Charles the Fat
Charles the Fat held everything Charlemagne had held for three years, by inheritance and the deaths of relatives rather than by anything he did, paid the Vikings to leave Paris and raid Burgundy instead, was deposed by his nephew at an assembly in November 887, and died two months later; the empire was never reassembled and the name was given him two centuries afterwards. He was born in 839, the youngest son of Louis the German, and got Alemannia when his father died in 876. Then the family ran out. His brother Carloman had a stroke and gave him Italy in 879, and Pope John VIII crowned him emperor in February 881. His other brother Louis the Younger died in 882 and East Francia was his; and in 884 the West Franks, whose young king had died and whose heir was a child of five, offered him the western kingdom rather than face the Northmen without a grown man. In November 885 the Vikings came up the Seine with the largest fleet anyone had seen and besieged Paris, which was an island with two bridges, for a year; Count Odo held it. Charles came in October 886 with the army of the whole empire, camped on Montmartre, and instead of fighting bought them off with seven hundred pounds of silver and permission to winter in Burgundy, which was in revolt against him. He was ill - the sources say headaches, the modern reading is epilepsy - and had no legitimate son. His attempt to have his bastard Bernard recognised failed, and in 887 his nephew Arnulf of Carinthia marched on him with the Bavarians and the East Frankish magnates deserted at Tribur. Charles asked for a few estates in Alemannia and died at Neidingen on the Danube in January 888. Odo took the west, Arnulf the east, and Italy, Provence and Burgundy went to whoever was there. It is the date historians use for the end of the Carolingian empire.
- Lived: 839 CE – 888 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: emperor, monarch
