Granted lordship over Alamannia in 876, following the division of East Francia, he succeeded to the Italian throne upon the abdication of his older brother Carloman of Bavaria who had been incapacitated by a stroke.

Crowned emperor in 881 by Pope John VIII, his succession to the territories of his brother Louis the Younger (Saxony and Bavaria) the following year reunited the kingdom of East Francia.

Usually considered lethargic and inept—he was frequently ill, and is believed to have had epilepsy—Charles twice purchased peace with Viking raiders, including at the infamous Siege of Paris, which led to his downfall.

During a coup led by his nephew Arnulf of Carinthia in mid-November 887, Charles was deposed in East Francia, Lotharingia, and the Kingdom of Italy.

[2] The Empire quickly fell apart after his death, splintering into five separate successor kingdoms; the territory it had occupied was not entirely reunited under one ruler until the conquests of Napoleon.

[4] Charles was the youngest of the three sons of Louis the German, first King of East Francia, and Hemma from the House of Welf.

Three brothers ruled in cooperation and avoided wars over the division of their patrimony: a rare occurrence in the Early Middle Ages.

[8] In 880, Charles joined Louis III of France and Carloman II, the joint kings of West Francia, in a failed siege of Boso of Provence in Vienne from August to September.

On 18 July 880, Pope John VIII sent a letter to Guy II of Spoleto seeking peace, but the duke ignored him and invaded the Papal States.

He modelled it after the Palace at Aachen which was built by Charlemagne, whom he consciously sought to emulate, as indicated by the Gesta Karoli Magni of Notker the Stammerer.

As Aachen was located in the kingdom of his brother, it was necessary for Charles to build a new palace for his court in his own power base of western Alemannia.

[11] In 885, fearing Godfrid and his brother-in-law, Hugh, Duke of Alsace, Charles arranged for a conference at Spijk near Lobith, where the Viking leader fell into his trap.

Though the emperor lost his vassals of the Wilhelminer family and his relationship with his nephew was broken, he gained powerful new allies in the Moravian dux and other Slavic duces of the region.

When Carloman II of West Francia died on 12 December 884, the nobles of the kingdom invited Charles to assume the kingship.

[13] It is likely that Charles was crowned by Geilo, Bishop of Langres, as rex in Gallia on 20 May 885 at Grand in the Vosges in southern Lorraine.

Though West Francia (the future France) was far less menaced by the Vikings than the Low Countries, it was heavily hit nonetheless.

A charter dated to between 897 and 900 makes reference to the soul of Karolus, on whose behalf Alan had ordered prayers to be said in the monastery of Redon.

Charles, childless by his marriage to Richgard, tried to have Bernard, his illegitimate son by an unknown concubine, recognised as his heir in 885, but this met with opposition from several bishops.

Because Charles had called together the "bishops and counts of Gaul" as well as the pope to meet him at Worms, it is likely that he had plans to make Bernard King of Lotharingia.

[17] In early 886 Charles met the new Pope Stephen V and probably negotiated for the recognition of his illegitimate son as heir.

[18] Charles eventually abandoned his plans for Bernard and instead adopted Louis of Provence as his son at an assembly at Kirchen in May.

In the summer of that year, having given up on plans for his son's succession, Charles received Odo and Berengar, Margrave of Friuli, a relative of his, at his court.

While there he received news that an ambitious nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, had fomented a general rebellion and was marching into Germany with an army of Bavarians and Slavs.

Aside from rebuking his faithlessness, he did little to prevent Arnulf's move—he had recently been ill again—but assured that Bernard was entrusted to his care and possibly Louis too.

Louis was crowned in Provence, as Charles had intended, and he sought the support of Arnulf and gained it, probably through supplication to him.

In Upper Burgundy, one Rudolph, a dux of the region, was elected as king in a distinctly non-Carolingian creation, probably the result of his failure to succeed in the whole of Lotharingia.

In Aquitaine, Ranulf II declared himself king and took the guardianship of the young Charles the Simple, the Carolingian heir to the West, refusing to recognise Odo's election.

Indeed, contemporary opinion of Charles is consistently kinder than later historiography, though it is a modern suggestion that his lack of apparent successes is the excusable result of near constant illness and infirmity.

Charles was the subject of a hortative piece of Latin prose, the Visio Karoli Grossi, designed to champion the cause of Louis the Blind and warn the Carolingians that their continued rule was not certain if they did not have "divine" (i.e. ecclesiastical) favour.