In the 820s Louis began to turn away from this fruitless confrontational policy and instead encouraged Breton nobles to enter imperial service voluntarily. He believed this would open their eyes to the potential rewards of cooperation with the wealthy Frankish empire, and he was right. One Breton who joined the Franks and rose to a position of honour and trust at the imperial court was Nomenoe. In 831 Louis appointed Nomenoe as missus imperatoris (imperial representative) for Brittany. Nomenoe was required to become an imperial vassal but he received the county of Vannes and virtually regal powers over all of Brittany as his reward. The arrangement was mutually advantageous. Nomenoe gained a clear superiority of status over the Breton counts and could rely on the support of Europe’s most powerful ruler in any disputes. For his part, Louis gained a clear title to lands that he did not actually control and was also able to start bringing the Breton church into line with Roman practices. Brittany as a united political entity was born.
Louis’s policy might well have led to the peaceful assimilation of Brittany into the Frankish realm but the prestige of the Carolingian dynasty was about to go into freefall. Louis’s greatest problem in his later years was finding an inheritance settlement that would satisfy his three quarrelsome sons and at the same time preserve the unity of the Frankish empire. It was an impossible task. Louis’s efforts were continually sabotaged by one son or another and, to nobody’s great surprise, civil war broke out soon after his death in 840. The war was ended by the Treaty of Verdun in August 843. This tripartite division of the empire confirmed Brittany as part of the West Frankish kingdom (‘France’) of Louis’s youngest son Charles the Bald (r. 840-77). Nomenoe had always remained loyal to Louis, but the corrosive atmosphere of the civil wars loosened the ties of loyalty between vassals and king throughout the Frankish empire. Nobles increasingly settled disputes by resort to private warfare, and in May 843 fighting broke out between Nomenoe and his neighbour, the count of Nantes. In the autumn. King Charles tried to restore order in the area but failed. When the king made a second attempt to reassert his authority in 845, Nomenoe defeated him soundly at Ballon, near Redon. Four years later Nomenoe expelled the Frankish bishops from the sees of Dol, Alet, St Pol-de-Leon, Quimper and Vannes and installed native Breton speakers in their places. In the Middle Ages, when secular and ecclesiastical authority was symbiot-ically entwined, such an action amounted to a declaration of independence.
Beset by conflicts with his brothers and a kingdom full of disobedient vassals, Charles would have been hard pushed to bring Nomenoe to heel even had he not also had to face the threat of Viking pirate raids. Vikings first raided the Frankish empire in 799, but it was only when Louis’s succession problems began to weaken royal authority in the 830s that the problem became serious. The Vikings were great opportunists, and in 843 they took advantage of the civil war to sack Nantes and set up a base on the island of Noirmoutier, off the Loire estuary and right on Brittany’s doorstep. Many Breton monasteries were plundered and in 847 Nomenoe was reduced to buying the Vikings off after they had defeated him in battle three times in quick succession. However, as the Vikings did even more damage to the Franks they were, for the time being, more of a help than a hindrance to the Bretons.
After his successful coup against the Frankish-dominated church, Nomenoe captured Nantes and Rennes, then launched a campaign deep into Charles the Bald’s kingdom, only to die suddenly at Vendome in March 851. Charles immediately invaded Brittany, only to be crushingly defeated later that summer by Nomenoe’s son Erispoe in a gruelling three-day battle at Jengland-Besle on the Vilaine. Charles had to flee ignominiously for his life, leaving his baggage behind for the triumphant Bretons to plunder. In a humiliating peace treaty, Charles was forced to cede to Erispoe all the territory conquered by Nomenoe and - an even greater concession - grant him a royal title. Brittany thus became a kingdom, although Erispoe remained a vassal of the Frankish king. Erispoe was murdered while attending church in 857 by his cousin Salomon, who then seized the throne for himself.
An unscrupulous ruler, Salomon brought the kingdom of Brittany to its greatest territorial extent. At first he professed loyalty to Charles, and was granted further territorial concessions around Angers in 863 as his reward. Three years later, however, Salomon allied with the Vikings and together they inflicted another humiliating defeat on Charles at Brissarthe, near Le Mans. Charles was forced to cede the Cotentin peninsula (in modern Normandy) to Salomon and make him the symbolic gift of a crown.
The new territories conquered by Nomenoe, Erispoe and Salomon were rich but, ironically, they also began the dilution of Brittany’s Celtic character. The new territories were culturally, religiously, linguistically and administratively Frankish in character, and the small number of Breton settlers who moved east did little to change that. Brittany became permanently divided into two parts, Bretagne Bretonnante - Breton-speaking Brittany - and Bretagne Gallo - French-speaking Brittany. Bretagne Gallo became an open door for the vigorous and enormously influential culture of medieval France. This is comparable to what happened to Scotland after it acquired English-speaking Lothian in the tenth century. With both countries it was their successes against their neighbours, not defeat by them, which led to the dilution of their Celtic character. Because of their wealth, Breton rulers inevitably began to spend most of their time in the new territories. French-speaking Nantes and Rennes became the main political and cultural centres. However, the flow of ideas was not entirely one way. It was through Brittany that the legends of King Arthur became known in France, where they played a key role in the development of two of the most important manifestations of medieval European civilisation, chivalry and courtly literature.
World History
