History Rhyming: A Short Review of Oathbreakers

Should I Read This: Absolutely, even if medieval history is not necessarily your interest.

Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Oathbreakers a book by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry - Bookshop.org US

Author’s Website: This is David M. Perry – Author- Journalist – Historian – Speaker and About — Matthew Gabriele

History, it is often said, does not repeat, but it does rhyme. That, probably more than anything, is the message, intentional or not, of Oathbreakers. An excellent history of the end of the Charlemagne empire by David M. Perry (who, it must be said, has the tweest author photograph on his website of any author I have reviewed) and Mathew Gabriele (whose photo is not twee at all), authors of the Bright Ages, well told. The book is both a fascinating history of the time period when the Franks allowed their Empire to fall apart and a resonant story about how societies can and do change.

The story of the Franks and the collapse of their empire, the most powerful in western Europe since Rome, is fascinating on many levels. The personalities involved, of course, are often outsized (Bernard of Septimania would make a good Game of Thrones villain) , and their choices literally shaped the modern world. The book does an excellent job of telling their stories, and the stories of the people around them. It is a compellingly written, with a nice leavening of dry, sarcastic humor. It reads more like a Game of Thrones script than a textbook.

I keep mentioning Game of Thrones, as the marketing for this book brings that comparison up a lot. And it is a fair comparison — if you threw some dragons on top of the book, you’d have a very good treatment for a successor series. But that, to me, is the least interesting aspect of the book. Oathbreakers, I think, is most interesting when it deals with how the civil war that ended the empire affected the perceptions of the people involved. The Franks had spent much of their political history posturing. Some skirmishes happened, some individuals were executed, sometimes horrifically, but Frankish politics largely consisted of bluffing. The various people would threatened, would march their armies, and then use their apparent force to gain concessions largely without a significant battle. Until, one day, that battle came.

The battle shattered the Frankish world, not so much because of the outcome (the civil war was still very much in doubt after it) but because of what it represented. Until that time, the Franks believed themselves to be the new chosen people, that God had gifted them their Empire because of their virtue. And part of that virtue was the sense of community that held, at least among the elites. They did not fight major battles because God would reveal, through the strength of the armies present and moving the hearts of the major lords to support one ruler or another, who should rule. Conflicts were often as much about the pen and persuasion than they were about actual bloodshed.

Until they weren’t.

The book does an excellent job of showing just how that one battle, and the slaughter that happened after, broke the Frankish conceptions of themselves, and how that broken conception eventually lead to the broken empire. The anguish over families fighting families comes through excruciatingly clear in the sources they quote, as well as the sense of doom and despair in the political and religious writings in the years and decades after. Stories matter, and things can appear to be certain and fixed until they are, suddenly, not. And those sudden changes have as much to do with what becomes possible as any army or general or king.

Which is demonstrated nicely in the impact the dissolution of the Frankish empire had on European conceptions of themselves. The battle that shattered the empire was taken up by both the nascent French and German empires in the nineteenth century as the basis for their own myths of national origin. That the two sides had sometimes widely differing opinions on what the battle actual achieved and that those opinions often changed on either side in the space of a few years, is another testament to the power of stories people tell about themselves. Nationalism is, in a real sense, a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The same battle that shattered the story the Franks told about themselves built the story that the Germans and French used to construct their own nations on same ground that had once been a united Frankish Empire blessed by God and known and respected throughout the medieval world.

Oathbreakers also does a good showing that the dissolution of the Empire was not brought about solely by the choices of the players involved. While they point out that things could have gone differently if this person had moved more forcefully or that person had been a hair more patient, all of their actions are clearly constrained by the system in which they operated. The Empire might have been extended. It, indeed, had survived similar stresses in its recent past. But the systems that encouraged partition among heirs, that placed power in the hands of nobles and then encouraged them to change sides and be forgiven afterwards, was always one in danger of tripping over the line between pretend combat and slaughter.

The resonances with today are probably obvious. But they are important all the same. People, largely, remain people throughout history. And the story of the Franks and the shock of finding out that their myths were not true, the anguish of people whose crops were destroyed or children held as hostage for good behavior is as raw and real as the pain we feel for our loved ones today. And just like today, the stories and systems matter. People operate within the constraints of their societies, the myths and rules that govern them. And while they can make a difference, they operate constrained by the culture and rules around them. Until, one day, they wake up and find that the rules no longer hold.

The obvious lesson is that if you want things to improve, you need better stories and better systems. Otherwise, you find yourself in the ruins of the way the world used to be with no way back. Oathbreakers understands that fact — and focuses as much on the way that fact played out for the Franks as the play by play of the fall of the Empire. It is an excellent, well written history that I highly recommend.