Medieval Losers

Duke Tassilo of Bavaria, 787-8: Charlemagne’s Shadow

Jan 12, 2025

Reproduction of the Tassilo Chalice, donated by Liutperga, Tassilo’s wife, to Kremsmünster Abbey in about 777

Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about the Frankish world of the early Middle Ages, 450 to 850. Now, having invalidated all that will follow, let us dive into the history of the first medieval loser I have chosen for this series. Allow me to introduce you to Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria (c. 741-96), the last of Agilolfings. Or, as I came to know him during my graduate school career, Charlemagne’s shadow. Let me explain.

Tassilo, born in 741, was first cousin to Charles (Charlemagne: c. 748-814). The seven-year age gap between the two is significant for their story. Historians once believed that Charles was born in 742 until the work of two scholars demonstrated the latter date of 748 was more accurate.[1] Tassilo’s career proceeded while Charles grew up. Charles’s father, Pippin I or Pippin the Short (c. 714-68) helped install Tassilo as duke of Bavaria in 748, the very year Charles first drew breath. While Charles was a teenager at his father’s court in the 760s, Duke Tassilo founded monasteries and dispensed justice to his Bavarian subjects. Tassilo followed this up by holding a series of councils to implement legal decrees. At these councils, Tassilo referred to himself as princeps (prince) and dominus (lord). It was only in the early 770s that Charles, now sole king of the Franks, would emulate Tassilo in monastic building, and it would be later still before he held councils. An air of competition can be sensed between the two cousins.[2]

This competition was only increased by each man’s marriages. Tassilo married Liutperga, daughter of King Desiderius of the Lombards (c. 720-c. 786) in about the year 763. Charles himself would also marry a daughter of Desiderius – her name, alas, unknown – in 770. The competing cousins were now brothers-in-law. This state of marital affairs did not last long, however. Charles repudiated his Lombard wife in 771 and in 773-4 he conquered the Lombard kingdom in Italy, banishing Desiderius to the monastery of Corbie. This development could have led to a fallout between Tassilo and Charles. Tassilo decided not to pursue such a course. But his and Charles relationship “now became more obviously competitive.”[3]

The Latin Chronicle written by Creontius (Crantz), Tassilo’s chancellor and chief minister, provides an insight into the two men’s growing rivalry from 772-3. According to the text, Charles allowed only two envoys Tassilo had sent to Rome to continue on their journey after halting their initial progress. For Tassilo, this was a slight:

Tassilo was displeased and felt insulted that his cousin King Charles had refused to let his men through and was seized by great bitterness towards him. Charles, for his part, was anxious about Tassilo, who, he thought, was becoming too powerful.

Crantz goes on to detail that Tassilo was close to the Saxons, Wends, and Huns, all of whom were Charles’s enemies.[4] And it was not only in the diplomatic realm where there were differences and competition. In their wish to receive plaudits from learned clerics, desire to expand their territory, and guarding the borders of their lands, their lives “ran in parallel.”[5] Stuart Airlie, a historian of the Carolingian empire, suggests that it makes a degree of sense to consider Tassilo as Charles’s “significant other” up to 787-8. That is the reason I referred to Tassilo as Charles’s shadow at the beginning of this piece. It was in 787-8 that Charles moved to curtail any ambition that Tassilo had to rival him.

At a council at Worms in late 787, Charles decided to destroy Tassilo’s power. It was agreed that this was due to Tassilo’s breach of his promises and his refusal to come at Charles’s urging. The fact that as duke of Bavaria, Tassilo was not necessarily Charles’s subject was not mentioned. The council decided to pursue a military solution to the problem. Three armies converged on Bavaria from multiple directions. What broke any resistance Tassilo might have offered was shattered when he realized that the Bavarians had thrown in their lot with Charles. The Annales regni Francorum or Royal Frankish Annals gives us the “approved” Carolingian narrative:

The Bavarians were all more loyal to the lord king Charles than to himself…Hemmed in everywhere, Tassilo came in person, putting himself with his hands into the hands of the lord king into the position of a vassal…he confessed he had sinned and acted wickedly in all things. Then he renewed his oaths once more and gave twelve hostages.[6]

Tassilo might have been able to retain a position for himself and his dynasty within the Carolingian empire as Charles’s vassal, but in 788 the latter decided to dispose of him for good. That year, several Bavarian notables accused Tassilo of breaking the oath he had sworn to be loyal to Charles the year before. Again, the Bavarian vassi might have colluded with Charles to finally remove Tassilo. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry have suggested in their recent book, Oathbreakers, if the Bavarians did so, they would eventually have cause to regret it.[7] That is a story for another time. The nature of Tassilo’s oath breaking was that he and his wife, Liutperga, were making inroads to the Avars for an alliance against Charles. According to the Annales Nazariani, Charles had Tassilo brought before him. The latter could not deny the charges, and Charles ordered him to be tonsured and exiled to a monastery. Due to Tassilo’s pleas of humiliation, Charles remitted the tonsuring, but Tassilo was banished to the monastery of St -Goar, and then the monastery of Jumièges. His two sons were treated likewise, and his wife Liutperga was exiled as well.[8]

Tassilo’s story has a brief postscript. At the Council of Frankfurt in 794, Tassilo appeared and renounced all of his residual rights in Bavaria and fully transferred all authority to Charles. Nelson suggests, per one source of the period, that Tassilo possibly acted under his own agency in order to avoid conflict in the future. Regardless, it was definitive: “Here was the finale of generations of struggle between two powerful families, Agilolfings and Arnulfings…though Tassilo’s myth proved lasting, especially in Bavaria, his history ended at Frankfurt.”[9] Two years later, Tassilo was dead.

Janet Nelson believes that this struggle and rivalry between Tassilo and Charles was retrospectively embedded into the official record of the Carolingian family, the Annales regni Francorum. Under the year 757, the Annales recorded that Tassilo submitted himself to his uncle Pippin I. However, modern scholarship has revealed that this was an interpolation, only added in 788 after Charles destroyed Tassilo.[10] In other words, the official Carolingian account of Tassilo of Bavaria’s supposed treason was doctored after his fall in order to justify the decision taken by Charles to remove a potential rival. That Tassilo was indeed a rival has been demonstrated by this brief account of his life. Unlike the Annales, I have tried not to illustrate that Charles’s supremacy was ordained from the start. That is the reason I have referred to him by his Christian name and not his moniker, Charlemagne, throughout. His greatness was not assured. Tassilo stood in his way. That is why he had to become a loser. Charles ensured that was his fate in 788, no matter that historical research can now tell a very different story.

Bavarian State Exhibition 2024: Tassilo, Korbinian & The Bear - Museen in Bayern

The above website provides details of an exhibition in Bavaria last year, commemorating Tassilo’s part in early Medieval Bavaria.

Medieval Losers will return soon with the story of Aethelwold of Wessex, nephew of Alfred the Great and rival of Edward the Elder.

The Musings of a Gentleman Historian

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