It’s not every day one misplaces an Emperor.
A few years ago, an Emperor died in Poitiers. OK, maybe it was more than a few years ago – 1182 as of now, since he died in the year 838. OK, he was more a King than an Emperor, although his father and grandfather and brother were all Emperors, and he defeated his father/Emperor and held his stepmother/Empress hostage. And OK, maybe he didn’t actually die in Poitiers, apparently instead at his palace at Chasseneuil, about six miles downstream of Poitiers on the Clain. But he was buried in Poitiers, for sure. He was buried in the Church of Ste Radegonde, where his tomb is sighted for at least four centuries. Yet now, no one seems to know where he is any more.
Our story begins with another Emperor, Charlemagne. In 781 Charlemagne decides to make his infant son, Louis the Debonair (strangely, the same Louis referred to in some sources as Louis the Pious), nominal King of Aquitaine. Aquitaine is then one of the richest regions of what was Roman Gaul, and has only been in the Carolingian orbit for two generations, having been conquered by Charlemagne’s father, Pepin le Bref (or Pippin the Short). The region is restive, and creating a separate kingship is part of Charlemagne’s strategy to keep local magnates from revolting. Louis had been born at one of the Carolingian dynasty palaces, in Chasseneuil, arguably the northern border of Aquitaine, and born at an important time – his pregnant mother Hildegard had been left at Chasseneuil while Charlemagne was on his way to invade Spain, from where on his return his rear-guard led by Roland would be famously ambushed and become immortalized in the “Song of Roland” song cycle. On Charlemagne’s death in 814, the almost-Poitiers born Louis assumes the double crown of France and the Empire, on top of his earlier Kingship of Aquitaine. Three years later, he passes the latter crown to his son, Pepin (or Pippin), the same way Charlemagne had passed this crown onto him. Pepin, like his father Louis, was born at Chasseneuil – a twin no less, along with his brother Hlothar (Lothar), who would succeed to the largest part of the Carolingian Empire. Pepin is thereafter referred to as Pepin d’Aquitaine (or Pepin I of Aquitaine, to distinguish from his own son Pepin who got the same label). The Carolingians after Charlemagne, however, had anything but a simple time. Emperor Louis, the Debonair and Pious, annoyed his three sons by his first wife in his proposed division of the Empire between them. Things got worse when he remarried to Judith, a daughter of the influential German Welf family, and gave part of the Empire to his son with Judith, Charles the Bald. Things were bad enough that Louis’ sons rose up in revolt, and succeeded in capturing their father in 830. The disliked stepmother, Judith was exiled to… Poitiers, where she spent a year as a de-facto captive of Pepin at the Abbey of Ste Croix. Louis agreed to restore the original three brothers’ arrangements, then after he was freed changed his mind and announced that he would give Charles the Bald a bigger slice of the pie, including now Aquitaine – at the expense of local boy Pepin. Back to battle went the sons, and by 834 they had won again, and Louis went back again to reducing Charles’ inheritance, and giving Aquitaine back to Pepin. Who then started back to Poitiers, only to die on his way back. He was buried in the church of Ste Radegonde, alongside the famous saint for whom the church was named.
And then the story gets stranger. Between 838 and the 1100s, the church is destroyed and rebuilt several times; Radegonde’s tomb is lost and then refound. Yet in the 13th century, documents show Pepin’s tomb was still behind the main altar of the oft-rebuilt church. Then… silence. Today, there is no imperial tomb in the church of Ste Radegonde. No one seems to have bothered to look for it. That’s not something that happens every day…
