Life Without Charles

CAROLINGIAN PORTRAITS (311 pp.)--Eleanor Shipley Duckett--University of Michigan ($5.95).

Pleurisy gave Charlemagne a final month in bed, and he spent it searching for errors in Latin Bible texts. He could afford a sublime death. In the 46 years of his reign he had extended his empire across all Europe. With a kind of ecumenical zeal, he had made Christians out of Saxons, Serbs and Slavs, and with paternal zeal, he had made kings out of both his sons--Louis the Pious in Aquitaine, Pippin in Italy. He died at 71, in 814. but his power was so immense that the full century that followed still bears his name.

Triple Lot. The last hundred years of Charlemagne's empire are the subject of this meticulous study, drawn from diaries and church histories collected and translated by Medieval Scholar Duckett. With a treasure-trove of antique detail, she shows that just as life under Charles the Great had been purposeful and pious, life without him was chaos. Three generations of heirs let the empire dwindle away under the weight of weakness, jealousy and distrust. By midcentury, Europe was divided between Charles's three grandsons--Lothar, Charles the Bald and Louis the German. In one of the rare medieval verses that combines reason and beauty, a bishop expressed the general woe:

Lost to the Empire is now both name and glory. The realm, once one, hath fallen in triple lot. No man is Emperor, assessed in thought or honor, For king a kinglet, for realm the realm's dividings.

Guilt & Impulse. Miss Duckett's account, though marred by the errors of style that plague scholars who wish to entertain, is astonishingly rich in anecdote. Charlemagne was obsessed with his poor handwriting, constantly practiced it as he traveled over his lands in the royal coach. Charles's son, Louis the Pious, began his reign by banishing his three bastard sisters to a convent, later blinded his nephew, Italy's 18-year-old King Bernard, for plotting revolt. But afterwards Louis fell into a remorse from which he never fully recovered. His son, Charles the Bald, was the prisoner of fatal impulsiveness: while revolt flickered along all France's frontiers, Charles took his army off to Italy to help the Pope fight the heathen Saracens, leaving affairs at home in the crafty hands of his bishop, Hincmar of Reims, who showed his contempt for the King in tracts secretly circulated around the palace. "We have not foresaken our King," he wrote. "He has foresaken us."

Of all her pale heroes, Miss Duckett does best by Hincmar, whose Annals are the major source of her book. Hincmar lived 74 years, spent 40 of them in Prankish courts and divided his time between dark treatises on predestination and darker plots. Hincmar's cold spirit is the only one that comes alive in the book and, seen in his final years, working tirelessly to bolster the inept rule of Louis the Stammerer, son of Charles the Bald, he seems the only man in the century who grew half the height of Charlemagne.

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