The Treaty of Verdun and the Frankish Partition of 843

In August 843 three grandsons of Charlemagne signed the Treaty of Verdun, splitting the Carolingian Empire into West, Middle, and East Francia.

13 August 2026 · Part of The Dark Ages: Merovingians & Carolingians →

In August 843, at a meeting whose original text has not survived, three grandsons of Charlemagne carved his empire into three kingdoms. The Treaty of Verdun ended three years of civil war among the sons of Louis the Pious and split the Carolingian world into West Francia, a Middle Kingdom, and East Francia — territories that would, over the following century, harden into the recognizable outlines of France and Germany. It was not the end of the Carolingian dynasty, which would rule fragments of the old empire for another century and more, but it was the moment the single empire Charlemagne had built stopped being single.

The Empire Charlemagne Left Behind

When Charlemagne died in 814, he left an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central Italy — a political achievement without precedent in the post-Roman West. That empire rested on personal loyalty to the ruler and on the Frankish custom of partible inheritance, by which a king's lands were traditionally divided among his surviving sons rather than passed whole to a single heir. Charlemagne's own succession plans had assumed division, but the deaths of his elder sons left only one, Louis the Pious, to inherit everything in 814. For a generation the empire held together as one realm under one emperor, sustained by the cultural and administrative program historians call the Carolingian Renaissance, which trained the clerks and advisers — men like Alcuin of York a generation earlier — who kept government running.

Louis the Pious and the Seeds of Civil War

Louis the Pious tried repeatedly to settle the succession while he lived, and repeatedly failed to make any settlement stick. His 817 plan, the Ordinatio Imperii, favored his eldest son Lothair with the imperial title and ultimate authority over his younger brothers Pippin and Louis the German, who received subordinate kingdoms. The birth of a fourth son, Charles — later called Charles the Bald — to Louis's second wife Judith upset this arrangement, and Louis's attempts to carve out a share for Charles provoked repeated rebellions by his elder sons, including a period in 833 when Louis was actually deposed and briefly forced into public penance by his own sons and the bishops who backed them. He was restored, but the empire he handed on at his death in 840 was already a battleground of competing claims. This pattern of a strong king failing to control his own succession echoed an older Frankish problem: the Merovingian kings before them had faced the same fracturing pressure of partible inheritance, and the eventual hollowing-out of Merovingian royal power by ambitious deputies was itself part of how the Carolingians had risen to the throne in the first place.

The Battle of Fontenoy and the Oaths of Strasbourg

Louis the Pious's death in June 840 removed the one figure able and willing to hold the empire together, and the brothers went to war almost immediately. Lothair I, who held the imperial title, tried to assert overlordship over his half-brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald. The decisive clash came on 25 June 841 at the Battle of Fontenoy, near Auxerre, one of the bloodiest battles fought among Franks in living memory; contemporary poets described the slaughter with real horror, since the dead on both sides were kinsmen and former comrades. Lothair lost the field but not the war outright, and that winter Louis the German and Charles the Bald cemented their alliance. On 14 February 842 the two brothers and their assembled armies swore mutual oaths at Strasbourg — each swearing in the other's language, Louis in Old French and Charles in Old High German, so ordinary soldiers on both sides could witness the pledge. The Oaths of Strasbourg, preserved in the chronicle of Louis's nephew Nithard, are the oldest surviving written texts of both early French and early German. Isolated and outmaneuvered, Lothair finally agreed to negotiate a genuine division of the empire.

Negotiating at Verdun

Commissioners spent months in 842 and early 843 surveying the empire's resources — its estates, dioceses, abbeys, and revenues — to construct three shares of comparable wealth rather than simply equal territory. The brothers and their advisers met at Verdun in August 843 to finalize the settlement. No copy of the treaty text itself survives; everything historians know about its terms comes from later chroniclers, above all the Annals of Fulda and the Annals of St-Bertin, which describe the resulting borders rather than quote a formal charter. What emerged was not a division along language or ethnicity, which barely functioned as a political concept at the time, but a division designed to give each brother workable, coherent territory.

The Three Kingdoms

Charles the Bald received the western portion, roughly the lands west of the Rhône, Saône, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers — the core of what became West Francia and, much later, the Kingdom of France. Louis the German took the lands beyond the Rhine, plus a few bishoprics on its west bank at Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, forming East Francia, the nucleus of the later German kingdom. Lothair I, as eldest and nominal emperor, kept a long, narrow Middle Kingdom running from the North Sea coast of Frisia through Lotharingia, Burgundy, and Provence into the Kingdom of Italy, along with both of the empire's symbolic capitals: Aachen and Rome. This corridor kingdom looked prestigious on a map but was strategically almost impossible to defend, and its fate over the following decades would prove that geography, not titles, decided the future.

Chronology

Legacy: France, Germany, and the Land Between

The Treaty of Verdun did not create France and Germany overnight, and no one at Verdun in 843 thought of the settlement as founding two future nations. Charles the Bald's West Francia and Louis the German's East Francia nonetheless developed increasingly separate administrations, languages, and aristocracies over the following generations, a divergence the Strasbourg oaths had already hinted at. Lothair's Middle Kingdom fared far worse: on his death in 855 it split again among his three sons, and when the youngest, Lothair II, died without a legitimate heir in 869, West and East Francia carved up his share of Lotharingia at the Treaty of Meerssen in 870, leaving Italy on its own. The long, disputed borderland between France and Germany — fought over from Lotharingia's dissolution through Alsace-Lorraine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — traces directly to the impossible geography of Lothair's 843 inheritance. The fragmented kingdoms were also poorly placed to resist outside pressure: within a generation, Viking raiding fleets were exploiting the divided Frankish successor states, and by 911 a West Frankish king had granted the Viking leader Rollo land around the lower Seine that became Normandy — the duchy from which William the Conqueror would launch the Norman Conquest of England a century and a half later.

Conclusion

The Treaty of Verdun was a family settlement, not a blueprint for modern Europe, and its framers thought in terms of dynastic inheritance rather than nations. Yet by splitting Charlemagne's empire into a western, an eastern, and an unstable middle kingdom, the brothers at Verdun set boundaries — however imperfect and repeatedly redrawn — that outlasted the Carolingian dynasty itself. West Francia and East Francia went on to become the medieval kingdoms of France and Germany; the contested middle strip became the fault line along which those two powers would compete for the next thousand years. Few treaties whose original text is lost have left so durable a mark on the map of Europe.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't the original text of the Treaty of Verdun survive? No official charter or full text has come down to us; everything known about the treaty's precise terms is reconstructed from later ninth-century chronicles, particularly the Annals of Fulda and the Annals of St-Bertin, which describe the resulting territorial division rather than quote a formal document.

Who were the three brothers who divided the empire? They were the surviving sons of Louis the Pious and grandsons of Charlemagne: Lothair I, who kept the imperial title and the Middle Kingdom; Louis the German, who received East Francia; and Charles the Bald, who received West Francia.

What made the Middle Kingdom so unstable? Lothair's territory was a long, narrow corridor stretching from the North Sea to central Italy, with no natural unity of geography, language, or administration. It fractured further among his own sons after his death in 855 and was largely absorbed by its eastern and western neighbors within a few decades.

Did the Treaty of Verdun create modern France and Germany? Not directly — the ninth-century kingdoms bore little resemblance to modern nation-states, and centuries of further wars, mergers, and dynastic change followed. But the west-east division of Verdun set the earliest durable boundary between what became French-speaking and German-speaking Europe.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in Recommended reading — and in Further reading on older articles — may earn Writesides of History a commission at no extra cost to you.

From the archive