Charles the Younger

Charles II Karling, (Latin: Carolus Carolingius Minor Imperator Romanorum) also known as Charles the Younger (French: Charlejeune) reigned as Holy Roman Emperor between 821 and his death in 854. The son of Emperor Louis the Pious and the grandson of Charlemagne, the untimely death of his father saw the electors refuse to elect the young prince, installing instead King Odilo the Frail of Bavaria onto the Imperial throne, the first Holy Roman Emperor not of the Carolingian Dynasty. According to a highly contested legend, Charles II, who inherited the huge expanse of the Frankish, Frisian and Italian domains held by the Karlings, was so aggrieved that he ordered his regentess, the former Empress Enda (whom Louis had divorced but not dismissed as regent amidst the stress of his late reign), to bring him back the Crown that was rightfully his. Enda apparently acceded to this demand by the young King, and stacked the Council with glory hounds who together declared war on the Emperor in his name, beginning the conflict known later as the Children's War. After crushing the forces of the Emperor, he made short work of the forces of the boy the electors had now crowned (later known as anti-Emperor Tassilo), and was installed by force as King of the Romans, to be crowned by the Pope in 832.

History regards the reign of Emperor Charles the Younger as a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes of the Carolingian dynasty. Although he had to win his Imperial throne back by force and had to defend it in a major rebellion just after reaching adulthood, the rest of his reign was remarkably stable and he sired a son who inherited the Holy Roman Empire without trouble after his death. In fact, Charles lived up to his namesake grandfather's legacy when his reign saw the expansion of the Empire with Carinthia, as well as the conquest of Schleswig and Aragón and a successful Holy War on behalf of his second wife, Queen Gaudiosa the Great of Léon.

Early life
Born the son of Louis the Pious and the grandson of Charlemagne, his grandfather's name was Charles II's destiny: to rule over the Holy Roman Empire and continue the Carolingian legacy. He spent his early years being tutored by his father in the art of rulership (despite his father's fractious reign) and expecting to be elected to succeed his father after his death. Chroniclers note the young Charles's remarkable strength: despite being born clubfooted, the boy was remarkably tall for his age and grew up strong of body and spirit, being instilled from an early age with the duty his right to rule conferred.

Regency and rise to power
Full article: Children's War

Charles's expectations quickly ended in disillusionment when his father died unexpectedly of severe stress in 818. According to a popular legend which the chroniclers reported as fact, when his Regentess Enda the Heavenly returned from the meeting of the electors at Bruges and informed the expectant 4-year old King that the electors had given the Crown to King Odilo of Bavaria, he was so angered by this that he stood up, forced Enda to look at him by tugging on her skirt, and spoke the legendary words: "Regent, I command that you fight the bad man and bring me my Crown back!" The Codex Carolinum records that Enda was so impressed by this that she obeyed the King's command. She convened the Council in the presence of the King, presented his command to them, and fired any councillor that dared to disagree, after which the Council consented to immediately rise in arms against what they declared to be an illegitimate anti-King in what became known as the Children's War. While historians note that the story seems embellished, the general consensus amongst them is that since Enda had no relation to the King and not many reasons to risk her neck for his Imperial Crown, there must be some truth in the story about his command to bring back the Imperial Crown.

The odds were certainly in favour of the boy king and his supporters (known as the Carolingian faction), since as King of the Franks he ruled over half of the Empire and could muster a greater number of levies than the Agilofing King of the Romans. In a campaign that alternated between the siege of holdings around Bruges and forays to the border of Aquitaine to deal with the armies of the Agilofing party, Charles easily won his Crown back from Odilo's successor, the teenage boy king Tassilo of Bavaria. He never got control of the old capital back, moving the Imperial Palatium to his own seat of power at Nijmegen. Enda humiliated the electors by forcing them to assemble at Nijmegen, kneel and swear allegiance to her charge, elect him King of the Romans and abjure Tassilo as an illegitimate anti-King, ordering his imprisonment (Charles later threw him into the oubliette). Charles was then betrothed to an Agilofing Duchess in an effort to seal the feud between the two parties.

Charles was now King of the Romans, to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope upon reaching adulthood. His regentess ably shepherded the realm as he grew up. His betrothed died shortly before he reached adulthood, foiling the plans to tie in the Carolingian's Agilofing rivals closer to the Imperial dynasty. Poetry written in the young king's own hand reveals that he had a troubled adolescence, as he fell in love with a mysterious woman named Rotrude, whom historians presume was much older than him. Trying to snap him out of it, Enda arranged a new betrothal to the beautiful Countess Mari of Poher, but she was unsuccessful. The poems cast an interesting light on the boyhood of the young Emperor, continuing in a much darker tone with occasional thoughts of death as the romance went awry. Many presume because of this that Charles the Younger suffered from serious episodes of depression.

Reign as Holy Roman Emperor
To fully bring home his legitimacy to those princes of the Empire that still doubted him, Charles had to secure his coronation by the Pope. Sending a legate to Rome as soon as he came of age, he eagerly declared war on the excommunicate King of Northumbria on the Pope's behalf, many presume because the Pope demanded this in return for his coronation. However, as the Emperor's troops were campaigning in England, a league of vassals led by disaffected vassals declared a war for their independence, denouncing the Emperor's legitimacy. To the Pope's dismay and on pain of his own excommunication, he made peace with Northumbria, rushed his troops home, used the Imperial treasury to borrow a large number of mercenaries and crushed the rebels. Most of the rebels, their titles forfeited, died in the Emperor's jail. Many see in this the Emperor's moodiness and have tried to explain it as a consequence of the electors' refusal to elect him, which made the Emperor intolerant to dissent. Having won the war, the Emperor went barefoot to the Pope in Rome to repent of his excommunication. The Pope granted his coronation the second time, but before the ceremony could be planned and with the Pope already on his way, a heretical rebellion prevented a solemn coronation, and the Emperor had to be crowned on the battlefield. Followers of the Emperor's poetic dabbling see the mood of his poems darken increasingly, concluding that he was stressed out by the need for such an ignominously sober coronation.

The Emperor would continue to struggle with his moodiness, depression and stress for much of his adult life. To cope with it, he turned to the tutelage of the Benedictine order, and became an oblate and benefactor of a group of Benedictine monks wishing to establish a new abbey at Arnhem. The Emperor is noted to have read the Bible studiously, secluding himself regularly to find solace in the word of God through the Benedictine lectio divina. In 834, he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Veremundo in Asturias de Oviedo. When he returned, his wife conceived and gave birth to a son and heir, Louis II in 835. Overjoyed, Charles developed a devotion to the Asturian saint, whom he considered to have interceded for the birth of an heir, and privately composed a hymn in his honour which the Benedictines set to music (the hymn itself has been lost, presumably because its text wasn't that good). Though he still appears to have been in a dark mood, the Emperor's state of mind improved after the birth of Louis, and he is noted to have declared his war to unite ducal Britanny under his wife's rule in honour of his son. In 836, he conquered the county of Broërec and bestowed the Duchy of Britanny on his wife. In the meantime, he started to improve the Imperial demesne in Gelre, starting with the final endowment of the magnificent romance-style Sint-Vermond Abbey church at Arnhem, which he dedicated to St. Veremundo of Asturias. He would continue to build castles and cities in Gelre, Overijssel and Frisia, strengthening his demesne. The accompanying rise in population in the Imperial demesne is thought by modern historians to have been the cause of various infectious plagues.

In the meantime, the Emperor set out to convert the Danes and Swedes to Christianity. Sending a succession of court chaplains to the heathens, he was dismayed when he heard of their imprisonment. In 840, while the Danish king was trying to invade the Kingdom of Mercia, he declared war on the Danes in retaliation for the imprisonment of his chaplains, intending to conquer the County of Schleswig for the Empire and to strengthen the defence of Christendom against the Pagan threat in that way. As the war prospects looked up for the Imperial armies (which Charles, being not very martially-inclined, left to his commanders), he is noted as having finally shed his brooding and dark mood, and his writings now reveal gratitude to God and love for his wife Mari. In 843, the successful conquest of Schleswig was recorded to have left the Emperor "uncharacteristically jubilant".

The birth of his youngest child and third daughter, Princess Blanche is believed to have indirectly caused a large amount of stress to Empress Mari, and she died the same year in 849. After her burial in her family crypt in Poher, Charles declared that he wanted his heart to be buried with his beloved wife while his body rested in Gelre. He also took a vow of celibacy which lasted until a year into his second marriage to Queen Gaudiosa the Great of Asturias, who had impressed him when he attended her coronation as Queen of Asturias in 840 and whom he married in November 849 (although as he remained celibate during that time, many speculate their relationship started off more platonic and that Empress Mari remained his great love). Many presume there were attempts to unite the blood of Saint Veremundo to that of Charlemagne, but the Emperor's second marriage remained childless.

However, the alliance between two of the most powerful rulers in Christendom did bear fruit in another way. Soon after their marriage, Empress Gaudiosa and Emperor Charles started planning a reconquest of the Queen's rightful lands in Léon. Charles raised the full levies of the Empire to rally to his new wife's and Christendom's defence. A banner gifted to the Imperial forces by the monks of Sint-Vermond Abbey embroidered with the cross of Asturias and the image of the saint was carried before the Imperial army as it marched. It was later returned to the Abbey, where it became a revered relic after a barren woman prayed for the saint's intervention while touching it and birthed a strong son. A year later, after the combined armies of the Emperor and Empress had taken the unprepared Moorish armies completely by surprise. In 851, Charles was at his wife's side as she was proclaimed Queen of Léon.

While the Imperial armies had been on the march in Léon, the Imperial vassal King of Aquitaine had seized the disarray among the Moors to reconquer much of Aragón and add it to the Empire. Eager to seize upon this opportunity as much as possible, the Emperor consented to declare war for his vassal's claim on the County of Alto Aragón as well in 853, though the war would not be won until after his death.

Death, burial and succession
The continuous plagues that ravaged the rapidly expanding population of Gelre during his reign left Emperor Charles exhausted and in ill health. Many note that his apparent mental health issues in his early reign must also have sapped his strength. He died on the 2nd of January in the year 854, with his son at his side. The chronicles record how the day before on his deathbed, the Emperor had the Archbishop of Cologne, who had just administered the viaticum to him in the presence of his son, summon the electors and requested that they elect his son Roman King of the Franks there and then, to which the electors graciously acceded. Having found lavish monetary gifts to the electors in the administration of the Imperial treasury, many historians presume that they had been bribed to do so, with a later joke about the Emperor being that he "won his Crown by demand and passed it on by supply". Shortly after he had witnessed the coronation of his son himself, the Emperor passed away at age 39.

According to his last will and testament, the Emperor's body was interred in a monumental tomb at his abbey of Saint Veremundo, with a statue of him holding the Holy Banner of Saint Veremundo near his final resting place in his own private side-chapel. His heart travelled in a separate casket to Poher in Britanny, where it was laid to rest next to his beloved wife, as the Emperor had promised to her on her deathbed. Louis declared that the realm be in mourning for his departed father until he was himself crowned.

Personality
His extensive private writings, preserved by the monks in Sint-Vermond Abbey, give an especially vivid insight into the mind of Charles II. From these sources and the chronicles, he emerges as a very emotional and deeply romantic man. Many speculate that because of his childhood and the early death of his father, he never really learned to control his emotions, although depression in the Carolingian family might also have been genetic. This led to his long struggle with depression, moodiness and stress which only slowly dissipated after the birth of his son and heir, Louis II. Nevertheless, the Emperor is often painted positively as a romantic, charming and kind soul, who doted on his children and his wife. His deep love for Empress Mari, in particular, has been the subject of many romance ballads in the High Middle Ages.

His experience with the electors as a child probably left him distrustful of the motives of his vassals throughout his life, though he hid this behind a courtly demeanour. His kindness notably did not extend to any who doubted his God-given right to rule, and he was absolutely merciless in childhood to the underage anti-King Tassilo, whom he had thrown into the oubliette and who died without ever seeing the light of day again. He reserved a similarly merciless treatment to the princes of the Empire who rose against him shortly after he came of age, and many of them died in his prison. He did, however, allow them the mercy of a Christian burial in their homelands.

Despite his deep devotion to the Benedictine order, Charles the Younger was not considered a very zealous believer. Instead, he was lauded by his biographer, brother Johannes of Sint-Vermond, for his "passionate, deep faith (...). He was like a child trusting in the tender love of God, as to a loving father". Charles's faith had a mystical quality, even though he is not remembered as a great mystic, being much more spontaneous. Notably, he never needed the help of any clergyman to understand the scriptures during his many sessions of lectio divina, from which he emerged with a number of profound insights. His passionate devotion to Saint Veremundo is thought by many to be an example of the passionate, impulsive flashes of inspiration he was prone to, in religion as in his reign.

Legacy
Emperor Charles the Younger has been presented by the chroniclers as a proper second Charlemagne, and he is referred to by analogy to his father as Charlejeune. At his accession to the throne of the Franks, the troubled reign of his father had left the Holy Roman Empire divided and the rule of the Carolingian dynasty, growing few in number, uncertain. At the end of his reign, this had turned around. Not only did the princes of the Empire cease their rebelliousness after his Imperial coronation, the Empire also knew an unprecedented time of stability. He successfully emulated his grandfather in conquests against the Muslims and the Norse pagans, which reaffirmed the Carolingian reputation as towering figures that dominated Western Christendom. His instrumental role in the formation of the Kingdom of Léon is remembered as turning point in the early Reconquista.

Charles II's memory has been particularly honoured in the Low Countries. Under his rule, the Duchy of Gelre became one of the richest and most populous lands of the Empire. The city of Nijmegen, to this day, honours Charles the Younger as a sort of second founder, and a museum of medieval history at the Valkhof, the complex including the donjon of Charles II's palatium, still sees many visitors.