Louis the Pious
Louis the Pious inherited the whole of Charlemagne's empire because his brothers died first, tried to keep it whole by law, was deposed by his sons in a field and restored by them a year later, and left them the civil war that made France and Germany. He was born in 778, the third son, and was king of Aquitaine from the age of three, governing it from Toulouse for thirty years while his father fought elsewhere. When the elder brothers died in 810 and 811 Charlemagne crowned him co-emperor at Aachen in 813 and died the next January. Louis began by cleaning the palace: his sisters and their lovers were sent to convents, his father's counsellors dismissed, the monasteries reformed under Benedict of Aniane. In 817 the Ordinatio Imperii made his eldest son Lothair co-emperor and heir to everything, with the younger sons Pepin and Louis as under-kings, which was meant to end partition for ever; his nephew Bernard of Italy rose against it, was blinded on Louis's order and died of it, and Louis did public penance for the death at Attigny in 822, which was taken as weakness. Then he married Judith of Bavaria and in 823 had a fourth son, Charles, and spent the rest of his reign trying to find the boy a kingdom out of the three already promised. The elder sons rebelled in 830 and again in 833, when the armies met near Colmar and Louis's men deserted him in the night at the place afterwards called the Field of Lies. Lothair had him deposed and made to confess his sins in the church at Soissons, and the humiliation turned the bishops and the younger sons back to him; he was restored in 834. He died in June 840 on an island in the Rhine near Ingelheim, campaigning against Louis the German, and his three surviving sons went to war within the year. The name Pious was given to him in his lifetime for the monasteries, and afterwards as a reproach.
- Lived: 778 CE – 840 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: emperor, monarch
