“Pipinus Rex”: Pippin's Plot of 792 and Bavaria

Abstract

Two serious internal challenges to Carolingian royal authority disturbed the middle years of Charlemagne's reign. Neither is mentioned in the officially approved recensions of the Frankish Royal Annals, but Einhard tells us about both of them in the twentieth chapter of that ruler's “Life,” and various information was included in other annalistic traditions (Exhibit 1). In 785/86 a group of magnates in Eastern Francia and Thuringia opposed royal policies and denied or renounced their loyalty to the king; their opposition was aggravated, no doubt, by the demands of Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons, which placed heavy burdens on their adjacent territories.” The second, in 792, was centered around the royal palace at Regensburg on the Danube where Charlemagne had been since the spring of 791 in order to direct operations against the Avars and to suppress any lingering opposition in Bavaria, which he had annexed barely three years earlier in 788. The most noteworthy aspect of this second domestic insurrection was participation by a senior member of the Carolingian family itself: Charlemagne's oldest son, Pippin, who was born in the mid-to-Iate 760s and, thus, certainly of major age and a responsible adult capable of independent rule.