Amid the daily news of war, politics, and the economy, few people likely spend much time reflecting on Europe in the early Middle Ages. Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry's 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 in the history of Western civilization.
As they did in their myth-busting book The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, Gabriele, a medieval studies professor, and Perry, a historian and journalist, approach their subject from an iconoclastic perspective. At the height of the empire on Christmas Day 800 CE, when the mighty Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III as Roman emperor at a court that was "a magnet for some of the most brilliant minds in Europe," the Franks exercised supremacy over a large swath of Western Europe. Their domination "rivaled Rome at its height," and they regarded themselves as successors to the Israelites as a new chosen people.
Four decades later, that peak was a dim memory. At the bloody Battle of Fontenoy, on June 25, 841, 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 efficiently reconstruct the battle from a variety of roughly contemporary sources. The savage clash, whose "carnage staggered the observers, leaving a bloodstain on the fields of Fontenoy that the Carolingians never washed away," was the opening act in a drama that exposed "how fragile even the mightiest regime can be and how quickly everything can fall apart." In this 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, Gabriele and Perry describe the "series of events that punctured a bright, shining lie that the Franks had been telling about themselves (and largely to themselves)."
The authors provide an abbreviated timeline and cast of characters to help keep key events in perspective and to aid in sorting out the multiple Charleses, Louises, and Bernards who populate the age. 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
Shelf Talker: Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry team up again in an informative and entertaining story that connects the disintegration of Charlemagne's empire to the rise of modern Europe.