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- Louis the Pious
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Partial article
Louis the Pious (also known as Louis I, Louis the Fair, and Louis the Debonaire, German: Ludwig der Fromme, French: Louis le Pieux or Louis le Débonnaire, Italian: Luigi il Pio or Ludovico il Pio, Spanish: Luis el Piadoso or Ludovico Pío) (16 April 778 – 20 June 840) was Emperor and King of the Franks from 814 to his death 840.
Rule in Aquitaine
Born in Chasseneuil, in today's Gironde, France, on 16 April 778, the third son of Charlemagne by his third wife, Hildegard, Louis was crowned king of Aquitaine as a child in 781 and sent there with regents and a court to rule in order to quiet rebellions which were forming after Charlemagne's defeat by the Moors in Spain (778). Charlemagne's intention was to see his all sons brought up as natives of their given territories, wearing the national costume of the region and ruling by the local customs. Thus were the children sent to their respective realms at so young an age. Each kingdom had its importance in keeping some frontier, Louis's was the Spanish March. In 797, Barcelona, the greatest city of the Marca, fell to the Franks when Zeid, its governor, rebelled against Córdoba and, failing, handed it to them. The Umayyad authority recaptured it in 799. However, Louis marched the entire army of his kingdom over the Pyrenees and besieged it for two years, wintering there from 800 to 801, when it capitulated. The sons were not given independence from central authority, however, and Charlemagne ingrained in them the concepts of empire and unity by sending them on military expeditions far from their home bases. Louis campaigned in the Mezzogiorno against the Beneventans at least once.
Louis was one of Charlemagne's four legitimate sons, but the eldest, Pepin the Hunchback, had consented to a rebellion against his father and was banished to a monastery. That left three in active life and, like most Frankish men, Louis had expected to share his inheritance with his brothers, Charles the Younger, king in Neustria, and Pepin, king of Italy. In the Divisio Regnorum of 806, Charlemagne had slated Charles the Younger as his successor as emperor and chief king, ruling over the Frankish heartland of Neustria and Austrasia, while giving Pepin the Iron Crown of Lombardy, which Charlemagne possessed by conquest. To Louis's kingdom of Aquitaine, he added Septimania, Provence, and part of Burgundy.
But in the event, Charlemagne's other legitimate sons died — Pepin in 810 and Charles in 811 — and Louis alone remained to be crowned co-emperor with Charlemagne in 813. On his father's death in 814, he inherited the entire Frankish kingdom and all its possessions (with the sole exception of Italy, which remained within Louis' empire, but under the direct rule of Bernard, Pepin's son).
Death
Louis fell ill soon after his final victorious campaigns and went to his summer hunting lodge on an island in the Rhine, by his palace at Ingelheim. On 20 June 840, he died, in the presence of many bishops and clerics and in the arms of his brother Drogo, but not of Charles and Judith, who were in Poitiers. Soon dispute plunged the surviving brothers into a civil war that was only settled in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun, which split the Frankish realm into three parts, the kernels of later France and Germany. The dispute over the kingship of Aquitaine was not fully settled until 860.
[edit] Family
By his first wife, Ermengarde of Hesbaye (married 794, 795, or 798), he had three sons and three daughters:
* Lothair (795 – 855), king of Middle Francia
* Pepin (797 – 838), king of Aquitaine
* Adelaide (b. c. 799), perhaps married Robert the Strong
* Rotrude (b. 800)
* Hildegard (or Matilda) (b. c. 802), married Gerard, count of Auvergne
* Louis the German (c. 805 – 875), king of East Francia
By his second wife, Judith of Bavaria, he had a daughter and a son:
* Gisela, married Eberhard I of Friuli
* Charles the Bald, king of West Francia
He may have had two illegitimate children: Arnulf of Sens and Alpais.
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778 - 840 (61 years)