Carloman I - Competition With Charlemagne

Competition With Charlemagne

Carloman's reign proved short and troublesome. The brothers shared possession of Aquitaine, which broke into rebellion upon the death of Pepin the Short; when Charlemagne in 769 led an army into Aquitaine to put down the revolt, Carloman led his own army there to assist, before quarrelling with his brother at Moncontour, near Poitiers, and withdrawing, troops and all. This, it had been suggested, was an attempt to undermine Charlemagne's power, since the rebellion threatened the latter's rule; Charlemagne, however, crushed the rebels, whilst Carloman's behaviour had simply damaged his own standing amongst the Franks. Relations between the two then degenerated further, requiring the mediation of their mother, Bertrada, who appears to have favoured Charlemagne, with whom she would live out her widowhood, over Carloman.

In 770, his mother Bertrada began implementing her great strategy. After spending the Easter with Charlemagne at Liege, she visited Carloman at Seltz: her motives for visiting him are unknown, although it is suggested that she was trying to allay his fears of his brother, or persuade him to be more co-operative with Charlemagne, or even secure his agreement and collusion in her plans. However it was, by the end of the year Bertrada and Charlemagne had successfully encircled Carloman: Charlemagne had married Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, Carloman's immediate eastern neighbor, and the marriage created an alliance between Charlemagne and the Lombards; Bertrada had also secured for Charlemagne the friendship of Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria, her husband's nephew; she had even attempted to secure Papal support for the marriage by arranging for Desiderius to cede to Rome certain territories to which the Papacy laid claim, although Pope Stephen III remained in theory hostile to an alliance between his allies the Franks and his enemies the Lombards, and in reality deeply conflicted between the threat the Lombards posed to him and the chance to dispose of the anti-Lombard Christopher the Primicerius, the dominant figure at the Papal court.

These maneuvers had been favorable to the Franks in general, but posed a serious threat to Carloman's position. He had been left without allies: he attempted to use his brother's alliance with the Lombards to his own advantage in Rome, offering his support against the Lombards to Stephen III and entering into secret negotiations with the Primicerius, Christopher, whose position had also been left seriously isolated by the Franco-Lombard rapprochement; but after the violent murder of Christopher by Desiderius, Stephen III chose to give his support to the Lombards and Charlemagne. Carloman's position was rescued, however, by Charlemagne's sudden repudiation of his Lombard wife, Desiderius' daughter. Desiderius, outraged and humiliated, appears to have made some sort of alliance with Carloman following this, in opposition to Charlemagne and the Papacy, which took the opportunity to declare itself against the Lombards.