Charles the Fat reunited Charlemagne's empire, then watched it fall apart
A youngest son with no obvious path to power, Charles the Fat had three kingdoms drop into his lap, and by 884 he ruled everything his great-grandfather Charlemagne had held. Three years later his own nephew deposed him. And the nickname? Nobody alive in his day ever mentioned his size.
The label Carolus Crassus first appears in the twelfth century, in the work of an anonymous writer known as the Saxon Annalist, yet it stuck in French, German and Italian alike. His contemporary Regino of Prüm simply called him the third emperor of that name. Born in 839, the youngest son of East Francia's founding king, Louis the German, and his Welf wife Hemma, Charles was said as a youth to have suffered a fit of possession, and modern writers suspect epilepsy.
Inheritance did most of the work. He received Alemannia in 876, took Italy in 879 when his brother Carloman was disabled by a stroke, and was crowned emperor by Pope John VIII in February 881. His brother Louis the Younger's death in 882 gave him all of East Francia, and in 884 West Frankish nobles invited him to take their throne after his cousin Carloman II died. Unusually for the era, he and his brothers had shared their father's lands without fighting each other.
Seeking to imitate Charlemagne, he began a palace at Sélestat in Alsace modelled on the one at Aachen. His troubles came from Viking armies settling in the Low Countries after Alfred the Great beat them in 878. At Asselt he negotiated rather than fought: the chief Godfrid became a Christian vassal and married a Carolingian princess, while Sigfred took a payoff. Contemporary writers did not criticise this.
Paris was another matter. When Sigfred's fleet besieged the city in 885, Count Odo slipped messengers through the lines to beg for help. Charles eventually arrived with a large army and camped at Montmartre, but rather than attack, he sent the raiders upriver to plunder rebellious Burgundy and later paid them 700 pounds of silver. His prestige collapsed. In November 887 his nephew Arnulf of Carinthia toppled him, and Charles died in retirement that January. The empire split into five kingdoms and was not wholly reunited until Napoleon.
Source: Charles the Fat
