Matthew Gabriele

They were seen as kind of not part of one basket of literacy, but as different things.

Charlemagne had no fewer than five wives, many more informal sexual partners who were women, and at least 19 children over the course of his life.

One of the reasons that it's a little bit squishy is because the idea of marriage was not the same as what we have now.

It's a much more informal process.

We have no records of what a wedding ceremony looks like from the early Middle Ages.

We have no sense of what a marriage entailed.

It was probably some kind of agreement between families, but that also meant that they could be broken very easily.

When Pepin the Short dies in 768, he follows very typical Frankish custom at the time and divides the kingdom between his two sons, his eldest son Charles, later Charlemagne, and then his younger son Carloman.

Charles gets kind of the heartland of Frankish power, kind of the western section of the kingdom of Francia, and Carloman kind of gets the eastern side, including areas of Alemannia, what's now modern Germany, and places like that.

They are, shall we say, antagonistic towards each other throughout this entire time.

They don't get along particularly well.

But Charles has the great good fortune of having his brother die.

It seems like natural causes, there doesn't seem to have been kind of any foul play at that time.

Charles moves very quickly to secure the support of powerful aristocrats in Carloman's kingdom and establishes himself as kind of sole ruler of the Frankish kingdom.

He marries a woman by the name of Hildegard, who is from a very prominent aristocratic family in his brother's kingdom in 772, meaning that he's forming an alliance across the borders after his brother has died in order to cement aristocratic support for his takeover of his brother's kingdom.

One of the fundamental pillars of Frankish rule is conquest, is warfare.

It was a way that kings established themselves as legitimate rulers, but also as a way of gathering plunder, gathering booty that they can distribute to powerful aristocrats in order to effectively buy their loyalty.

Military campaigns are built into the very fabric of kind of governance of the Frankish realm.

meaning that every May 1st, the Franks would gather an army.

Usually the king would send out notices as to where that would be, and then they would launch a campaign.