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Individual Record for: II LOUIS (male)

Source:

bulkeley.txt

Notes:

856 King of Neustria.
867 King of Aquitaine.
877 King of West Franks.
Louis the Stammerer was one of the many weak kings who followed Charlemagn e, victim to the politics and intrigue that left Europe open to invasio ns from both east and north for several centuries thereafter. When Charlem agne died, his son Louis I inherited the empire he had put together. Lou is I, called Louis the Pious, was a decent king, but he wasn't the hero h is father had been - or the brute, if you want to
digress and take the Saxon viewpoint for a moment. (Charlemagne had practi sed what we nowadays rather prissily call "eth nic cleansing" on the Sax on tribes of what is now Germany. He had some four t housand of them exter minated in one day. Truly great men tend to be great in both their good a nd their bad deeds.)

Anyway, Louis I had three sons by his first wife, and a surprise fourth s on by his second wife, who provided the excuse for the three elder
half-brothers to engage in a great deal of politicking, war, intrigue, a nd all that juicy soap-opera stuff that makes history fun . (Among other
things they tried to prove that little Charles II could not possibly be th eir father's son, because Louis the Pious was so old when the baby came al ong.) However, Charles, who became known as Charles the Bald, managed to s urvive and eventually grew up to become one of the three who divided Euro pe into the West, Middle, and East Kingdoms. Charles was a fairly strong r uler, and when his brother Lothair died, he got control of a large pa rt of the Middle Kingdom including the Netherlands and Alsace-Lorraine.

Louis the S tammerer was the son of this Charles. He is described as physi cally weak, and in fact he survived his father by only about two
years. He left no direct heirs. He had virtually no impact on the politi cs of his day, save that he lost the region of Provence to a cousin, anoth er Louis, who had inherited Italy by a fairly roundabout succession. His w eakness, and the weakness of his successors, left
Western Europe wide open to the Viking raids which had begun as early as t he reign of his great-grandfather Charlemagne. Louis the Stammerer's succe ssor was his German cousin Charles III, called Charles the Fat. It was th is Charles who surrendered western France to Rollo the Norman, which creat ed the medieval Kingdom of Normandie. Thence came William, variously kno wn as The Conqueror or The Bastard depending on where you grew up.

Notes Source: bulkeley.txt

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