Paul the Deacon, a Lombard with prior experience at Charlemagne’s court, penned the history of his now-conquered people at the end of the ninth century. He was forced to acknowledge the arrival of the Carolingian Kings, which took place when Warnefrid was still a young man and Paul was still a prince:

“At this time in Gaul when the Kings of the Franks were degenerating from their wonted courage (fortitudine) and skill (scientia), those who were regarded as mayors of the palace began to administer the Kingly power and to do whatever is the custom for Kings, since it was ordained from heaven that the Kingdom of the Franks should be transferred to the progeny of these men”.

Paul had personally witnessed the fall of his people’s sovereignty. A threatened papacy reacted by requesting the Franks to take up the imperial duty of defending Rome and its possessions when the Lombards pushed the conquest of the Italian peninsula too far. It was entirely related to how the Carolingian dynasty came to be. Even though Charlemagne brought an end to Lombard independence, Pippin’s forces had been the ones to first march on Pavia, the capital of the Lombard Arian Kings. Pippin’s army defeated the Lombards twice, both times taking hostages, swearing allegiances, and taking loot. However, Pippin was not seeking conquest and may have been afraid of being more embroiled in the struggle for dominance between the Lombards, Greeks, and Romans. It was Charlemagne who in 774 accepted that the die had already been cast and annexed the Lombard Kingdom. There continued to be pockets of Lombard resistance, and Paul’s brother was arrested during the rebellion of Friuli in 776. Six years later, Paul, already a monk, came to Charlemagne’s court hoping to arrange his brother’s release.

Paul was respected by the court community because of his educational background. He wrote a number of epitaphs for the dynasty’s deceased members and was asked by Bishop Angelram of Metz to write the Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, which places a significant emphasis on the Carolingian family’s history. Between 782 and 786/7, Paul would have lived at the Frankish court and would have discussed the Carolingian family’s ancestry with the other intellectuals. It’s challenging to compare Paul’s mention of the dynastic change to the History of the Lombards, but it seems that despite their disparate languages, their tenor is very similar. Both stories portray the dynastic shift of 751 as the divinely authorized conclusion to a protracted process of Merovingian rule rather than a spontaneous uprising.

(Carefully orchestrated by the Roman Catholic Church)

The act of deposing a legitimate ruler and claiming his position was a complex matter; justifying it, was even more complex. 

Early Frankish historiography simply avoided mentioning Childeric III as a solution. The Continuations provide the impression that Pippin’s ascent was not the result of a coup but rather the filling of an unidentified power vacuum—though one that was obviously not intended to raise more questions—by leaving Childeric out of the story. The Merovingian elephant in the room was less likely to be overlooked by the ARF. Instead, they made an effort to quell it by citing the reasons why the Franks—and not the Carolingians—had rebelled against their King. Since this was no small matter, they asked the pope ‘with regard to the Kings in Francia, who at the time did not have royal power, whether this was good or not.’ The pope confirmed what the Franks had feared, namely that they had been duped by Childeric, who despite his royal lineage was ‘without royal power’ (sine potestate regia). Childeric therefore was not really a King at all, but a pretender, who was wrongly named King (qui false rex vocabatur). So as not to disturb God’s divine order, the Franks carried out the papal auctoritas and corrected this anomaly. Childeric was removed and Pippin appointed in his place; the royal nomen et potestas were once more united in the person of the King.

Notions of strength and power underlie the very concept of Kingship, especially in societies where Kings figured as leaders of a warrior-elite.

The relationship between Pippin and the papacy is presented in a completely different way in the Annales Mettenses priores. As the relationship between the Carolingians and Rome had grown more intense by the time this chronicle was written, in the early ninth century, some of the mystery that apostolic Rome would have had in the mid-eighth century may have worn off. When Pope Paul I (757–767), Stephen’s brother and successor, became the spiritual sponsor of Pippin’s daughter Gisela in 758 and was therefore compared to Pippin himself, bonds of spiritual kinship had already been established during Pippin’s rule. Pippin may not have ever set foot in Rome, but Bertrada did in 770, and Charlemagne would make at least four trips there.

On Christmas day 800, Pope Leo III (795-816) placed the imperial crown atop his head.

By 806, when the Annales Mettenses priores were written, Pope Hadrian I (772-795) had baptized Charlemagne’s youngest son, and respectively crowned his older sons Pippin and Louis Kings of Italy and Aquitaine.

Furthermore, the need to strengthen papal power and, consequently, the weight of its endorsement of Carolingian authority, had vanished by the time writing in 806 when the Carolingian monarchy had solidified itself. If anything, it appears that the author of the Annales Mettenses priores is relieving some of the pressure brought on by the exaggerated perception of papal authority. After all, a greater earthly power to back that claim could hardly be accepted when the Carolingian dynasty now appeared to be firmly in charge of the imperial dignity in the West. However, Rome’s spiritual capital was once more exploited to support the Carolingians’ claims to leadership once the foundations of their authority turned out to be weaker than anticipated.

In c. 827, not long after Einhard had completed his literary masterpiece in Aachen, a short historical treatise was composed in Alemannia, probably at the monastery of St Gall, entitled the Breviary of the Kings of the Franks and the mayors of the palace. The text is extant in two independent copies, a late ninth- century copy now kept at the Vatican and a tenth-century copy preserved in Stuttgart. The older of the two texts contains only a selection of the original composition, running from Pippin I (d. 639/640) to Charles Martel. The tenth- century copy, on the other hand, contains the full span of the Breviary and provides a record of Frankish history from King Pharamund to Louis the Pious, at which point the text was continued by Notker the Stammerer. A computation of 242 years, from the reign of King Chlothar II (d. 629) to ‘the currently thirteenth year of Emperor Louis,’ places the composition of this section of the Breviary in 827.

The Stuttgart text from the ninth century was no longer solely concerned with Carolingian history; by including a description of Merovingian history, it acquired a cyclical aspect in which dynasties emerged and collapsed. The heroic conversion and baptism of Clovis I, known as the New Constantine, were given special attention by the author. The fast succession of Clovis’ successors in the narrative only served to establish an unbroken line of kings connecting Clovis to Chlothar II, the emergence of Carolingian supremacy, and Pippin’s accession to the throne.

The result is magnificent and exceptional in Frankish historiography: Clovis I and Pippin the Short, the two forefathers of the great royal dynasties of the Franks, are placed side by side and each is portrayed as a defender of Christianity. It was a narrative in which Constantine was mentioned repeatedly. Charlemagne and Louis, Pippin’s successors, seem to the author to be as significant as Clovis’s successors had been. The chronicler then moves on to describe Pippin’s elevation, pausing only to mention that Charlemagne was made emperor by Pope Leo III, which, in the context of the Breviary, is similar to Pippin’s consecration by Stephen II.The roles of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, who are normally at the heart of ninth-century Carolingian historiography, now serve to emphasize the enduring success of Pippin’s deeds, or perhaps the author is even signalling that the Carolingian dynasty was already in decline.

The rhetoric pitting Carolingian power against Merovingian frailty had reached its pinnacle. They wrote their accounts during the undisputed reign of the Carolingians over a large empire that had no parallel in the Latin West since the fall of Rome. Emperor Louis the Pious was forced to publicly confess his faults, lay down his weapons, and don a penitent’s robe when he appeared before a Frankish assembly in the monastery of St. Médard in Soissons in 833, breaking the enchantment of infinite Carolingian virtue. The emperor had basically been rendered helpless, albeit only momentarily—within a year Louis had managed to recover the upper hand.After his restoration, new solutions would be necessary to secure the foundations of Carolingian authority, as the events of 833 had painfully exposed that even emperors could lack the potestas to keep the peace.

In 835, Abbot Hilduin of St Denis and arch chaplain at Louis’s court, formulated such a reorientation on the historical foundations of Carolingian authority. In a short text known as the Gesta Stephani, Hilduin recalled the ceremony of 754, at which Pope Stephen II had consecrated Pippin and his two sons as Kings of the Franks. Contrary to earlier traditions, Pippin’s royal inauguration was no longer explained in terms of Carolingian strength versus Merovingian weakness, but came to rest solely on the authority of the bishop of Rome.

According to the Annals of St Bertin, the captors of Emperor Louis the Pious ‘harassed him for so long that they forced him to lay aside his weapons and change his garb, banishing him to the threshold of the Church.’ Effectively, the emperor could no longer perform his duties as a protector of the ecclesia. When news reached Pippin of Aquitaine and Louis the German of their brother Lothar’s maltreatment of their father, they switched allegiances and marched on Aachen to liberate Louis. Lothar fled south on 28 February 834, leaving his father to be restored to his former status.Since it was through a carefully orchestrated ritual that Louis was publically turned into a penitent, it required additional ritual to revert the transformation, and rebirth the emperor with the weapons symbolizing his ability to execute his ministerium. In a series of care- fuly concerted reconciliations, Louis patched up his battered image and mended the broken bond between the head of the empire and the body of the elite. As Louis realized, this was not the time to bear grudges; those who had forsaken their emperor on the Rotfeld, among whom his archchaplain Hilduin, were pardoned and restored to their former positions.

The first step toward Louis’s restoration was not taken in the cathedral of Rheims, where Pope Stephen IV (816–817) confirmed his imperial dignity in 817, or in Aachen, where Louis had been crowned emperor by Charlemagne in 813. Rather, “the emperor wanted to be reconciled in the church of St Denis by episcopal ministration and consented to be girded with his arms at the hand of the bishops.”

Louis had good reasons for picking the St. Denis monastery because the Carolingian family had a strong historical connection to it. Louis felt he owed the martyr after being reinstated in the presence of his relics.

In a letter he afterwards wrote to Abbot Hilduin of St Denis, the emperor reminisced about the monastery’s former royal patrons. After Dagobert I, patronage of the monastery had fallen to the Carolingians. Charles Martel, or so Louis was convinced, owed his reign to the martyr in whose presence he would later be buried, as would his son Pippin, Louis’s grandfather. In thinking of the role St Denis had played in his family’s history, Louis could scarcely pass over the ceremony of 754, which had turned his family into a royal dynasty.

Hilduin managed to combine his Parisian martyr, the Greek Areopagite and the third-century Roman pontiff into a single saint. What Hilduin therefore created was a powerful nexus between the Roman papacy and the Frankish monarchy, which he attached to the locus of St Denis, where it would endure until the French Revolution.

The moment to reconsider the guiding principles of Carolingian power wasn’t until the early years of Louis the Pious’ reign when the first flaws in the Carolingian political structure started to show. Hilduin shifted course in his description of the dynasty’s beginning and gave up the idea that power was the distinguishing feature of Carolingian Kingship in light of the traumatic recollection of 833. Instead, Hilduin concentrated solely on the dynasty’s apostolic endorsement and unique connection to the papacy. This new discourse was more resilient to transient crises even if it was not as strong or captivating as its predecessor. By letting go of one’s own moral excellence as the primary requirement for royal dignity and relying more and more on their apostolically endorsed bond with God

It was becoming increasingly difficult to perceive Carolingian Kingship as the powerful antithesis to the Merovingian model.