Matthew Gabriele

And again, based upon what we know about marriage patterns and the legitimacy of marriage, their relationships, which oftentimes we know they had long-term relationships, like, why are we saying that's illegitimate?

We're saying it's illegitimate because some of them did produce children and Charlemagne didn't want them to be kind of potential threat.

But...

It didn't seem like anybody at the court or anybody in the period kind of thought of those as inappropriate in any way, shape, or form.

Louis is very aware of his tenuous position at this time.

And so he marches very, very slowly with an army back towards the court because he doesn't know what's going to happen.

It seems very clear he's expecting maybe a fight in order to take the empire.

And the person who would organize that fight is his sister.

Once Louis finally does arrive at court, the first thing he does is he exiles all of his sisters, every single sister.

He has a couple of noblemen killed for treason.

It seems very clear that they were the partners of some of his sisters.

Whether they were actually kind of plotting his demise or not, that seems very up in the air.

And then also some of his cousins and his half-brothers, his illegitimate brothers, if you will, sending them off to monasteries, exiling them from court.

And then that allows him to finally kind of take over.

For us today, he becomes incredibly important because he seems like the first, especially to 19th and early 20th century scholars, kind of the founder of Europe in a real way.

Charlemagne created this empire and then it was lost in the subsequent generations.

And then it led to all this dissension of the European religious wars of the early modern period, the world wars of something like that.

If we had only kept on to that unity, we would have had peace.

We would have had modernity in an early period as well.