Charles the Simple
Charles the Simple gave the Vikings Normandy to stop them taking everything else, got Lotharingia for the West Frankish crown for a decade, and spent the last six years of his life in a count's prison while a rival reigned; the epithet meant straightforward and became the other thing. He was born in September 879, five months after the death of his father Louis the Stammerer, and was passed over twice as a child, first for his half-brothers and then, in 888, for Odo, the count of Paris who had held the city against the Danes in 885. He was crowned by a faction in 893 and became sole king when Odo died in 898. Thirteen years later a Viking army under Rollo had been on the Seine for a generation and had just failed at Chartres, and Charles met him at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in the autumn of 911 and gave him Rouen and the lower Seine as a fief in return for homage, baptism and a promise to keep other Vikings out. The story of Rollo's man lifting the king's foot to kiss it and tipping the king over is the later Norman chronicler's. The grant became Normandy. The same year the East Frankish Carolingians died out and the nobles of Lotharingia chose Charles, the last Carolingian king, over the Saxon and Franconian dukes, which gave him Aachen and a second kingdom and took his attention from the first. The West Frankish magnates resented his Lotharingian favourite Hagano, and in 922 they rose and crowned Robert, Odo's brother. Charles killed Robert in battle at Soissons in June 923 and lost the battle, and a month later Herbert, count of Vermandois, invited him to a meeting and locked him up. He died at Péronne in October 929, still the prisoner of a count, while the crown passed to Robert's son-in-law. His wife had taken their son Louis to her father's court in England, and that boy came back as king in 936; the family lasted until 987.
- Lived: 879 CE – 929 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: king, monarch
