The King's Failing Body

What can a ninth century crisis of legitimacy teach us about Joe Biden's own crisis?

In most of these posts I talk about Arnulf, and only in passing do I mention the uncle he overthrew in 887, known to historians as Charles the Fat. Historians have spilled a fair amount of ink debating what the causes of the coup were, but an important element was Charles’ increasingly severe illness. One source, strangely, claims that after being deposed Charles was “was strangled by his men.”¹ This is a radically different explanation than other sources, where Charles’ demise is ascribed mainly to illness. While in the UK at a conference a few weeks ago, this was precisely the “Arnulf question” that someone posed to me. What was behind the coup, was it illness or internal revolt? The question got me thinking about the role that illness, and health, played in politics. In an unlikely turn of events, my thoughts on this have become topical to events in the US presidential campaign. Who says studying medieval history is pointless? Watching the intense debates around Joe Biden’s ability to continue his presidential campaign has crystallized some thoughts I had about Charles’ dilemma in 887.

Arnulf’s uncle Charles the Fat was quite ill in the fall of 887. Charles the Fat was the last surviving son of the East Frankish king Louis the German, and had reacquired the entirety of the Carolingian empire in 884 when the West Frankish Carolingian king died. At the same time, Charles did not have a legitimate son who could be reliably pointed to as an heir. What Charles did have was an illegitimate son Bernard, who he tried to legitimize unsuccessfully. Other crises in 886 and 887 would have raised further doubts about the future of the kingdom/empire. Henry, arguably the most capable Frankish commander, was killed in 886 battling the Vikings, who returned to the continent in 887. Charles the Fat’s illness, which seems to have struck at the end of 886, would have been a particularly urgent matter of public (meaning elite) concern.

Charles the Fat’s illness in 886 and 887 posed a serious crisis for his reign, and Regino of Prüm in his Chronicon notes how the elite saw “not only the life of [Charles the Fat’s] body but also the sense from [his] mind fall away from him.”4 Modern historians often view early medieval politics in a decidedly depersonalized way. The king was a savvy political operator using writing, violence, and other means to maintain his position and authority within the kingdom. Political histories often take a king’s reign as a whole, instead of focusing on the chronology of a given period. This emphasis is good, and get us away from a model of politics of a king either trapped by elites or who is all powerful. But it can obscure the way that the physical health and the lifecycle of the ruler was an important element of political discourse. Where we do see discussion of this is during moments of crisis. For instance the king’s body was a locus of contestation during Lothar II’s divorce trial in the 860s and Louis the Pious’ court was rocked by scandal relating to the corruption of royal bodies.

That is, the way we talk about politics is often an abstraction. “The court did X to build consensus” or “This emphasized a recurring trend in political discourse.” Beneath this, in both medieval and modern politics, are individuals with their own personalities and health issues. One possible, yet underdiscussed, reason for Charles the Fat not choosing Arnulf as his heir? That the two just really did not get along, and there was a deep animosity between them. Likewise the physical body of the ruler is not a topic of much concern except when things go wrong.

So what can we take away from the events of 887? The sources make clear that an overriding concern seems to have been the rapid decline of Charles’ health. The Annales Vedastini makes this even more explicit: “the eastern Franks, seeing that the strength of the emperor was too weak to rule the empire, discharged him from the kingdom, and placed Arnulf…into the kingdom alone.” The Bavarian continuation of the Annals of Fulda also notes Charles’ illness immediately before describing the events of the coup. Charles suffers “a most severe illness” and it is “from that day” that the elite decided to replace him with Arnulf.

It would seem that once knowledge of Charles’ illness became known there were serious misgivings around the future. With the threat of the Vikings continuing to pose a challenge to Carolingian rulers, the elite were running out of options. This gave Arnulf the opportunity that had been denied to him in 880 when his father had died. Arnulf was not only an established figure in Bavaria, but was an accomplished military commander who had led armies against the Vikings and the Moravians on the eastern frontier. Charles’ illness was the flashpoint for Arnulf to put forward his own claims to rulership, but it had been almost a decade in the making.

There were ways to try to mitigate the perception of Charles’ illness, and that is likely why he tried to hold an assembly in autumn 887. In doing so it would have demonstrated that the king was back, baby. Instead, it may have had the opposite effect, just as Joe Biden’s debate did. Hoping to present an impression of strength and competence, it backfired and highlighted a dangerous political truth to a wider audience. The king was a relatively hard to access figure, and there were not cable news networks covering his every move. As such an assembly was one of the few moments when the political community came together in a broader group, making it a high stakes moment for displaying royal authority.² A modern equivalent might be an American political party’s nominating convention. The Republican National Convention last week was all about portraying the GOP as in lock step and unified, an exercise in consensus building to rally behind their leader. The upcoming Democratic convention thus is a double edged sword, it has the possibility to create an image of stability and order, but any chaos at the convention will only serve to highlight the problems of the campaign.

Image of Charles the Bald receiving parts of the realm, Codex Aureus, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek CLM 14000

In the middle ages as now, political consensus and unity was often quite insecure, and the declining health of a leader could bring the concealed tensions and factions to the forefront. Within a short period of time it seems that many of the elites had switched their support to Arnulf, so it seems that once the gates were opened for elite dissent from Charles, it quickly became a torrent of defection. Joe Biden’s debate performance seems to have done something similar, it created an opening for Democratic figures to openly call for him to not run for reelection. At the same time, it exposes divisions within the party, just as Charles’ illness must have exposed divisions within the Frankish elite. For the time being, at least, Biden has vowed to stay in the race. That the debate is being had at all in public like this suggests something has shifted within the consciousness of the political elite. This, to me, is what a crisis of legitimacy looks like in real time. It is the active questioning of the leader’s ability to do their job. Of course this looks different in a medieval vs modern setting, but leaders require belief in their legitimacy as an authority figure. A leader was not simply legitimate or illegitimate, but there could be conflicting opinions about the leader’s authority. It also poses a problem for Biden’s supporters who insist that even in a diminished state he is better than Trump. While probably true, political decisions are rarely 100% rational. Instead politics is often determined by perception and performance, not pure rational self-interest. Biden will have an increasingly difficult time maintaining his legitimacy without drastically changing the narrative of his decline. Insisting that everything is fine, actually, will not persuade any but people already well-tuned in to the election. To the rest, the impression of a weak president unable to execute the duties of the office will be an overriding concern.

What looking at Charles the Fat’s struggle has taught me is that political support is fickle and can quickly ebb and flow from a leader. More than that, it is the physical embodiment of leadership that underlies everything else. These are both valuable lessons even in the modern world that prioritizes office and institution. The intentional depersonalization of governmental institutions obscures how human beings staff every office, every post, and are the ones who actually implement and conduct politics. Kings and presidents are abstractions, they are shaped by the physical people who inhabit them. One needs to only look at the differences between Trump and Biden as president to understand how much the personality of the president changes the presidency. The formal powers may, theoretically, be the same, but the personality of the person in charge shapes how those powers are used. There is no impersonal “state” above people that acts of its own accord, but one composed of a variety of physical, human, beings. As long as we haven’t ceded ourselves to the machines, politics must also be understood along this human dimension. The body of the president is used as a vessel to host all sorts of different ideas: what if he is too ill to launch a nuclear attack? The ideas we place on the body of the president are different than those placed on the body of the king, but in both cases the body is a site of power in and of itself. Both Biden and Charles the Fat faced a crisis of legitimacy on account of this, but only time will tell if Biden is able to stave off the brewing party coup.

Edit: Only a few hours after I posted this, Joe Biden did drop out of the presidential race.

1. AV, s.a. 887, p. 64: a suis strangulatus.

2. This idea was put forward by Timothy Reuter in his article “Assembly Politics.”