The Carolingians: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. The Carolingian Empire played a crucial role in the development of Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Although the dynasty itself was not that long-lived, it was star-studied with famous rulers such as Charles Martel and Charlemagne, and its legacy stretched far and wide. In today's Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Professor Matthew Gabriel, the co-author with David Perry of the new book Oathbreakers, speaks to David Musgrove to answer all of your questions about this influential Frankish Empire. First question, can you just give us a sense about what do we actually mean when we say the Carolingian Empire and, I suppose, the Carolingians?

Carolingians were a ruling dynasty in the early Middle Ages, roughly from the middle to the late 8th century, who existed in some form ruling over some states until, you know, the 10th or 11th centuries in in many cases. They came from a group of Germanic peoples called the Franks. The Franks had been kind of known and traded with and interacted with the Roman Empire since, you know, the third or fourth century, eventually settled in kind of around the the modern low countries on the continent, and then started gathering power as kind of Roman power kind of receded back towards the Italian peninsula over the course of what we call late antiquity. When the kingdom was established, the Frankish kingdom was established, it was first ruled over by a group called the Merovingians, named after their legendary founder, a guy by the name of Merovek.

And they ruled until the middle of the 8th century when a new dynasty came in, and this is the Carolingians. This is when we get to the Carolingians. And they eventually established an empire that would span most of Europe at that time, from beyond the Pyrenees into northeastern Spain, Catalonia, around Barcelona, all the way up to Denmark, and then from the English Channel all the way down into central Italy, even extending further to the east to beyond the Rhine and beyond the Danube at times as well. The Carolingians themselves started out as high aristocracy, but they took power specifically from the Merovingians in a coup d'etat and

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