Who Were Charlemagne’s Daughters

On Christmas Day in the year 800, the Pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans. At Charles’ side were his daughters, Rotrude and Berta. His educated, liberated, and unmarried daughters went everywhere with their father. Why did they never marry? What role did they play in his reign?

If you know of Charlemagne at all, you probably know him as the warrior king who forged an Empire that encompassed most of Western Europe. He spent almost every summer for 40 years at war and converted many to Christianity (sometimes by force). He also assembled the greatest scholars of Europe at his court.

Charles loved to collect things. Scholars. Old Greek and Roman manuscripts. The Lombard Crown. The vast Treasure of the Avars. A splinter of the True Cross, which he wore around his neck for protection. The Byzantine Empress, Irene, sent him the Sancte Chemise — the veil Mary supposedly wore when she gave birth to Jesus. The Caliph of Bagdad sent him a water clock and then an elephant which he took with him into battle.

The Father of Europe

Charles established his court in Aachen as a place of scholarship. He invited the greatest minds of his day to attend him. Together, they explored ideas, translated old texts for one another, and revived classical learning. They invented the Carolingian script—a combination of the Roman and Insular scripts—which is still a font today. They introduced the use of spaces between words, capitals at the beginnings of sentences, and periods at the end. While Italian, French, Romanian, and Spanish were emerging as true languages rather than regional dialects of Latin, court scholars regularized the spelling, grammar, and vocabulary of Latin, codifying not only the language of the Church but of scholarship for the next 900 years.

Most importantly, in a society that did not value literacy, Charles required monasteries to establish local schools. He established the Palace School at Aachen, where the children of the nobility would study the arts and sciences, and recruited the renowned scholar, Alcuin, to run it.

Charles was an unconventional man, who preferred the simple dress of a Frankish soldier to the pleated chlamys and formal wear of Rome. When it came to education at the palace school, he did not discriminate between those of his children born in wedlock or by concubines. His children by his concubines all had good careers as abbots and ministers. And further, he educated his daughters as if they were his sons.

Rotrude and Berta and their younger sisters (Gisela, Rualhaid, Hiltrud, and Theodrada) only receive a few lines in history. Rotrude got three sentences in the Royal Frankish Annals, Berta had two, Gisela three, and the other three got nothing. The three older sisters also appear in the correspondence of the scholar Alcuin. Alcuin had come to Charlemagne’s court from the great Cathedral School of Durham. He was charged with founding the Palace School for the young nobles of Francia and teaching them the classical disciplines. One of his favorite pupils was Charles’s eldest daughter, Rotrude, whom he called, “Columba.” Berta was “Delia.” An older student, Angilbert, was called “Homer.” Alcuin named himself “Flaccus” and called King Charles, “David.”

Alcuin Taught Reading, Writing, and Problem Solving

Alcuin was a gifted teacher and taught his students the classic liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry. In his classroom, he also used a book of logic problems which he’d created called Problems to Sharpen the Young.  

Consider the following: “A man had to take a wolf, a goat, and a bunch of cabbages across a river. The only boat he could find had room for himself and one other. How can he get them all across the river safely – without the wolf being left alone to eat the goose or the goose being left alone to eat the cabbages?”

So, the daughters of Charlemagne not only learned to read and write but how to reason.

Uncommon Princesses 

At first, the eldest daughters, Rotrude and Berta, shared the traditional destiny of all princesses: a political marriage that was good for their father’s kingdom.

At the age of seven, Rotrude was engaged to marry Constantine VI, the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Berta was sought after by Offa, the King of Mercia, for his son, Egfrith, in trade for allowing Charles’ eldest son to marry his daughter.

Charles’s decision to ally the Franks with the Pope in Rome ended the first engagement, and when Offa, a mere king of part of England, came bargaining for his daughter, Charles was so insulted that he closed all the ports of Francia to English ships.

In the next few years, Charles formally announced that his daughters would never marry. He gave as his reason that he could not bear to part with their company.

Most scholars assume that Charles wanted to avoid the political complications that accompany sons-in-law and their offspring. The tradition of Carolingian inheritance was to divide the kingdom among male heirs. Charles made his plans early.

His eldest son, Charles, was to rule Francia proper with him. In 787, his second son, Carloman, was rechristened with Charles’s father’s name, Pepin, and crowned king of the Italian peninsula.  The youngest, Louis, was sent to the Aquitaine on the border with Muslim Spain.

Whatever the reason, the result was this: his five legitimate daughters who survived childhood remained at court. They were not shipped off to another country at the age of twelve.

The mother of Rotrude, Berta, and Gisela was Charlemagne’s first Christian wife, Hildegarde. He had had an informal Germanic liaison with the mother of his first son, Pippin Hunchback, and his second marriage with a Lombard Princess was arranged for him by his mother. He sent her back to her father when he fell in love with the 13-year-old Hildegarde.

Hildegarde bore nine children, six of whom survived before she died at the age of 25. Theodrada and Hildtrud, the half-sisters of Rotrude and Berta, were born to his fourth wife, Fastrada. His fifth wife, Liutgard, who was only a year older than Rotrude, had no children before dying in 799.

So, Charles’s children grew up together in their father’s court, along with the children of his concubines. As even the concubine’s children went on to careers in the Church as abbesses and abbots, they apparently all studied together at the Palace School as well.

Rotrude, Berta, and Gisela won praise as students and writers. They ate meals with their father and loved to discuss poetry with Liutgard. When she died, he did not remarry, so, for the last 15 years of his reign, his older daughters effectively operated as his Queens, which meant the administration of his court was in their hands.

Charlemagne was a very smart man, but he never learned to write. It is possible to imagine that his literate daughters were privately helpful in composing the many Capitularies he issued to govern his Empire. However, that is not all they were up to.

Two of Charles’s sons left the court at an early age — Louis was sent to rule Aquitaine and Pepin to rule Italy, with the help of counselors before they were adolescents. Only the eldest, Charles, who was to succeed his father as Emperor and King of Francia, remained at court with his sisters, half-sisters, and the children of his father’s concubines. In 810, Carloman died and all six of his daughters were sent to Charlemagne’s court for their education. The court was awash with bold, unmarried women.

The Crowned Doves

Alcuin’s letters to Charlemagne’s daughters are full of fond wishes that they “fare well and prosper in the practice of every virtue.” Rotrude remained a scholar her whole life and commissioned Alcuin to write a commentary on the Gospel of St. John. When she retired to the nunnery at Chelles where her aunt was the Abbess, the two of them set up an important scriptorium for the copying of manuscripts.

However, Alcuin changes his tone when he writes about the princesses to a young cleric who was coming to court: “May the Crowned Doves that fly about the rooms of the Palace not come to your windows, nor wild horses break through the doors of your room.” “Think carefully to whom you speak.” (Letters of Alcuin of York, by Stephen Allott, 1974. William Sessions Ltd. York, England, Letters 92 and 125)

Forbidden to marry, but surrounded by babies, concubines and courtiers, Charles’s daughters apparently decided they were entitled to act like their father. They couldn’t have husbands, so they took lovers. Their children, when they came, were simply added to the court.

Einhardt, Charles’s biographer, had a few choice words to say about the girls: “He was so careful of the training of his sons and daughters that he never took his meals without them when he was at home, and never made a journey without them; his sons would ride at his side, and his daughters follow him, while a number of his body-guard, detailed for their protection, brought up the rear. Strange to say, although they were very handsome women, and he loved them very dearly, he was never willing to marry any of them to a man of their own nation or to a foreigner, but kept them all at home until his death, saying that he could not dispense with their society. Hence, though otherwise happy, he experienced the malignity of fortune as far as they were concerned; yet he concealed his knowledge of the rumors current in regard to them, and of the suspicions entertained of their honor.”

(The Life of Charlemagne, Einhardt, trans by Samuel Eps Turner, NY Harper & Bros, 1880.)

The Wanton Heats of the Palace

Berta had a long-standing affair with Angilbert, a nobleman who had grown up at court and became one of Charles’s most trusted emissaries to other courts. They had three children: Nithard, who became a historian during Louis the Pious’s reign, Hartnid, who became an abbot, and Bertrude, who married a count.

Rotrude did not form an attachment, but had at least one son — probably with one Rorgo, the Count of Maine. Their son, Louis, became the abbot of St. Denis, the most powerful abbey in France, and served as Archchancellor of Francia. Most of the younger daughters followed in their older sister’s footsteps. To say that the girls broke all the rules is an understatement.

Charles didn’t—or wouldn’t—acknowledge his daughter’s adventures; but it was an open secret. One Courtier described the atmosphere as being full of “wanton heats…caresses of delights and blandishments of passion.” (Vita Aldalhardi, from King and Emperor, Janet K Nelson, 2019 pp. 443-444). The courts of Europe were scandalized, as was Rotrude’s and Berta’s brother, Louis.

In 810-811, there was a terrible cattle plague that spread all over Europe. In 811, Pepin of Italy, and then Rotrude died. Charles, Charlemagne’s oldest son, died the following year.

Charlemagne was crushed. He crowned his youngest son, Louis, as King and Emperor a year before his own death in the winter of 814. He was worried enough about his daughters that he provided monasteries and nunneries for them to go to, should no man wish to marry them. He admonished his sons, asking that they not stand in the way of their sisters marrying.

When Charlemagne died, it took the new Emperor Louis a month to arrive at the court at Aachen. His sisters were tasked with dressing their father’s body and his burial. The day he died, they washed his body, wrapped it in a purple and gold silk shroud, and laid him in an antique Roman sarcophagus, carved with the story of the Rape of Persephone.

When Louis arrived and ascended to the throne, he spent one-third of his father’s vast treasure on a memorial celebration, and satisfying the bequests of his father’s will, divided the remainder between himself and “those of his sisters who had been born in lawful wedlock.” 

Then Louis cleared his court of this “enormous troop of women.” He ordered all of his various sisters to “remove themselves instantly from court to their monasteries.”  

Charles had provided monasteries or nunneries for most of them to retire to. Berta was not eager to leave court but Louis was not interested in her thoughts on the matter. So, Berta became Abbess of a nunnery. It was possibly the one associated with the monastery of St. Requier in Amiens, where Angilbert had retired from foreign affairs to be the lay Abbot.

Unlike his father’s reign, Louis’s reign was fraught with division; his sons repeatedly went to war with each other. It is said that Berta, who died in 826, was buried near her sister Rotrude in the Nunnery at Chelles but the nunnery was destroyed during the French Revolution, so it is impossible to say. Whether Louis consulted Berta in times of trouble, we will never know.  Charlemagne’s daughters pass out of history and are not mentioned again.

Bibliography

King and Emperor, A New Life of Charlemagne,  Janet L. Nelson. University of California Press, 2019

Carolingian Chronicles (Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories), translated by Bernhard Walker Scholz with Barbara Rogers.  Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press. 1972.

Alcuin of York – His Life and Letters, Stephen Allot, William Sessions Ltd. The Ebor Press, York, England, 1974.