Wednesday June 07, 2017
Another fun learning a lot question!
Now, West Francia was nominally a monarchy, but in reality, its nobles exercised far more power than the king (Louis III spent basically his entire reign trying to quell one rebellion). With Louis II’s in-lifetime sons both dead, the West Francia nobles saw their chance. They railed Emperor Charles the Fat into seizing the crown. Why? Because Charles had plenty of territory over his own, and rather preferred his huge tracts of land that did not lie in West Francia. They wanted an absentee ruler who would let the nobles be the nobles–and that’s pretty much what they got. (Except for that one pesky time Charles promised to fight Vikings, and fought the nobility instead…oops.)
But the nobles of West Francia, it turned out, had conflicting agendas beyond simply “more power for us.” When Charles the Fat died, one group thought that a king with military skill who had promised to fight Vikings and actually fought Vikings was a good idea, and designated Odo, then count of Paris, as king. But Odo’s authority did not look so good from elsewhere in West Francia. And this particular group remembered that, somewhere in the mists of long ago, Louis II actually had had three sons. They hauled in Charles the Simple, or rather, Charles’ advisor-mentor-power-holders, and plopped a crown on his head.
Why read Game of Thrones when you could read shit like this instead?
@worldlypositions, remember that discussion we had about that period when all the kings of France had insulting names?
Update - some of the other kings from this period:
Charles the Bald (843 - 877)
Louis the Stammerer (877 - 879)
Charles the Fat (881 - 888)
Louis the Blind (887 - 900)
Charles the Simple (898 - 922)
Louis the Do-Nothing (966 - 987)
Louis the Fat (1081 - 1137)
Louis the Stubborn (1289 - 1316)
Charles the Bad (1349 - 1387)
Charles the Mad (1380 - 1422)
Louis the Universal Spider (1423 - 1483)
EDIT: Louis the Do-Nothing, Louis the Indolent, and Louis the Sluggard are all the same person.
Yeah, wow. Though I’m not sure that they had insulting names at the time they were kings, which makes it seem like less of a weird time. Looking into a few of them:
Charles the Bald appears to have lots of hair, so it has been suggested that this is sarcastic, and so I think not offensive (though apparently ‘ironic nicknames’ are mostly a thing in Australia, so I may have a different sense of this to others).
Charles the Fat wasn’t called that during his life.
Louis the Blind was blinded in 905AD, the year he ceased being King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor. (‘Blind’ also doesn’t seem insulting to me if you are literally blind, but maybe it does to others.)
I was going to say Louis the Fat seems to have actually been called an insulting name at the time, since at least his biography by a loyal advisor is called The Deeds of Louis the Fat. But reading a bit of it, I am not sure whether it sounded insulting at the time, rather than like a disability (especially since such things seem to change):
By this time the weight of his fleshy body and the toil of endless tasks had quite beaten down the lord king Louis.a He was failing in his body, something which is the lot of the human condition, but not in his spirit. If anything prejudicial to his royal majesty took place anywhere in his kingdom, he never allowed it to go unpunished. At the age of sixty he had great experience and determination; and if the constant torment of an overly fat body had not stopped him, he would have overcome and crushed his enemies everywhere.¹ …