How a Tale of Demonic Possession Predicted the Decline of an Early Medieval Empire

In the tale, the demon called himself Wiggo.

As the Frankish courtier Einhard recounted, a young girl of about 16 began behaving erratically in the early ninth century C.E. Eventually, the girl’s desperate parents had no choice but to seek an exorcism. They took her to a church in the kingdom of the Franks, a realm whose borders spanned much of Western Europe at the time. The priest at the church, which had been sanctified by the recent arrival of some saintly relics from Rome, tried talking to the demon living in the girl’s body. Suddenly, a reply came out in Latin, a language she did not know. Only then did Wiggo identify himself and freely admit what he was doing.

He was Satan’s doorkeeper, Wiggo declared. He had been roaming the land of the Franks with 11 friends for the last several years. “Following our instructions,” the demon continued, “we destroyed the grain, grapes and all the earth’s produce that is useful to mankind. We slaughtered the stock with disease and even directed plague and pestilence against human beings.” The priest asked what had given Wiggo such power. The demon replied, “By reason of the perverseness of this people, and of the manifold sins of those who are set up to rule over them.”

The sins of the Franks and their rulers had made the land fertile for Wiggo and his friends. This was a land without justice in which greed ran rampant: The powerful “abuse the higher place,” Wiggo said, “which they received that they might justly rule their subjects, giving themselves up to pride and vainglory; hatred and malice they direct not only against those who are far off but against their neighbors and those with whom they are allied; friend mistrusts friend, brother hates brother, and father has no love for son.” None, Wiggo concluded, gave honor to God as they did in previous generations. His speech finished and his work apparently done, the demon left the girl, overcome by the power of the martyrs’ relics.

Medieval stories about the sacred or supernatural—demons, angels, saints, relics and visions—were set in a society where the borders between natural and supernatural were thought to have been thin or nonexistent. They reflected broad beliefs across social classes, and for modern historians, they offer an opportunity to see beyond tightly controlled, elite circles. Accounts of miracles, religious sermons and other such cultural artifacts allowed medieval authors to cloak their critiques of power and reveal what was really going on in the world.

Wiggo’s description of the realm matches up with the situation in the kingdom at the time. Its most famous leader, Charlemagne, had risen to power in the late eighth century as ruler of the Franks, a people known to the Romans since late antiquity, who had ruled their own independent kingdom since the late fifth century. After a coup in 751, members of the new Frankish dynasty—the Carolingians—expanded against their enemies at a breathtaking pace, establishing an empire that at its height extended from the North Sea to beyond the Pyrenees in the south to the Danube River in the east. On Christmas Day in 800, the pope crowned Charlemagne as Roman emperor at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne’s son and heir, Louis the Pious, succeeded his father as emperor in 814.

But upheaval at Frankish court in 829 culminated in an attempted coup in 830. The Carolingian Empire was indeed in crisis: Elite leaders denounced each other, the economy was shaky, famine stalked the land, nobles plotted coups against the emperor, and armies were on the march.

In an authoritarian regime like the Frankish empire, it was dangerous to criticize the ruler directly. Better to let Wiggo do it for you.

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This specific tale of demonic possession is preserved in a collection of miracle stories, likely written sometime around 830 by a scholar named Einhard, who is best known for writing a famous biography of Charlemagne. He was also a close associate of Louis the Pious and so esteemed at court that he served as the childhood tutor for Louis’ eldest son, the future emperor Lothar I.

Einhard wasn’t happy about the state of things, but criticizing the emperor to his face was traditionally a bad career move for a courtier. Instead, Einhard used a local story of demonic possession of a young girl to make the critique for him, likely drawing on broader widespread views of the recent turmoil.

Einhard made clear this connection when he concluded the account of Wiggo’s possession by breaking the narrative and writing in his own voice as a courtier: “Ah for pity! Into what great miseries our times have sunk, when evil demons rather than good men are teachers, and the proponents of vice and inciters of crime admonish us for our own correction.” Einhard had seen the behaviors of men and women that had opened the hellmouth, and he wrote to Louis with a warning. The political consensus, always fragile beneath a projection of divinely appointed strength, had begun to fray, and the positions of the ruler and his queen remained vulnerable. In other words, Einhard was saying that until the ship of state was righted, those who plotted coups against the political order were almost always certain to try again.

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Our new book, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe, recounts the gripping and often horrifically violent tale of the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire. To justify their rule, the Carolingians told a story about themselves as God’s chosen people, inevitable and more or less infallible. In fact, they were a mess. Their reign began with a coup, and they never really stopped conspiring; while claiming to be stewards of stability, the royal family loved trying to overthrow the current ruler. Charlemagne’s eldest son, Pepin the Hunchback, staged a coup against him in 792 and failed. Then, a few years after Louis took control of the empire in 814, he caught wind that his nephew might be plotting a coup and responded by blinding the alleged plotter, who died as a result of the procedure. Louis faced two more serious coup attempts in the 830s.

The 830 coup attempt that prompted Einhard to immortalize the folk memory of Wiggo was dramatic, revealing deep divisions behind an appearance of elite comity and consensus. At one point, the rebels (including the emperor’s second son, Pepin I of Aquitaine) captured Judith of Bavaria—Louis’ second wife, resented by the children of his first marriage—dragging her from sanctuary in a basilica, likely torturing her and certainly threatening her life. They pushed her to confess to witchcraft and adultery. The plotters also seized several of their rivals at court and executed them. It seemed for a time as though the coup had succeeded.

But in the end, Louis’ eldest surviving son, Lothar, swept in and brokered a deal that reinstated the status quo. Arriving with a small army, Lothar took over from Pepin I, decreeing that the fate of their father and his queen would be decided a few months later at an assembly far to the east. This brilliant stroke moved the action away from the regions in which the rebels enjoyed the most support and allowed tempers to cool. Indeed, at that assembly in Nijmegen, in what is now the Netherlands, the assembled magnates and their armies decided that things had gone too far and restored Louis to the throne.

Historians can look back and see the tensions that resulted in the coup of 830, and how its lack of resolution led to another coup attempt in 833 and ultimately to a brutal civil war in the 840s. But throughout all the murder, treason and plotting, most historical sources, from the Annals of Fulda to the Annals of St. Bertin, remain committed to the myth of stability, inevitability and God’s blessing. The Annals of St. Bertin, for example, suggest that the empire went back to business as usual after the coup attempts, obscuring just how tumultuous those years really were. At the end of its entry for 830, the text states, “The Lord Emperor [Louis] had regained control of the situation. He ordered those responsible for what had been done to him, whose double-dealing had been detected and their plot exposed, to be kept in custody until the meeting of another assembly to be held at Aachen.”

In other words, the annals were saying that things returned to their “natural” state, with the emperor back in charge. The ship always seems to simply right itself, to return to what elites pretended was the natural order of things.

What’s more, these sources tend to report the views of the most powerful, concealing dissent—and certainly not paying attention to the attitudes of commoners, as revealed in secondhand incarnations like Wiggo’s tale. Winners don’t always write history, but courtiers did sometimes need to keep their criticisms on the down low. Still, the stakes were too great for Einhard to stay silent. So, he wrote, obliquely, using a demon named Wiggo to give voice to the concerns of the Franks as a whole.

What’s maybe even more important about the story of Wiggo and those like it is how they reveal what observers, from courtiers to peasant girls, thought about high politics and elite greed. The disorders of the Carolingian Empire brought low the ruling dynasty, set nephews against uncles on the battlefield and created innumerable grieving mothers. But as Einhard made clear, the rampant greed of the kingdom’s ruling class caused an increase in general misery—famine, plague and pestilence that made it seem like the gates of hell had been thrown open, and which, in Einhard’s telling, forced a peasant family and their little girl to bear a heavy burden for all of the sins of their rulers.

Adapted from Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. Published by Harper. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.

Matthew Gabriele | | READ MORE

Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies and chair of the Department of Religion & Culture at Virginia Tech. His latest book, co-authored with David M. Perry, is Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. See more at profgabriele.com.

David M. Perry | | READ MORE

David M. Perry is the co-author of Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. He's currently the senior academic advisor in the History Department at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.