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Medieval Germany -- The Carolingian
Dynasty, 752-911
Charlemagne - around 1512, Albrecht DÜRER, oil on the lime wood, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
Charlemagne inherited the Frankish crown in 768. During his reign (768-814),
he subdued Bavaria, conquered Lombardy and Saxony, and established his
authority in central Italy. By the end of the eighth century, his kingdom,
later to become known as the First Reich (empire in German), included
present-day France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well
as a narrow strip of northern Spain, much of Germany and Austria, and
much of the northern half of Italy. Charlemagne, founder of an empire
that was Roman, Christian, and Germanic, was crowned emperor in Rome by
the pope in 800.
The Carolingian Empire was based on an alliance between the emperor,
who was a temporal ruler supported by a military retinue, and the pope
of the Roman Catholic Church, who granted spiritual sanction to the imperial
mission. Charlemagne and his son Louis I (r. 814-40) established centralized
authority, appointed imperial counts as administrators, and developed
a hierarchical feudal structure headed by the emperor. Reliant on personal
leadership rather than the Roman concept of legalistic government, Charlemagne's
empire lasted less than a century.
A period of warfare followed the death of Louis. The Treaty of Verdun
(843) restored peace and divided the empire among three sons, geographically
and politically delineating the approximate future territories of Germany,
France, and the area between them, known as the Middle Kingdom. The eastern
Carolingian kings ruled the East Frankish Kingdom, what is now Germany
and Austria; the western Carolingian kings ruled the West Frankish Kingdom,
what became France. The imperial title, however, came to depend increasingly
on rule over the Middle Kingdom. By this time, in addition to a geographical
and political delineation, a cultural and linguistic split had occurred.
The eastern Frankish tribes still spoke Germanic dialects; the language
of the western Frankish tribes, under the influence of Gallo-Latin, had
developed into Old French. Because of these linguistic differences, the
Treaty of Verdun had to be written in two languages.
Not only had Charlemagne's empire been divided into three kingdoms, but
the East Frankish Kingdom was being weakened by the rise of regional duchies,
the so-called stem duchies of Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and
Lorraine, which acquired the trappings of petty kingdoms. The fragmentation
in the east marked the beginning of German particularism, in which territorial
rulers promoted their own interests and autonomy without regard to the
kingdom as a whole. The duchies were strengthened when the Carolingian
line died out in 911; subsequent kings would have no direct blood link
to the throne with which to legitimate their claims to power against the
territorial dukes.
- The Merovingian Dynasty,
ca. 500-751
- The Carolingian Dynasty,
752-911
- The Saxon Dynasty, 919-1024
- The Salian Dynasty, 1024-1125
- The Hohenstaufen Dynasty,
1138-1254
- The Empire under the Early
Habsburgs
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