Louis The Pious Biography

Louis I, who was also called Louis the Pious, inherited the throne of the Frankish Empire from his father Charlemagne. He wanted to do two things: 1) rule a Christian empire and 2) have a united empire. To accomplish the first goal, he held ecclesiastical councils in Aachen that would formulate rules to reform, govern, and strengthen the Catholic Church. He mandated that all monasteries abide by the Benedictine Rule, which stressed humility, obedience and industry. Similarly, he wanted all clerics to adopt monastic standards. He also enforced religious morality in his home by sending his unmarried sisters to nunneries. He defended the borders of his empire against hostile forces like the Moors in Barcelona. He also wanted to keep the empire together, despite the difficulty presented by having multiple sons, three of whom would outlive him. To compound the problem, his second wife had a son, and she naturally wanted him to inherit part of the empire. As that would result in their own shares of the empire being shrunk, the three older sons objected. The last remaining years of Louis' life would be devoted to civil wars with his own sons. The succession problem would not, in fact, be settled until after Louis' death.