The Attempted Setting Up of Carloman as King in 873

This is Hincmar's account of the final phase in the rebellion of Charles the Bald's son Carloman. Three years before Carloman was first alleged to have been "plotting against his father, thereby breaching his fidelity."^[21] He had been put into the Church as a child of five or six and tonsured as a cleric, subsequently receiving minor orders as a deacon. He had then been given several abbacies, which he held in the manner of a lay abbot, having a regular abbot in office alongside to supervise the monasteries' religious life. In 868, Hincmar records Charles the Bald's sending of Carloman "with a crack force of household troops" to Neustria to fight the Vikings on the Loire.^[22] In 869, when Charles made a strong bid for the succession to his nephew Lothar II, he endowed Carloman with further abbacies in the newly acquired western part of Lothar's kingdom. But the new situation had evoked a new ambition in Carloman: his rebellion was surely a response to the potential availability of a Lotharingian kingdom for himself. Though Hincmar does not say that Carloman aspired to kingship in 870 or 871, his record of Carloman's activities in these years strongly suggests such an ambition. The annal for 873 makes this explicit. Life imprisonment was the punishment intended by Charles for his faithless son. But when the bishop had

deposed Carloman from all ecclesiastical rank, and left him only the communion of a layman, . . . the ancient cunning Enemy incited Carloman and his accomplices to exploit another argument, namely, that because he no longer held any ecclesiastical orders, he could be all the more free to assume the title and power of a king. . . So it came about that, following his deposition, his former accomplices began to rally to him again, more enthusiastically than ever. . . : their plan was that, as soon as they got the chance, they would snatch him out of the prison where he was being held, and set him up as their king.^[23]

Charles the Bald then had Carloman hailed before a secular court and condemned to death for his crimes—a sentence commuted to blinding "in order to deceive the pernicious hope in him on the part of those men who hated peace."^[24]

There are two implications here for Hincmar's view of ninth-century Frankish king-making. First, however much Hincmar disapproved of Carloman's supporters, he did not challenge their capacity to "set up a king."^[25] It was Carloman's personal ineligibility that made his elevation to kingship impossible: the would-be king-makers' qualifications for their role were implicitly accepted. Significantly, there is no hint here or in Hincmar's letters that Carloman's supporters included any bishop. Second, in affirming here Charles's right to override filial claims in making his arrangements for the future, Hincmar was asserting (and perhaps wished to assure Charles the Bald) that the Church could offer a workable method for excluding a legitimate son from a share in the royal succession. Consecration to holy orders,

was indelible: hence Carloman, by receiving tonsure as a cleric, had been removed permanently from the ranks of those eligible for kingship.^[26] Carloman's supporters sinned in ignoring this. In the end, the Church's rule was vindicated, even if secular power and a secular judgment were needed to enforce it.^[27] Thus the Church, which increasingly stressed the obligations of Christian marriage, and hence, by implication, the claims of all legitimate sons, was offering at the same time an escape route from the ensuing intensification of problems arising from partible inheritance. In practice, previous kings too had recognized that partibility had limits: the kingdom of the Franks had never been treated just like a family holding. But the Carolingian dynasty in the middle decades of the ninth century seemed to risk a crisis of overproduction. Hincmar was clearsighted about the threat further partition might pose to royal power in a kingdom reduced to a mere "fragment."^[28] Carloman could, perhaps should, receive honores that would enable him to maintain high social status. But the "title and power of a king" would be denied him. Hincmar was no less clearsighted about Charles's need to buttress the new method of exclusion by a traditional one. Only by blinding was Carloman's fate sealed, and his supporters' hopes thereby finally dashed. Hincmar recorded the sentence without comment. In his view, it was justified by Carloman's faithlessness towards his father and by the overriding need to forestall any further partition of the Frankish heartlands.^[29]

The rest of the 873 annal sets Carloman's story in a context that also suggests its meaning for Hincmar. Alongside it is placed the story of the East Frankish prince Charles the Fat, tempted doubly by the devil, on the one hand, to rebellion against his father, and on the other, to renounce the world. Both temptations had to be spurned, in Hincmar's view: royal power must be transmitted legitimately, from father to son, and, thus acquired, must be used.^[30] The annal goes on to highlight Charles the Bald's success in defeating the Vikings at Angers. Here was a king acting "manfully and strenuously," and carrying out his royal function to the full. His judgment on his faithless son was amply vindicated in a triumphant affirmation at once of his paternal and regal authority, and of the integrity of his realm.