Oathkeepers and Oathbreakers
Another Milestone, another book giveaway, and a taste of what's on the horizon
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
As promised, we hit another milestone of subscribers - 1,000! Thank you all for being here with us as we begin this journey.
What’s coming in 2023, our new book Oathbreakers - a new history of the Carolingian Civil War of the 840s that had far-reaching consequences. Here’s a taste…
Bishops arrived on the battlefield at Fontenoy (not far from Auxerre in modern France) so soon after the fighting that they had to step over corpses and evade the crows and vultures picking at the remains. They led a solemn mass right there, surrounded by the carnage. Before them under the heat of a late June sun stood a group of survivors that included two kings and a host of great men of the realm. After gathering in prayer, the survivors buried the dead, friend and foe alike, treating them with reverence for among the enemy dead were their own brothers and friends, their own uncles and nephews, fathers and sons, former compatriots in a great empire. While common soldiers toiled digging graves in blood soaked earth, the kings turned to their bishops to ask why. Why did this battle happen? What was the meaning in the horror they had just endured? How could they make the deaths of the brothers and friends make sense?
A generation before, these families had been united by a common cause. In the early ninth century, under their emperor Charlemagne, the Franks as a people had built the largest European empire since the heyday of Rome. What’s more, even as they jockeyed for power, prestige, and profit, the Frankish elites saw themselves as connected in a shared political and cultural enterprise, the building of a patria or homeland. Now in 841 CE, everything was in shambles. The empire had fragmented. The civil war, whispered about as a threat but an unthinkable one for a decade or more, had erupted. Families who before had charged into battle together, now drew each other’s blood.
A nobleman named Angilbert who fought in the battle declared that he felt the very earth recoil in horror at the slaughter, writing, “The fields shudder, the woods shudder, the marshes shudder.” He wished no epics would be written of its participants, but rather that the day itself be cursed and “not be counted in the round of the year, but expunged from all memory” because of the fratricide the field had witnessed. Let no one remember the dead “stripped naked, vultures, crows, and wolves greedily devour their flesh.” Another contemporary, a churchman named Florus of Lyons, remembered “the bonds of duty severed by kinsmen’s blades, both wild beasts and birds devouring them” and a great comet appearing in the sky foretelling the “destruction of mankind.”
The bishops tried to impose meaning and restore order. They gathered in council, then proclaimed as one that the two kings -- the half-brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald -- had fought for justice and equity and that God had made clear, by their victory, that they were in the right. Their treacherous brother, the emperor Lothar, and nefarious nephew, Pepin of Aquitaine, had been consumed by greed, broken their oaths, and forced by God to retreat from the field.
Yet that message failed. The civil war raged on for years, alliances ever shifting, with betrayals and plots cascading into new bloody battles and new laments for both the fallen warriors and the political and cultural community that had so suddenly fallen into ruin. The empire never reknit itself and kings continued to fight kings, brother versus brother, cousin versus cousin. In this war, as in most, there are rarely winners but often only survivors
Oathbreakers tells the history of what happens when a long-term political and cultural consensus breaks down and long suppressed tensions flare into deadly violence. It features a cast of characters and twists and turns worthy of any prestige drama, except this game of thrones actually happened, with consequences that still shape the world we live in today.
Thanks again to you all and we look forward to sharing more soon.
For now, since David and I are oathKEEPERS, we’ll be in touch with a couple lucky folks with info about a free paperback copy of our first book The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.
Happy New Year!
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