paul staber

The problem is clearly to many squiggly borders, when borders get squiggly people get squiggly. :D

Martin Verran
>>7474824

And I was Playing CKII as these Fellows a few Nights ago. A bit difficult to try and match the actual historical achievement of Charlemagne, though.

Christina Maria Jessen

Franks, Germans and Italians are all Germanic people... Not that there were Italians yet, there were Lombards and the descendants of the Ostrogoths in the south. But all the major people such as Franks, Lombards, Aquitanians, Burgundians, Saxons, Bavarians and Austrians were all various Germanic people. It's true that Romance languages had spread among some of them, but that's a linguistic issue, not an ethnic one. In fact, looking at the area of the Carolingian empire, the only people who weren't Germanic were the Basque. The Asturians and Catalans were Visigoths or at least literally and culturally descended from them. In a lot of ways, the distinction between Germans, Italians and Frenchmen are a product of this division of kingdom, not a consequence of it. Before that, all these groups were just made up of various Germanic people.

Pavel Yakushevich

Multiculturalism. Didn't work in IX century, doesn't work in XXI century.

William Lao
>>7485951

You unfortunately see this story as a cautionary tale about multiculturalism. I see this as a cautionary tale against drawing random borders without regard for the people living there (much like the British empire would do).

Robert Rustad

"Shrimp! Heaven! Now!" Please Daniel, we can't keep doing this! :)

Eoin Thorpe

You have no idea how excited I am for this.

Sara Samaletdin
>>7481579

Well it did include the decendants of the original Gauls (who were Romanized and other people who moved ther during the Roman Empire) and the ruling class was the Germanic people.

Sudarshan Ramani

I commend this episode, and the overall message of borders drawn haphazardly, and I respect the writers and producers for insisting that this is speculation. It's certainly interesting. I would like to add some comments on the same: 1) The overall assumption made in this episode is that Nationalism is bad, and somehow the old days when everyone was one Carolingian Empire was better. Now I understand why this sentiment has a lot of contemporary favour, and I get the spirit behind it, but I just think it's ahistorical in the extreme. Nationalism did not always mean what we think the worst parts of it does today. And while it did have its flaws and monstrous crimes, surely it's not solely to blame by itself as an idea. And obviously, the decentralized feudal world was far more flawed and dangerous than anything that came after. 2) The issues about borders between West France and East Germany neglects other more important conflicts. Like the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict between Italian City-States and Holy Roman Empire between factions who backed the HRE against the Pope's authority. Inherent in the thesis is the assumption that West France and East Germany were the locus of all conflicts when this is very presentist. At various times, North Italy punched above its weight. And that conflict was far more destabilizing. 3) The list of conflicts lumped together implies a broad continuity. But the Thirty Years War had nothing to do with border disputes in that region. It had to do with the destabilization of the HRE, and it began in Prague, and France only became involved in the conflict for part-of-the-way with the war beginning and continuing after its involvement. France's involvement there is more or less classic great power rather than some ancient dispute between Charlemagne's grandsons. 4) The categorical simplification of the "people in the middle" who were not French or German is something I have the biggest problem with. The list of conflicts mentioned pointedly ignores the Franco-Prussian War which is actually the one war fought entirely in that region and entirely about that region. And at the end of that Imperial Germany, against the will of the French people living in Alsace-Lorraine, annexed the entire region against all norms and principles of that time. This illegal taking of territory against the democratic will of the people living there cannot be justified by any grand scheme of history and saying how both sides could consider it theirs equivates and condones one side over the other, when in that case, Imperial Germany was mainly and solely the guilty party 5) The categorization mentioned in the episode, "West France" was mostly France and "East Germany" became Germany implies that both regions are equivalent in nationality and locus of development. But the truth is that France was always regionally, and socially, more homogenous and stronger than Germany. There's nothing to compare or equate both since historically both regions had stronger divergences. Likewise, the whole "Western France" mostly France ignores the Angevin Empire, i.e. the territories in Western France which the British Plantagenets claimed and which they fought to defend in the 100 Years War, and which ultimately ceded to France much to British anger. So again it's arbitrary and presentist. And in the case of "Eastern Germany" that pointedly excludes the real East Germany, i.e. Prussia which was the biggest and most important state responsible for the unification of Germany, That part of Eastern Germany drawn in that map excludes Brandenberg and Berlin. And Germany's real importance in European history is in the role it played in Eastern Europe, whether it's the colonization by the Teutonic Knights, the role it played in the Christianization of Baltic Pagans, its role in the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth...the majority of the Thirty Years War was fought in Eastern Europe, and of course the plans of Imperial and Nazi Germany involved colonization and expansion into East Germany, with the Nazis taking the extra step of active genocide and extermination. Most of the Holocaust happened in Eastern Europe. Likewise even in Medieval Europe, the Hanseatic League was fixated East and not West simply because that's where all the money was...Eastern Europe in the medieval era was richer and more prosperous than Western Europe.

Sudarshan Ramani

TL;DR, I think the concept is interesting as speculation, but you can draw a similar setup about almost any two geographical sections of history. Fernand Braudel in THE MEDITTERRANEAN argued that the real shift in Europe, was the movement away from the Meditteranean to the Atlantic Ocean which happened during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where during the Crusades, the Black Death, and the Italian Wars, Western Europe became richer and more advanced than Eastern Europe when for millennia the reverse was true.

Martin Verran
>>7481579

Not the Italians ~ the Italians have been in the Italian Peninsular since well before Time Immemorial. The Term Italian is at least 30,000 Years old and has a History going Back well before the Romans. Modern Italians are a bit of a mixture of pre-Indo-European, pre-Roman Peoples like the Celts, and the Ancient Italic Peoples due to Demographic Shifts over the Centuries but all share a common History and Heritage.

ExtraCredits
>>7475226

Fair point. Primogeniture in many but not all sovereignties wound up being agnatic for other related social reasons, so when discussing primogeniture as a system I think it's fair to say that it majority favored men for succession, but there are absolutely (get it) places where male inheritance and primogeniture were not linked.

ExtraCredits
>>7475260

One day I'd love for Charlemagne to win a vote so we can discuss his empire (hopefully including Louis the Pious, though that might wind up as another one- or two-off) more fully!

ExtraCredits
>>7485951

I didn't write this series (Soraya here), but I'm with William on the message behind this episode. Multiculturalism is a wonderful addition to my life and my community. :)

ExtraCredits
>>7494034

I did not write the episode and James is traveling, so I feel like I can't address the majority of your (well written and argued) points from a position of knowledge. Sorry! I hate to have you spend such time on this and me be unable to really engage with your arguments. Addressing the TL;DR, I do think that the value in speculation of this nature is not to say there is one definitive truth and we must find it, but - at least in the context of Extra History and what we're trying to do for our audience - to encourage people to look at history as something that can affect our lives today. We tried to highlight the fact that this was speculation because we don't expect everyone to agree, and the disagreements that people have are at least as valuable as the original theory of the episode in that they show how many different points in history can be taken as a genesis for problems that rippled down through the ages and still affect us today. -Soraya

Denis Nardin
>>7481579

Franks and Lombards were a (very influential) minority group in Gaul and Italy. For example only few words in modern French or Italian are of Germanic origin. The Lombards in particular did not rule the peninsula for long (and they never ruled all of it). Moreover, ethnic origin is not as interesting as cultural roots and the influence of Roman civilization even on the German part of the Carolingian empire is disproportionate.

Christina Maria Jessen
>>7481579

Roman culture had a disproportionate impact on all of Europe in some form or another. Of course, how much depended on when (the influence didn't really reach Scandinavia or Eastern Europe north of the Balkans until the high middle ages, for example), but it's everywhere. Linguistics aren't really a good way of judging either numerical majority or cultural hegemony. Germanic influences are heavy throughout Western Europe, while Celtic ones are almost gone outside Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. This is also after literal centuries of Germanic rule and Germanic and Roman culture mixing. It's worth keeping in mind that even in Roman times, lots of Germanic people ended up staying within the empire for extended periods or even settling there. Both archaeological and genetic evidence shows that there has been considerable mixing between all major ethnic groups of Europe for millennia, as well. And the specific group called out, the Franks, were definitely a Germanic people. Not only do we know their history and that they are one, their kingship, inheritance laws and traditional laws, as in the ones predating partial adoption of Roman law, were all Germanic. Knighthood also more resembles Germanics hirds in their origin, the lord's sworn coterie of warriors, than anything like the professional Roman armies and any Celtic military organization was long gone on the continent by the time of the Frankish conquest. Similarly, Frankish and Visigoth art both show clear Germanic stylistic elements. All modern Romance languages also show substantial Germanic substrata mixing with the Latin base. Similarly, the chivalric literature of the high middle ages draws most clearly on Germanic history, outside Ireland the main cycles were the Carolingian (Charlemagne and Knights), Arthurian (which is a weird Celtic/Saxon fusion as told by Frenchmen), Niebelungenlied (straight up Germanic myth) and the mostly forgotten cycle about Theodoric the Goth. Two of these are clearly, unambiguously Germanic and the other two are about a Germanic king and a heavily Germanified take on Celtic mythology (seriously, look up early Welsh versions of Arthurian legends and see how little they resemble anything we consider Arthurian). I'd also point out that linguistics are not a good indicator of ethnic belonging. Unless you want to claim that Ugandans are English, Bolivians are Spanish and Greenlandic people definitely aren't Danish. Also, if the French national story say they're descended from the Franks and the Franks were Germanic, that's clearly the take away from how the descendants of the Franks saw themselves. You'll find more names with Germanic origins than Celtic or non-Biblical roman in virtually every Romance language as well. And, Martin, northern Italians are very heavily rooted in Lombard culture. The richest and arguably most influential part of the country is known as Lombardy to this day. Similarly, the fairly sharp cultural division between northern and southern Italy pretty much exactly follows the boundaries of the Lombard kingdom or later Kingdom of Italy or even later southern border of the Holy Roman Empire. This is without going into the Normans who hung out in the south for a while and the fact that the dominant language in Trent and South Tirol is German, because these are smaller influences. Italy has a long history of Germanic influences, with Venice being the sole state in Italy to not have been under Germanic or Arab rule at any point during the middle ages. Southern Italy on the other hand, had far more Greek influences (going all the way back to pre-Roman times), as well as Arabic ones. There are still Germanic influences. There were some brief viking settlements down there, there were still Ostrogoths around even after the Byzantine reconquest and, of course, it's been under the influence of the north. But even so, it's substantially less Germanified than northern Italy.

Pavel Yakushevich
>>7485951

Randomly drawn borders created multicultural states without single identity. States that are unsure of what they are and easily taken apart. States that are ripe targets for conquest, annexation more border redrawing until borders are either set along nation dividing lines or nations are completely assimilated into one another. I see that story being told here and, judging by number of wars this was has at least partially been a cause of, I am very wary of embracing it.

Connor Raikes

Here's my thought: the partition of the Carolingian Empire probably made conflict between Franks and Germans inevitable, even without the rise of nationalism. Charlemagne established the vision of a Holy Roman Empire that united all of Western Christendom - but that vision came into conflict with the two dominant spheres that his partition created: the French sphere and the German sphere. Both had the ambition to become the dominant power in Western Europe, and saw themselves as the guardian of the church. They were rivals almost immediately. However, because of Feudalism, France and the HRE were too decentralized to combat the other one directly in the high middle ages. The were both incentivized to avoid a long, extended war against the other, because they were both too powerful; the cost in manpower and resources would have shaken their hold over their other territorial holding and possibly lead to their own disintegration. So instead, their rivalry was generally fought through proxies, whether it be through control of the papacy or providing military support to other indirect military fronts. The later, frequent, extended wars between France and the Holy Roman Empire doesn't merely reflect the rise of nationalism; it reflects a growing control and consolidation of state power, in both France and the Holy Roman Empire - the former, following their success in the Hundred Years' War, the latter following the rise of the Habsburgs. That's when the larger, more direct wars began. Arguably, early Nationalism as an idea was created as an expedient in these larger conflicts, both as a way to keep people loyal to the centralized state, and as a way for people to have leverage over the state. However, Nationalism was not really an operating governing principle until the French Revolution, where it was used to establish the legitimacy of a French Republic in the absence of a King that ruled by divine right. Anyhow, really great episode! I appreciate presenting a dynamic interpretation of history, and making people think through it on their own.

Huw Rollinson

Thanks team for a thought-provoking episode. Whilst Louis the Pious’ death may have ensured the subsequent fragmentary turmoil, my take is that it would have occurred in any case a little further down the line. There are so many variables which determine warfare (or squabbling!). Resources probably is the most significant factor. Tribalism another. We are seeing it currently on the Iberian Peninsula where the Spanish government is attempting to suppress a nationalist sentiment. The bottom line is that birds of a feather flock together - especially in times of stress like resource crises. This behaviour is neither good nor bad but an undeniable fact.