A Dreadful Deed

Charlemagne's descendant, King Lothar II, is unhappy. He wants to crown his mistress queen, but, well... there's the small matter of his wife. In the scandalous divorce case that follows and Bishop Hincmar of Reims' critical reaction, morality, mayhem, and magic play starring roles. Is witchcraft to blame for the king's distress? 

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben, featuring the voice talents of Jack Krause and Joshua Summit, with original music by Purple Planet.  

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-Roll
• 0:14 Intro
• 2:10 Charlemagne
• 6:25 Lothar II
• 8:18 Hincmar of Rheims
• 17:35 Conclusion
• 21:07 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben. Just a heads-up before we start the show, this episode acknowledges the existence of sex. Listener discretion is advised.

Intro
The king was unhappy, which meant no one was happy. By 857, King Lothar II was beginning to regret his choices. His marriage, like many royal unions, was the product of a dynastic alliance arranged by his father. His queen, Theutberga, was a member of a powerful noble family, but after a year of trying she had failed to produce an heir, and Lothar was quickly tiring of the alliance with her family. He desperately wanted to marry his longtime mistress, Waldrada, who had already borne him a son, albeit an illegitimate one. In a bygone era, this would have been relatively easy, but in this newly Christian kingdom, divorce was nearly impossible.

Since marriage was a sacrament under Church law, no human authority could undo it. An unhappy king could attempt to have his marriage annulled, that is, he could try to discover some reason why the marriage could never have been legally formed in the first place. Barring that, there was one circumstance that might allow the dissolution of a valid marriage: adultery. If a king could prove that his queen had carried on an affair, church authorities might be willing to declare his marriage invalid. It helped if the affair was especially scandalous.

The divorce case that followed would become one of the first great European royal sex scandals, with the queen facing charges of adultery, sodomy, and incest. One bishop, however, would come to her defense with a lengthy critique of the case made against her and an alternate explanation for the disorder in the king’s marriage: witchcraft.

Charlemagne
A century prior to Lothar’s divorce case, his great-grandfather, Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, oversaw a revival of Church power and codified law, both intended to bolster his own imperial power. In doing so, Charlemagne became an ally of those priests and bishops who sought to stamp out the remaining influence and practices of pre-Christian traditions in the empire. In 775, for example, one author urged Charlemagne to defend his kingdom against “sorcerers, poisoners, storm-callers, witches, fortune-tellers, thieves, and homicides, especially in the assemblies of God.” The letter goes on to remind him that the emperor’s duty is “to condemn these things for the sake of the law… to judge rightly… [as] the minister of God, protector, and so forth in all these matters.” Charlemagne appears to have taken the message to heart, since he devoted a series of laws in the eighth and early ninth centuries to those who resorted to magic or to traditional pagan practices. His Capitulary of 802, for example, urges officials to ensure that his subjects, “will not, under any pretext, induced by reward or flattery, dare to conceal thieves, robbers, or murderers, adulterers, magicians and wizards or witches, or any godless men, but will rather give them up that they may be bettered and chastised by the law: so that, God permitting, all these evils may be removéd from the Christian people.” 

However, Charlemagne appears to have doubted whether or not witchcraft was real. Instead, his laws tended to treat those who believed in witchcraft as misguided, as in his Capitulary for Saxony, which commands, for example, “that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.” Another chapter in that same capitulary states that, “If someone deceivéd by the devil and according to the custom of the pagans believes any man or woman to be a witch and to eat people and because of this has burned them or given them flesh to eat or has eaten that flesh, it warrants capital punishment.” Charlemagne’s concern was not that there were witches running about his kingdom, but that his subjects—some of them new to Christianity and slow to relinquish their old beliefs—thought witches were real and were taking the law into their own hands.

Charlemagne’s real concern was not witchcraft but that pagan practices seemed to be sticking around in his Christian kingdom. He placed responsibility for eliminating these practices firmly in the lap of the church, declaring that “each bishop in his diocese must take care… that the people of God do not perform pagan practices… whether the profane sacrifices of the dead, the casting of lots or divination, spells and enchantments, incantations, or the burning of sacrifices, which pagan rites stupid people perform next to churches under the names of the holy martyrs and confessors of the Lord; who provoke the anger rather than the mercy of their saints.”

Charlemagne’s subjects weren’t the only ones who longed for the old days. He even had to remind some members of the clergy not to baptize bells or hang cards from poles to prevent hailstorms. A century later, his great-grandson would be longing for another pre-Christian tradition: divorce.

Lothar II
King Lothar II was one of Charlemagne’s many descendants and the ruler of the ninth-century kingdom of Lotharingia—a strip of territories along the modern border between Germany and France. In order to secure a divorce from Queen Theutberga and marry his mistress, Waldrada, Lothar had to convince his bishops that Theutberga had committed acts so unthinkable, so morally repugnant as to disqualify her from queenship. In 857, a mere two years after marrying Theutberga, Lothar and his advisors imprisoned the queen and assembled a case against her, and the charges are as salacious as they come. Lothar accused Theutberga of sleeping with her own brother before their marriage. The record of the accusation states that “her brother had committed a dreadful deed with her in masculine intercourse between her thighs, as ‘men are accustomed to commit sin with men.” Despite their caution, the accusation states that Theutberga conceived a child and “in order that the disgrace might be hidden, she had drunk a potion and had aborted the progeny.” Lothar summoned his bishops to try the case and dissolve his marriage to Theutberga on the grounds of her immorality, but two things helped her. First, she asked to be allowed to undergo the trial of hot water, an ordeal in which the accused (or, in this case, a champion acting on her behalf), reaches into a pot of boiling water to retrieve a stone, a ring, or some other item. The bishops observing the trial found the champion’s hand to be “uncooked” and declared Theutberga innocent. When Lothar insisted the ordeal was invalid because Theutberga had been thinking of someone else with the same name as her brother, her brother took up arms against the king. By 858, Lothar was forced to reconcile with Theutberga.

Hincmar of Rheims
But the story doesn’t end there. In 862 Lothar cut a deal with his brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis II, to have local church officials annul his marriage. Shortly after this, he married Waldrada, calling yet another church synod to confirm the decision in 863.

For one powerful church official, Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, this case, the king’s hatred for his wife, and his obsession with marrying his mistress, all had a simple explanation: witchcraft. In his De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae, or “On the divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga,” Hincmar offers a critique of Lothar’s case against the queen. He clearly sympathizes with Theutberga (or at least thinks the charges against her are patently false), and in an effort to discredit her critics, he turns an eye to Waldrada. Hincmar is wise enough to avoid explicitly accusing the king’s beloved mistress of witchcraft, but he does still spill a suspiciously large amount of ink over explaining that bewitchment by love magic would help to explain all of this.

Like many of his contemporaries, Hincmar believed in magic to a certain extent. To him, magic was the work of demons, who tempted humans into reviving pagan practices and practicing dark arts for the purposes of fortune-telling, cursing, and bewitching. At a church synod in Metz in 859, Hincmar decreed death to all witches, urging the king and his bishops “to drive the impious from the land… [and] not allow poisoners and profaners to live.” In De divortio, he explains the danger such individuals present to everyone, even the king:

Question 15: About that which was asked: whether it can be true, as many men say, that there are women who, by their witchcraft, can create irreconcilable hate between a man and his wife and also sow inexpressible love between a man and a woman…

Answer: It is shameful for us to repeat known stories, and it is tedious to count the profanities that we learn from those of this kind, who are found to conjure by the bones of the dead, and by ash and dead coals, and by the hair and pubic hair of men and women, with threads of many colors, and various herbs, and with parts of snails and serpents, and by the singing of songs… Some may also be dressed or dress themselves in many-colored clothes, others made themselves mad with drink or food from fortune-tellers, others, in truth, allowed themselves to be bewitched and weakened by songs from the strix: still others allowed themselves to be weakened by succubae, and some women were given the shape of men by incubi, with whose love they were inflamed…

Unlike Charlemagne, who seemed to regard the practice of magic with a combination of caution and skepticism, Hincmar saw it as a real danger. While he refrains from explicitly accusing Waldrada of using love magic on Lothar, Hincmar does suggest that magic can sow hatred or kindle love. He does, however, leave Waldrada an out by arguing that it’s possible that people who perform magic (or believe they’re performing magic) are in fact deceived by demons. For Hincmar, the only solution to the many spiritual dangers this diabolically influenced magic presents is the intervention of the Church, after which “men, freed and healed by blessing and ecclesiastical medicine, show goodwill in marriage and perform their natural duty.”

The answer to the question on love magic is one of the longest in De divortio, in part because Hincmar uses this opportunity to include a taxonomy of mages ripped straight from the writings of the seventh-century scholar and cleric Isidore of Seville. In this section, Hincmar lists a wide variety of magicians and the ways in which, according to him, demons have duped them into believing their magic is real:

Mages are usually called witches instead because of the magnitude of their crimes. And these shake up the elements, disturb the minds of men, and without any poison... kill them through the violence of a charm. There are necromancers, who, with their incantations... get answers to their questions by raising the dead. There are water-mages, who, gazing into water, summon the shades of demons, and see an echo or mockery of them there, and listen to what they say. Enchanters, who kill through the art of words. Diviners, who utter impious prayers around the altars of idols, and offer funeral sacrifices, and they receive answers at the feasts of demons. Soothsayers, who keep track of the times for rituals, activities, and works, who examine the bowels, entrails, and shoulder blades of livestock and all the rest, and from these predict the future. There are augurs, who examine the flight and call of birds, one aspect of which pertains to the eyes, that is, the flight of birds, and the other to the ears, that is, the call of birds. There are both sorceresses and ventriloquists; there are astrologers, who read the future in the stars. There are both those who examine birthdates, who are commonly called astrologers. There are makers of horoscopes, who study the times of various births for different destinies. There are both fortune-tellers, who under the name of false religion, by means things they call the sortes of the saints, they profess a science of divination, and they profess to foretell the future by examining some portion of scripture.

Most disturbing to Hincmar (via Isidore) is the idea that demons can alter not just humans’ perception but also our bodies, “especially when, either male in feminine form or females appearing in men’s habits, those demons the Gauls call ‘Dusios’ by some monstrous miracle fashion human bodies for their incorporeal spirits to attack and have sex with humans.”

All this raises the question of why an all-powerful and all-knowing God would allow this kind of disorder to exist in His orderly universe. Hincmar locates the reason in human weakness and proclivity to sin:

Question 16: What may be the cause why God, as it is said, often allows such things to be done in a legitimate marriage?

Answer: License is given to evil spirits according to God’s hidden justice, so that those who wish evil may be strangled in the net of sin, that they might not escape from their just due in punishment of their sins.

Question 17: And if by chance there might be found such male sorcerers or female enchantresses, what ought to be done about it?

Answer: The priest must vehemently be on the lookout against such persons and preach against such men publicly to the people and, by his efforts, to rescue them from such a stain of profanity and from divine judgment and from the dangers of their present life through persuasion and exhortation. If, however, he does find those who should amend and correct themselves as a result of this, the priest should arrest them fervently and with zeal and, if they are slaves, he should chastise them through beatings and torture that they might come to be corrected; if they are free and worthy of imprisonment, the priest should restrain them with severe punishment. But if such persons cannot be healed by ecclesiastical medicine in this way, the king should, through his equitable justice, remove the lawless from the land.

Hincmar is not the only cleric to describe the use of pre-Christian ritual as a kind of disease to be cured by, as he puts it, “ecclesiastical medicine,” but he is certainly one of the most emphatic. It’s important to remember, however, that Hincmar had a job to do. He was the archbishop of Reims, but he was also a royal councilor and a member of the court of Lothar’s uncle, Charles the Bald. If Lothar failed to produce a legitimate heir—a clear possibility given Theutberga’s apparent infertility—Charles had a claim to his nephew’s kingdom. It was in Charles’ best interest to ensure that his nephew’s marriage to his barren queen remained intact, and what was good for Charles was also good for Hincmar. Whatever his own personal opinion, Hincmar’s duty in this moment was to write whatever it would take to defend the queen’s marriage and prevent Lothar from marrying his mistress and producing a legitimate heir.

Conclusion
In ruling the largest kingdom Europe had seen since the Roman Empire, Charlemagne faced a particular problem. He ruled over an extremely diverse population, not all of whom had converted to Christianity. Even for those whose parents and grandparents were Christians, old habits die hard. The fact that, according to Charlemagne’s legal code, some of his subjects were performing these outlawed rites near churches while reciting the names of the saints demonstrates a degree of synthesis between pre-Christian traditions and Christianity. By all accounts, magic was not the chief concern of lawmakers or church officials in early medieval Europe. While church synods in the ninth century show an increasing concern about witchcraft among bishops, the penalties for performing pagan rites were still relatively lenient. What church authorities sought to do, in fact, was not to eliminate these rituals in their entirety but to redirect them.

Divination became acceptable, for example, as long as it was performed by the clergy using religious materials, especially the Bible or Psalter. Instructions on the Sortes Biblicae or Sortes Sanctorum tell a would-be fortune-teller, “If you need to find something out, you may do so in this way. Sing first of all a psalm on the first of the altar steps, that God will reveal to you that which you seek. Then open the Psalter, and look to it for the first letter, and you will find the answer to your question in this way.” The goal was not to banish magical practice. The goal was to shift power and belief from magic to miracle, from spirits to the saints, and from the magician to the priest. Hincmar’s condemnation of magicians, soothsayers, and witches and the harm they do is closely followed by his insistence that the only remedy is the intervention of the clergy, his “ecclesiastical medicine.”

The story of Lothar and Theutberga’s divorce case doesn’t end with Lothar’s marriage to Waldrada. Shortly after the annulment of her marriage, Theutberga fled to the court of Lothar’s uncle, Charles the Bald, who, of course, offered her his full support in appealing the annulment. The appeal was successful, no doubt due to Charles’ intervention. The pope overturned the synod's ruling and declared Lothar's marriage to Waldrada null and void. With little choice, Lothar took Theutberga back, but when the pope died, Lothar immediately appealed to his successor, who agreed to annul his marriage to Theutberga. However, on his way back from Rome, Lothar contracted a fever and died in Italy in 869. Theutberga retired to an abbey until her death in 875. Lothar's uncles did, in fact, seize his kingdom and divide it between themselves. As for Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, he lived to see all of it.

Outro
If you enjoyed today’s episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts helps new listeners find us, so if you want to help spread the word, please leave a review and tell your friends about us. This episode was produced by me, featuring the voice talents of Joshua Summit and Jack Krause and original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. You can get in touch with us via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow us on Facebook and Instagram at enchantedpodcast and on Twitter at enchantedpod. To learn more about the show or to become a supporter and help keep the magic going, please visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.