Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin

Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.

In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.

Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.

Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.

Travelogue 1146 – 24 September
The House Guest

The story of the Bishops of Rome - the papacy - and the story of Northern Italy in general after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is bound up with the story of the Byzantine Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna. For two centuries the exarchate stood against the Goths, first the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards. As long as the choice was between Byzantine and Gothic rule, many places were happy to be counted among the Byzantine camp, even as they effectively rebelled against Byzantine control, as the Bishops of Rome did. The petty infighting only weakened the Exarchate. In 751, the post-Roman order finally collapsed, as the Lombard king Aistulf overcame the Byzantines and ejected them from Italy. As Aistulf turned his eye on the Duchy of Rome, the new pope, Stephen II, chosen in 752, looked outside Italy for a balancing power. It’s worth noting that Stephen II was an Orsini. The Orsini were an aristocratic Roman family that would dominate Roman politics for a millennium. It seems no accident that, when Rome was being threatened, the Roman nobility stepped forward. Stephen II appealed to Pepin, the king of the Franks. It had only been a year since Stephen’s predecessor, Zachary, had approved Pepin’s appropriation of the Frankish throne.

What follows is fascinating. Stephen II asks Pepin for safe conduct into Francia. He becomes the first pope to ever cross the Alps. And for at least two years, he is a guest of the royal family while Pepin negotiates with Aistulf. He shows the Pope great honour and respect. When the Pope arrives, he receives him as a supplicant, and he leads his horse to the palace. The Pope returns the favour with many honours. He formally anoints Pepin king of the Franks, and he similarly anoints his two sons. He names all three “patricians of Rome”. These honorifics would become important in the future, when Charles became king, and when he and his descendants became emperors. Charles would have been just a boy when the pope was a house guest. Imagine the effect on him.

Travelogue 1145 – 18 September
The Stage Was Set

Time erodes the features of the man, as though he were statuary left in the rain. Revision paints him up as it thinks he should have looked, paints the stage as it would have liked the stage to appear. The erosion has swept away his friends and his colleagues and his family, and he seems a solitary figure. We are enchanted by solitaries. We imagine them heroic.

Charlemagne stands in isolation in the imagination of popular history, emerging like a mythical figure from the mists of the “Dark Ages”. I’m guessing he wouldn’t recognise himself in any of the popular portraiture. He was hardly a solitary, and he hardly saw his times as chaotic or primitive. The kingdom he ruled had stood strong for three hundred years, always expanding. He lived in a world of precedent and tradition. He was his father’s boy.

Great-Man stories are always leaky. They are exciting and engaging, and I think they can be useful in the narration of history, but they don’t capture the sweeping showers of truth very efficiently. The irony of celebrating Charlemagne the way we do is that we are, in the main, celebrating his father, Pepin the Short. Charles accomplished a lot; he was a great leader. But the creative elements, the moulds that were set for the Middle Ages, were largely set by his father.

It was Pepin who took the throne for the “Carolingians”, as his line came to be called, named after his son, Charles. Pepin made manifest what had been fact for generations, that his family had ruled the Merovingian kingdom. He deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and he did it with the quiet blessing of the Greek pope, Zacharias. Pepin united the north and south of Francia, subduing Aquitaine and seizing Septimania from the Muslims. He was responsible for installing Tassilo III as a vassal on the ducal throne in Bavaria. Charles’s dispute with Tassilo would eventually lead to the incorporation of Bavaria directly into the empire. Pepin was fond of reforming the Frankish church, and he supported the church’s evangelism in Saxony. Pepin forged an alliance with the papacy, perhaps the most enduring of his achievements in the romantic imagination of the Middle Ages.

Travelogue 1144 – 8 September
Baptising Saxons

Charlemagne picked up the family business with gusto. He pursued war strategies upon every frontier, expanding into Spain, Italy and Germany. In Germany, this translated into a long series of conflicts and negotiations with the Bavarians and with the Saxons. He ruled for almost fifty years, and the subjugation of those peoples was a project for almost his entire reign.

What might often be forgotten is that Charles was fighting pagans on both eastern and western fronts. We know the Spanish ‘Saracens’ were Muslim, but it might have been overlooked in high school history that neither the Saxons nor the Avars were Christian.

Context is always important in understanding history. When we recall Charlemagne as the first “Holy Roman Emperor” (and the title can be argued,) it’s easy to imagine him as a heroic leader taking the helm of a homogenous and unified Christendom. We imagine it because it was a convenient simplification and prejudice for later histories. The further distant the period, the less we care for detail.

But in fact (and here I indulge in my own cheap simplifications,) Europe was wilder and more heterogeneous than we are comfortable in admitting. Charles was far more focussed on tidying up affairs on his borders than on the big themes of history that we like to associate with him. He was more an agent in the expansion of Christianity in Europe than a glorious symbol of the already-consolidated Christian continent. It’s almost comical how many times he returned, not only to pacify the Saxons, but to force conversion and baptisms. But this mission would bear only a passing resemblance to the mission of later Europeans colonizers. The two eras would have seen their converts, their own religion, and the relation of church to state all very differently.

There’s enough evidence to believe in Charles’s sincere religious faith, but it is equally clear that he understood the political capital invested in the church. The bishops were internal allies. The pope was an external ally. A Christianized Saxony would have Saxon bishops he could summon. Charles was very fond of ecumenical councils and doctrinal capitularies.

Travelogue 1143 – 2 September
Just Another Rival

Charlemagne’s grandfather was Charles Martel. “Martel” was a sort of cognomen given him later, signifying “The Hammer”. His life story is an account of ceaseless aggression, making it a kind of history of the Franks written small. The Franks seldom rested from war, from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West until the kingdom’s territorial peak under Charlemagne, a period of more than three hundred years. The expansion started under the mysterious, long-haired Merovingians and continued through the leadership of their majordomos, who eventually became the Carolingians. Martel himself moved from war to war, battle to battle, with every year of his life devoted to some campaign. We know about him because he was so successful at it.

His father’s wife tried to sideline him early on, pushing Pepin of Herstal to pass Charles over in favour of Pepin’s grandson, Theudoald. The poor boy didn’t last long. He was eight years old when he became majordomo. The Neustrians rebelled, and the Austrasians broke Martel out of his prison and gave him command. Etcetera.

Martel’s claim to fame these many centuries later – in large part thanks to the eighteenth-century historian, Edward Gibbon, – is the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), in which he defeated a Muslim army under Abd Al-Rahman. This battle stopped Muslim expansion into Aquitaine, if only because Abd Al-Rahman, who was killed in battle, had proven to be irreplaceable.

This victory earned Martel a reputation as “Saviour of Europe” … but only centuries later, when the concept of Christian Europe had developed well beyond anything Martel himself would have recognised. Martel was deep into his own territorial strategies and ambitions, and he cast his own hungry eye on Aquitaine. The Muslims were not the existential threat that later Christian nationalists perceived, but just one more rival, much like the others.

Travelogue 1142 – 29 August
Long Time Ago

Charlemagne, or “Charles the Great”, was only the second king in his line. His father had had himself declared King of the Franks a few years after Charles was born. But his family had been running at least one of the Frankish kingdoms for more than three generations already, acting as majordomo to the Merovingian kings who had ruled for two and a half centuries.

It’s helpful to remind myself of the spans of time occupied by the early Middle Ages. They easily telescope from our vantage because there is so little surviving detail. Two and a half centuries is the amount of time the American Republic has survived so far.

It doesn’t seem possible to say when the Merovingian line was established. They were the kings of one small contingent of Franks, the Salian Franks, living some happy place like Brabant when Roman rule collapsed. It’s likely that Merovech, the source of the name ‘Merovingian’ allied himself with the last Roman general trying to maintain order. He wouldn’t even have been the first of his line, just the first with a profile in history.

It was Clovis, probably the grandson of Merovech, who created what would become France, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the Romans, fighting his way to the top of the Frankish heap, uniting all Franks into one kingdom that begins to be recognizable to moderns familiar with the map of Europe. He converted to Christianity and converted the kingdom. His name, Clovis, was an early form of Louis. So many patterns for French history were set so early, almost three hundred years before Charlemagne became Emperor. Again, that’s a chunk of time that would swallow up U.S. history whole, Washington to Biden. Fun fact: it's likely the language Clovis spoke was much closer to modern Dutch than to modern French.

Travelogue 1141 – 19 August
Lubber

The waves were high during our last visit to the beach. The girls waded in intrepidly. They needed no warm-up time; they were immediately splashing and diving and soaked with sea water. Joy was completely at the helm on their beach day. Their father, on the other hand, required a long time to enter the water. Past the knees, every centimetre was hard-won. Cold water translated into pain. There was no mediating sensation, like “refreshing” or “bracing”. No, it just hurt. All the way up the back and shoulders. But the water was relatively warm, and it was too windy to hang out on the beach, anyway. The blowing sands stung my legs.

Eventually, I was all the way in, out past where the girls could go, in the roar-and-silence of deeper waters. This is a nice meditative moment I get to experience a few times a year, bobbing among the waves in summer, just long enough that the family doesn’t miss me.

Strangely, it’s the troubled seas that draw me out. I am pulled by the bobbing motion, overcoming my fear of the sharp cold. I drift out beyond the feel of sand underneath my feet, and I watch the waves and the ships on the horizon. I look up at the clouds. I glance at the shore, and at the long pier half a kilometre off my shoulder. It’s comforting.

In the lobby of the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, a video loops on a big screen, films recorded on ships in the high seas during storms. We watch the waves crashing on the decks. The camera’s perspective drifts away from the ship, and out into the raw motion of the waves, huge, threatening, violent. The waves rise, they loom, white ribs of foam forming in the rushing wall of water. There is no stable POV, as the camera tilts with the motion of the sea. It is dizzying and frightening.

I live by the North Sea. I swim in the North Sea. But it’s a stranger. It has a reputation as a stormy sea, temperamental and dangerous. But I haven’t fathomed it. Finally, I’m just a landlubber, try as I have to always live by the sea. As fascinated as I am, I have never had the opportunity to see through the eyes of a seafarer. All those generations the Dutch plied the seas, thousands of people living out much of the lives on water, and the rest of us have so little idea what it felt like.