The Carolingians began as servants of the Frankish kings and ended as emperors. Pepin of Herstal (635-714), Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, made his family the real power behind the Merovingian throne; his great-grandson Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans in 800. Between those two points lie four generations of the same story told over and over: a father divides his lands between his sons, and the sons go to war. This tree is worth reading as a diagram of that habit, because the fracture lines repeat almost exactly from one generation to the next.
The pattern is set at the top. Pepin of Herstal favoured his legitimate son Grimoald II, murdered in 714, and designated Grimoald's young son Theudoald over Charles Martel, son of Alpaida, whom Plectrude imprisoned. Charles escaped, defeated the Neustrian rivals, and forced Plectrude to surrender the treasury and Theudoald's claim; he then ruled Francia without a king and divided it between his sons anyway. Carloman abdicated to Monte Cassino in 747; Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian, was anointed king in 751, and with Carloman seized their half-brother Grifo at Laon and confined him in a monastery, while his mother Swanachild was packed off to a convent. Grifo died in revolt in 753.
Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon left two openly hostile co-kings: Charlemagne and Carloman I, whose sudden death in 771 handed his brother everything. Charlemagne's own household was crowded — Himiltrude, the repudiated Lombard Desiderata, the beloved Hildegard, Fastrada, Luitgard — and its casualties are visible. Pepin the Hunchback conspired in 792 and was confined at Prüm; the daughters Rotrude, Bertha, Gisela and Hiltrude were kept unmarried at court, and after 814 Louis sent the surviving sisters, Bertha among them, to religious houses. Rotrude had died in 810 and Gisela's death date is uncertain. Pepin of Italy died in 810 and Charles the Younger in December 811, leaving Louis the Pious sole legitimate heir.
The last generation carries the collapse. Louis had his nephew Bernard of Italy blinded in April 818; Ermengarde of Hesbaye died that October, and Louis married Judith of Bavaria in 819. Judith then fought to endow their son Charles the Bald, turning Lothair I, Pepin I of Aquitaine and Louis the German against their father: they rebelled in 830 and again in 833, when Louis was deposed, to be restored in 834. The tree follows the Frankish annals and Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, and it ends where medieval Europe begins: at Fontenoy in 841, the Oaths of Strasbourg in 842, and the Treaty of Verdun in 843.
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