A collapsing gallery pushed Charlemagne's heir to plan his own succession
On Maundy Thursday in 817, a wooden walkway linking Aachen's cathedral to the palace gave way beneath Louis the Pious and his court, killing many. Shaken by his narrow escape, Charlemagne's son drew up a detailed succession plan within three months. Quarrels over that plan later tore his empire apart.
Louis was born in 778 near Poitiers while his father was campaigning beyond the Pyrenees; a twin brother died in infancy. Crowned King of Aquitaine at three, he was raised in his southwestern realm because Charlemagne wanted each son to grow up among the people he would govern. Once, summoned to a royal council in Saxony, the boy arrived dressed as a Basque. As a young king he guarded the Spanish frontier, taking Barcelona from the Emirate of Córdoba in 801.
He was never meant to inherit everything. Under Frankish custom the lands would be split between brothers, but Pepin died in 810 and Charles the Younger in 811. Louis was crowned co-emperor at Aachen in 813 and became sole ruler of the Franks when his father died the following year.
His first moves at court were a purge. He destroyed the pagan Germanic texts and objects his father had collected, exiled courtiers he judged immoral, packed unmarried sisters and nieces off to convents so no ambitious brother-in-law could rise, and forced two of his father's cousins into monastic exile. He then charged Benedict of Aniane with reforming the Frankish church so every religious house would follow the Rule of Saint Benedict. When Pope Stephen IV crowned him again at Reims in 816, he set a custom most later French kings followed.
The early years also brought shame. Louis treated his nephew, Bernard of Italy, so brutally that he later performed public penance for it. Worse followed in the 830s, when his adult sons Lothair, Pepin and Louis fought one another, their rivalry sharpened by his efforts to include Charles, a son from his second marriage. He was even deposed briefly between November 833 and March 834. Order was mostly restored before he died in 840, but three more years of civil war followed his death.
Source: Louis the Pious
