3 - THE MEN WHO WOULD BE KINGS: THE ‘SUPERMAGNATES’ AND THE ‘RISE OF THE ARISTOCRACY’

Summary

In the year 880, the four surviving Carolingian rulers met at Vienne to draw a line under the revolt of Boso and to seal a succession and division treaty which led to a period of renewed concord in the royal dynasty. One of their more specific goals was to make kingship more accessible to the nobility of Lotharingia, the symbolically and strategically important central Frankish realm which had been thrown into renewed turmoil by the events of 879. In this aim, the Vienne treaty was broadly similar to most other Carolingian family settlements. The point of subkingship, for example, was not only to keep junior members of the royal house happy by allowing them a tangible share in power, but also to give provincial aristocracies their ‘own’ king, who would often be married into a local family of note. A nearby royal court was less a hindrance than a potential source of opportunity for regional aristocrats, serving as a source of offices which would help them entrench their local standing, and as a doorway leading onto the grander stage of imperial politics. Equally, the Carolingians, lacking the institutions of the decayed Roman state, needed members of the aristocracy, whose power was rooted in control of land, to act as the means of transposing their authority from the palace to the localities.