The Charte d'Alaon is a spurious and fraudulent charter purporting to provide a genealogy of the house of

Odo the Great Odo the Great (also called ''Eudes'' or ''Eudo'') (died 735–740), was the Duke of Aquitaine by 700. His territory included Vasconia in the south-west of Gaul and the Duchy of Aquitaine (at that point located north-east of the river Garonne), ...

Duke of Aquitaine The duke of Aquitaine (, , ) was the ruler of the medieval region of Aquitaine (not to be confused with modern-day Aquitaine) under the supremacy of Frankish, English, and later French kings. As successor states of the Visigothic Kingdom ( ...

(715 – 735). The 19th-century French historian Joseph-François Rabanis proved it to be a hoax fabricated in the 17th century. His research thus rendered a good deal of "known" Gascon and

Navarre Navarre ( ; ; ), officially the Chartered Community of Navarre, is a landlocked foral autonomous community and province in northern Spain, bordering the Basque Autonomous Community, La Rioja, and Aragon in Spain and New Aquitaine in France. ...

se genealogy meaningless. Among the many otherwise unattested claims of the ''Charte'' are the descent of the dukes of Aquitaine and Gascony from the

Merovingian The Merovingian dynasty () was the ruling family of the Franks from around the middle of the 5th century until Pepin the Short in 751. They first appear as "Kings of the Franks" in the Roman army of northern Gaul. By 509 they had united all the ...

king Charibert II. The younger sons, if there were younger sons, of Charibert are in fact unknown; as is the parentage of Odo the Great. Likewise, the parentage of Lupus II of Gascony is unknown and no relationship between him and the house of Odo or the Merovingians can be proven. The Jiménez dynasty that ruled Navarre from the 10th through 13th centuries was also purported to descend from one of the sons of Lupus. Though a relation between Lupus and Seguin I can be posited reasonably, no relationship between either and the Basques of Spain can be shown. In fact, the Basque ethnicity of neither the Aquitainian or Gascon dukes can be demonstrated conclusively. In response to such Spanish genealogies, Higounet attacked them as "phantasmagorical." Historian Jules Villain even proposed a connection between the comital dynasties of

Comminges The Comminges (; Occitan language, Occitan/Gascon language, Gascon: ''Comenge'') is an ancient region of southern France in the foothills of the Pyrenees, corresponding approximately to the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens in the departments of Fran ...

and

Foix Foix ( , ; ; ) is a commune, the former capital of the County of Foix. It is the capital of the department of Ariège as it is the seat of the prefecture of that department. Foix is located in the Occitanie region of southwestern France ...

and Lupus II. His whole thesis, however, is incoherent. In the end analysis, neither the parents, wives, nor children of Lupus II are known. Though a few reasonable surmises can be made.See Collins.

Notes

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Sources

Charte d'Alaon at Foixstory.
*Higounet, Charles. ''Bordeaux pendant le haut moyen age''. Bordeaux, 1963. *Collins, Roger. ''The Basques''. Blackwell Publishing: London, 1990. *Rabanis, Joseph-François. ''Les Merovingiens de Aquitanie, essay historique et critique de la Charte D'Alaon''. Paris, 1856. *Monlezun, Jean Justin
''Histoire de la Gascogne''.
1864. ''Relies on ''Charte''. '' *Villain, Jean. ''La France Moderne, dictionnaire généalogique, historique et biographique''. 1908. ''Relies on ''Charte''. '' Historiography of France