Under Louis, monastic reform was extended throughout the realm, artistic production
surged in volume and quality, and religious thought reached a new, high level in writings
by such churchmen as Rabanus Maurus and Amalarius of Metz.
Celia Chazelle
[See also: AMALARIUS OF METZ; CHARLES II THE BALD; LOTHAIR I;
RABANUS MAURUS]
Cabaniss, Allen, trans. Son of Charlemagne: A Contemporary Life of Louis the Pious. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1961.
Ganshof, François L. The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian
History, trans. Janet Sondheimer. London: Longman, 1971, pp. 261–72.
Godman, Peter, and Roger Collins, eds. Charlemagne’s Heir: New Perspectives on the Reign of
Louis the Pious (814–840). Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
McKitterick, Rosamond. The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians, 751–987. London:
Longman, 1983.
Noble, Thomas F.X. “Louis the Pious and His Piety Re-considered.” Revue belge 58 (1980):297–
316.
Riché, Pierre. The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, trans. Michael I.Allen.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
LOUIS VI THE FAT
(1081–1137). Son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland and king of France from 1108 to
1137, Louis seems known as much for his corpulence as for his limited, though
successful, gain of control over his patrimony, the Île-de-France. Inheriting chaotic
political and feudal challenges to royal power, Louis overcame the robber barons and the
feudatories’ conservative defiance of his nascent challenge to their localized authority.
After the death of his first wife, Lucienne de Rochefort, Louis wed Adelaide of Savoy in
1115, who bore him his heir, Louis VII, in 1120.
Louis realized the need to establish his own position in the Île before he could extend
royal claims beyond what is traditionally, if erroneously, known as the French royal
domain. Toward the close of his reign, he intervened with unprecedented success in the
south of France. The marriage of his son and heir, the future Louis VII, to Eleanor,
daughter of the duke of Aquitaine, was a sign less of the duke’s status than of the rising
position of the king. Louis’s interference in Flanders and Normandy was less blessed.
If Louis’s success in extending his power outside the Île-de-France was ambiguous,
his reform of the royal administration was not. The struggle to remove major
administrative offices from the hands of their hereditary holders was difficult but
eventually triumphant. Louis replaced the old administrative hierarchy with new men
drawn from the lower nobility and clergy from the domain. Notable among these new
administrators was Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1081–1151), the first in a line of great
statesmen and royal advisers drawn from the ranks of the clergy, a line that ended with
Richelieu, Mazarin, and Fleury. Louis was also the first great royal patron of communes,
most of them in and surrounding the royal patrimony.
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