Private Bodies And The Body Politic In The Divorce Case Of Lothar Ii - )

Past & Present, Nov, 1998 by Stuart Airlie

`A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind'.(1) Thus, Walter Bagehot in 1867 provided advance justification for our own society's prurient interest in royal marriages, though he might have been surprised at the depths, in every sense of the word, of that interest. Ten centuries previously, in 860, Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims said much the same thing as Bagehot, though in rather different language: `This case touches all Christians. It is concerned with a king and a queen, that is, a Christian man and a Christian woman, and with the law of marriage given by God in paradise to our first parents, strengthened by the Church and confirmed by God through human and divine laws'.(2) The case to which Archbishop Hincmar was referring is the celebrated attempt by King Lothar II (855-69), a great-grandson of Charlemagne, to divorce his queen, Theutberga, and to legitimate his union with his true love, Waldrada. The king and queen, as a man and a woman, were the descendants of Adam and Eve, and the bishops, as successors of the Apostles, were their appointed judges and guides.(3) The domestic history of a Carolingian king and queen was therefore public; for this particular king and queen, marriage was part of sacred history.

The divorce case of Lothar II was a key political issue in the Carolingian world in the 850s and 860s. Four kings, two popes and a host of bishops and secular aristocrats were caught up in its ramifications.(4) The details of the case were lurid, even sensational: the queen was accused of having committed incest with her brother, Hubert; this incest was alleged to have taken the form of sodomite intercourse which resulted in pregnancy, with the queen aborting the foetus. The case was notorious: King Lothar found that its details were being discussed in Burgundy and Italy; the archbishop of Rheims found that it was being discussed even at the lower levels of society.(5) If the case was important for contemporaries, it remains so for us, as it casts a searching light on a whole range of topics in early medieval political culture. A full consideration of this complex case cannot be undertaken here. Specifically, this article will focus on what the case reveals about the representation of Christian royalty and, turning as it does on the relationship between a king and a queen, about the role of gender therein.(6) After establishing a historical context for the case, we shall examine how contemporary concepts of good rulership and of gender worked for Lothar II; then we shall see how the same concepts ultimately rebounded upon him.

I

Lothar II was one king among others in a dangerously divided world. The reign of his ancestor, Charlemagne, had seen a massive expansion of the authority of the ruling dynasty, the Carolingians, and of their people, the Franks. On his death in 814, Charlemagne had bequeathed his heir, Louis the Pious (814-40), a massive conglomeration of territories stretching across western Europe. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided this empire among Louis' three sons and three kingdoms came into being. In the west, Charles the Bald (843-77) ruled over much of what was to become France. In the so-called middle kingdom, Lothar I (843-55), father of Lothar II, ruled over a kingdom that stretched from the modern-day Netherlands down, between the rivers Rhine and Meuse, over the Alps into Italy. Finally, east of the Rhine, Louis the German (843-76) ruled over much of what was to become Germany.(7) The Treaty of Verdun had been the result of hard fighting and negotiating between these rival brothers but it did not guarantee stability for the new kingdoms. First, while Verdun had divided the empire in order to give each king a sufficient share of resources to form a viable kingdom, that share was not quite enough for the kings to rest content. Thus Lothar I and Lothar II were to complain of a diminishing of royal resources.(8) Kings therefore cast greedy eyes upon their neighbours' kingdoms. Secondly, this built-in instability was exacerbated, rather than muted, by the continuing existence of a residual sense of unity within the Carolingian world. If the post-843 kingdoms (regna) were part of one kingdom (regnum) of the Franks, then any one Carolingian ruler could push claims to rule a rival's territory. Consequently, Louis the German invaded Charles the Bald's kingdom in 858.(9) The fact that he did so at the invitation of some disaffected magnates of Charles points to the third and final problem: members of the aristocracy retained links of family and property across the new frontiers. They could exploit such links to appeal to an outside ruler when they were in trouble with their own king, but they were also vulnerable to the threats and blandishments of Carolingian rulers anxious to recruit new followers.(10)

Such were the fundamental rhythms of politics after 843. Carolingian kings, however, were more than lords of lands and men. They held a special office; they were Christian kings. By the ninth century, churchmen had constructed an imposing edifice of Christian kingship.(11) The great intellectual movement known to us as the Carolingian Renaissance saw the development of the idea that the king ruled by the grace of God. This strengthened royal authority but it also increased the burden of royal responsibility. The king held his office from God; his `job was contained within the Church'.(12) This means that much of the political language of the period was expressed in terms of obedience to, or falling away from, God's commandments. When Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, was engulfed in political crisis in the 830s, those who rebelled against him deployed the language of Christian rulership to justify their disobedience. The roots of the crisis lay in disputes among the royal kin and over access to patronage, but the rebels' language was not a mere mask behind which `real' issues were concealed. It was itself a devastating political tool: it was as a sinful Christian that Louis received penance from his bishops in 833, a penance that rendered him unfit to be king.(13)