Frankfurt and Aachen, 792–4

Abstract

The year 792 was in many respects a critical one for Charles; not least because it saw the second major conspiracy of the reign, and the first in which a member of his own family was implicated. This was his eldest son, Pippin, usually if unkindly known from Einhard’s description of him as ‘Pippin the Hunchback’, who was born around 769. In the brief account of the conspiracy given in the Lorsch Annals, he is described as being Charles’s son by a concubine called Himiltrude.¹ The author of these annals includes Charles’s sons by his ‘lawful’ wife amongst the planned targets for the conspirators. Einhard also calls Pippin illegitimate, and it is he alone who rightly or wrongly describes him as being hunchbacked. The Reviser, on the other hand, omits any reference to Pippin as being illegitimate or his half-brothers as being intended victims along with their father. There are indeed grounds for suspecting, from a letter of pope Stephen III sent to Charles and Carloman in the Summer of 770, protesting against the rumoured plan that one or other of them was going to marry the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, that one or both of the Frankish kings had previously been married and had put aside his wife in the interests of this new union.² If that is true, it is quite possible that Charles had been married to Himiltrude prior to 770, and that Pippin was legitimate.³ It is certainly notable that he had been given the name of Charles’s own father, which from family tradition would imply at least provisional recognition of him as heir.