The Waiting Crown

January 913. A letter from a dying duke of Franconia is answered in three lines of Latin on the first morning of the new year. On the night of the feast of Saint Blaise, Conrad of Franconia dies at Fulda. The king is seventeen. He will not see twenty-one. No one in the realm yet knows it.

Across the three years The Waiting Crown covers, a duke of Lotharingia who has already held a regency and a reform and a river war holds a realm whose queen-mother died last year, whose greatest Franconian is dead this year, and whose king is the quiet centre of gravity at the heart of it. A diet at Fritzlar names a new duke of Franconia on a second ballot. A Hatto-faction dissent smoulders through a summer and breaks into a skirmish at a ford on the middle Saar, where a marshal of twenty-five takes an arrow that was not aimed for him. A boy of seven watches his father ride out from a solar window at Metz and does not yet understand that the chair at Aachen will, within three years, need to be filled.

The Waiting Crown is the seventh volume of Rise of the Franks. It is the book about what a senior duke does in the years before an election — which, in the ninth-century grammar of the realm, is to make the election possible without appearing to choose it himself — and about the twentieth day of December nine hundred and fifteen, at the third hour of the morning, in a chamber at Aachen, when a king of twenty years and four months closes his eyes for the last time and a realm that has not decided who comes next begins, quietly, to decide.