A Frankish royal palace on the Oise where Charles Martel died in 741, Pepin the Short received Pope Stephen II in 754, and Charles the Bald issued the capitulary of 877.
Quierzy — Carisiacum in the Latin sources, sometimes Kiersy in English — lies on the Oise between Noyon and Compiègne. It was a villa regia, a royal estate with a hall, a chapel and the farms to provision a court, and it belonged to the ring of palaces in the Oise and Aisne valleys among which the Frankish rulers moved.
Those palaces were the machinery of Frankish government. A king who had no capital ruled by arriving: assemblies were held where the court happened to be, and charters, capitularies and councils take their names from the estate at which they were issued. Quierzy's prominence in the record reflects how often the Carolingians chose to stop there.
Charles Martel died at Quierzy on 22 October 741. He had never been king — he ruled as mayor of the palace, with the Merovingian throne left vacant for the last four years of his life — and he had beaten the Arab and Berber force that came north from Spain at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Before his death he divided the realm between his sons in the manner of a king: Carloman took Austrasia, Alemannia and Thuringia, Pepin took Neustria, Burgundy and Provence. He was buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis, again as a king would be. The arrangement made at Quierzy is the point at which the family's effective rule became openly hereditary, ten years before Pepin took the crown itself.
In January 754 Pepin the Short, by then king, received Pope Stephen II at Quierzy. The pope had crossed the Alps in winter to ask for protection against the Lombard king Aistulf, who was pressing on the territories of the Roman see — the first time a pope had ever travelled into Francia.
What was agreed at Quierzy, in the promise historians call the Donation of Pepin, was that the Frankish king would recover the exarchate of Ravenna and the other disputed lands and grant them not to the empire in Constantinople but to the papacy. Pepin campaigned in Italy in 755 and 756 and made the grant good. The Papal States, which lasted until 1870, begin with that undertaking; the same visit also carried forward the adoption of the Roman liturgy and its chant in the Frankish church.
In June 877 Charles the Bald held an assembly at Quierzy before leaving on his second expedition to Italy, and issued the capitulary that carries the place-name. It is essentially a set of instructions for governing the kingdom in his absence and for his son Louis the Stammerer: how the realm was to be administered, what was forbidden to Louis the German, an oath not to despoil the queen Richildis of her lands, and a bar on nominating candidates to vacant counties while the king was away.
Its most discussed provision concerns what should happen to the honours and benefices of men who died on the expedition: they were to be kept for the heirs until the king returned and could decide. This was long cited as the moment Carolingian offices and benefices became hereditary in law — the birth certificate of feudalism, as the stele in the village still calls it. Modern scholarship is more careful. The clause is a temporary wartime arrangement, not a general grant, and the drift of counties and benefices into family possession was already well advanced. The capitulary registers a practice rather than creating one.
Charles the Bald died on the way back from Italy in October 877, a few months after issuing the capitulary. The palace itself did not long outlive the dynasty's strength in the region: Viking raiding up the Oise in the following century destroyed the buildings, and the estate lost its royal function.
Hugh Capet later granted land at Quierzy to the bishop of Noyon, who built a fortress there, and the site passed into ordinary seigneurial hands. Nothing of the Carolingian palace stands today and its exact plan is unknown, which is why a village stele is the only marker of a place where a pope was received and the Papal States were promised.