Amid the daily news of war, politics, and the economy, few people likely spend much time reflecting on Europe in the early Middle Ages. Oathbreakers, a history of the decline of the Frankish Empire, and specifically its Carolingian dynasty, offers a good reason to put aside the rush of current events for a time and pay a visit to that crucial epoch. As they did in their myth-busting book The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Matthew Gabriele, a medieval studies professor, and David M. Perry, a historian and journalist, approach their subject from an iconoclastic perspective.
The Franks exercised supremacy over a large swath of Western Europe. In 800 CE, their domination "rivaled Rome at its height." Four decades later, that peak was a dim memory. At the bloody Battle of Fontenoy, the empire descended into an open civil war for the first time, pitting two of Charlemagne's grandsons--Louis the German and the Charles the Bald--against their brother Lothar, the emperor. Gabriele and Perry relate a fast-moving account of the abortive insurrections and failed diplomacy that led up to what ultimately seemed an unavoidable confrontation among the competing brothers and the splintering of the empire that followed.
Though the events in Oathbreakers are distant in time, Gabriele and Perry describe them with an immediacy that's both informative and entertaining. Without making any overt effort to do so, they reveal that the emotions driving the actors in the Carolingian drama--ambition, greed, and the lust for power--are in fact as timely as today's headlines. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer