‘The dissension of kings’

Abstract

Writing late in the ninth century, the anonymous author of the Annals of Xanten clearly felt close to despair when compiling his entry for the year 862. He abandoned the attempt at a detailed record and contented himself with the statement that ‘it is now tedious to record the dissension between our kings and the desolation caused by the pagans within our kingdoms’.¹ The modern student of the history of the Carolingian Empire in the century that followed the death of Charlemagne must feel some sympathy with the sentiments of this predecessor. From 830 onwards the sources for the narrative history of these times seem to do little more than record, in varying degrees of detail, much dissensio regum and perhaps even more desolatio paganorum. Historians attracted to this period, and there have not been very many of them, have tended to repeat what the chroniclers tell them, and to adopt many of their vantage points and the judgements that they made on their own society and its rulers.²