Battle of Soissons (923)

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The Battle of Soissons ( French Bataille de Soissons ) was a military confrontation near Soissons on June 15, 923, in which two West Frankish armies, each led by a king: on one side the legitimate and deposed Carolingian Charles the Simple , on the other side of the chosen of a noble coalition robertians Robert I. the battle but the victory ended with the death of Roberts, his side. He was replaced as king by his son-in-law Rudolf of Burgundy . Charles the Simple was imprisoned a little later and died in dungeon six years later.

prehistory

After the death of the last East Franconian Carolingian, Ludwig the Child , in 911, the Lotharing nobility invited Karl, now the only surviving Carolingian, to take over power. Charles invaded Lorraine, the home of his family, and conquered the area. Supported by the Lotharing nobility, he consolidated his rule there and came to an understanding with Heinrich I , King of the East Franks , with whom he concluded the Treaty of Bonn in 921 for the mutual recognition of possessions.

At that time Karl had already started to rely increasingly on Lotharingian forces after his power had eroded in western France. His particular favorite was the Lorraine Hagano. This angered the West Franconian nobility, as Hagano was a foreigner and, moreover, of low origin. After powerful nobles in 920 at a Diet in Soissons unsuccessfully demanded Karl to dismiss Hagano, they renounced him. When Karl not only clung to Hagano, but also decided to give him Chelles Abbey , this led to a conflict with the Robertinians and their allies, because the abbess Rothild von Chelles was the mother-in-law of Hugo the Great , son of Margrave Robert von Neustria, the head of the Robertines as brother of the late King Odo . On June 29, 922, Robert was raised to the rank of anti-king by the opposition nobles. On June 30th, he was hurriedly anointed in Reims by Archbishop Gautier von Sens on behalf of the dying Archbishop of Reims Hervé - subject to his consent.

Karl opposed the deposition and what he believed to be the illegal anointing of Robert. With Henry I's neutrality behind him (who also signed a friendship treaty with Robert at the beginning of 923), Karl took his time organizing a counter-attack that he wanted to carry out from Lotharingia and Normandy , where he had support for his position. The creation of the army took about a year, but Karl raised around ten thousand foot soldiers and thousands of knights, as well as the material needed to siege the fortresses.

The Norman leader Rollo , to whom Karl owed his fiefdom , opened the fighting in the west in the spring of 923. The opposite side positioned itself on the banks of the Oise and thus prevented the merger of Charles' two armies. The Lotharingians turned against the strategically important Soissons, Robert in turn hastened to defend the city.

The battle

Skirmishes between the foot troops near Soissons and violent clashes just outside the city forced the Robertines to swiftly deploy the heavy cavalry . But the Lotharing soldiers withdrew and placed themselves under the protection of their cavalry.

Robert was killed in the first phase of the fighting and his troops cornered. Robert's son Hugo the Great, however, managed to maintain his people's resistance for so long by showing them his father's corpse (and that he had the strength to replace it) until his brother-in-law Heribert II of Vermandois gave relief . Heribert, in turn, received support from Duke Rudolf of Burgundy, another brother-in-law of Hugo, who finally succeeded in breaking free.

Morale in the Lotharingian camp collapsed in the face of an uncertain outcome in a fight that seemed almost won. The Lotharingians withdrew cautiously.

Effects

The battle seemed to have ended with only minor losses for Karl, but when after a few days the orderly retreat turned into a disorderly one, the Carolingian began to be reproached for having been too passive - the battle of Soissons heralded the end of Karl's government even if chroniclers such as Richer von Reims and Folcuin von Lobbes even awarded him the victory on the basis of calculated loss figures. The supporters of the fallen Robert elected Rudolf of Burgundy to succeed his father-in-law and had him crowned by Archbishop Gautier of Sens on July 13, 923 in the Abbey of Saint-Médard in Soissons .

There was no reaction to Karl's reaction to Rudolf's coronation; four days later, on July 17, 923, in an ambush, he fell into the hands of Heribert von Vermandois, who held him for the rest of his life as a personal prisoner and used him as a political pledge. Karl's wife Edgifa von Wessex then fled the country with her son Ludwig , who was about two years old , to their homeland, where "Ludwig the Overseas" grew up, before he was brought out of exile by Hugo the Great in 936 for a Carolingian renaissance.

The Lotharing nobility, who saw the Carolingian tradition preserved in Karl, did not accept the new king, but immediately submitted to Henry I and thus ended the decades-long dispute over the Middle Kingdom in favor of Eastern France.

literature

  • Robert Parisot: Histoire de Lorraine , Volume 1 (1919) online
  • Rudolf Schieffer : The Carolingians . 4th, revised. and exp. Ed., Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 203f.