Carolingian Empire
The Carolingian Empire began with a scene that had not occurred for centuries: on Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of King Charlemagne, naming him Roman Emperor. The ceremony in Rome was not merely symbolic. It defied the still-living claims of the Byzantine Empire and announced to the known world that a new political force had taken shape in the West. Scholars at the time believed that year 800 corresponded to the 6000th year of human history. Some, including the scholar Alcuin, reckoned that the coronation marked the beginning of the seventh and final age of the world.
The empire Charlemagne ruled stretched across most of Western and Central Europe, housing a population estimated somewhere between 10 and 20 million people. It encompassed Franks, Lombards, Saxons, Basques, Slavs, and dozens of other ethnic groups. Its heartland was Francia, the land between the Loire and the Rhine rivers. Yet within less than a century of its founding, the empire fractured beyond repair.
How did a realm of such scale come together so quickly? What kind of government could hold it together at all? And why, after an extraordinary period of ambition and expansion, did it collapse into competing kingdoms by 888? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.
Charles Martel never called himself king, though he ruled virtually all of continental Western Europe north of the Pyrenees. His most celebrated moment came at the Battle of Tours in 732, where he halted a Muslim army advancing from Iberia. The Iberian Saracens had combined Berber light cavalry with heavy Arab cavalry into a formidable force that had almost never been defeated. Christian European forces, by contrast, lacked the stirrup. Martel's victory earned him the surname that stuck to him in history: "the Hammer." The historian Edward Gibbon called him "the paramount prince of his age."
Martel's son Pepin III accepted the pope's nomination as king around 741, converting the family's de facto rule into a formal title. Charlemagne's rule followed at Pepin's death in 768. At first, Charlemagne co-ruled with his brother Carloman I; when Carloman died, Charlemagne took control of the whole kingdom alone.
The dynasty that Martel had established would define European politics for generations. Their name, the Carolingians, became attached to the empire, its institutions, and its memory. Pepin III's willingness to submit to papal nomination was a gesture that his descendants would both benefit from and be bound by, a relationship with Rome that shaped nearly every political crisis the empire would face.
From the accession of Charles Martel through the conclusion of the Saxon wars, Frankish forces went on campaign almost every year without exception. Charlemagne typically gathered his forces around Easter and launched offensives that ran through the summer, timing the campaigns to ensure adequate food supplies for the army.
Charlemagne's regulations for his army were precise. Wealthy cavalrymen were required to bring their own armour. Poorer soldiers had to bring spears and shields. The men driving supply carts were required to carry bows and arrows. Supply carts themselves had to carry three months of food and six months of weapons and clothing, along with tools.
The empire's military success rested less on cavalry than was long assumed. The stirrup was not known to the Franks until the late 8th century, so mounted soldiers used swords and lances for striking rather than charging. Historians now attribute Carolingian military effectiveness primarily to siege technologies and exceptional logistics. Horses mattered not as shock weapons but as transport, allowing large forces to move quickly across great distances. The importance of this is underlined by an entry in the Royal Frankish Annals: during Charlemagne's 791 campaign, a disease swept through the horses so severely that "barely a tenth out of so many thousands are said to have survived." That loss stopped the Carolingian advance into Pannonia against the Avars.
His conquests were extensive. Charlemagne defeated the Lombard Kingdom in 774 and declared himself King of the Lombards. He forced Tassilo III, Duke of Bavaria, to renounce his title in 794. He waged war against Saxon territories from 772 to 804, a period that included the Massacre of Verden in 782 and the codification of the Lex Saxonum in 802. His son Pepin ran campaigns against the Avar confederation, which finally ended in 803. A campaign into Spain in 778 was the exception: it ended in defeat at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, regarded as Charlemagne's greatest military failure.
Aachen, the city Charlemagne chose as his primary residence, was not merely a palace but a political statement. Construction of the Palace of Aachen began in the 780s, with original plans possibly dating as far back as 768. The palace chapel, built in 796, later became Aachen Cathedral. Historian Stuart Airlie suggests there were over 150 palaces scattered across the Carolingian world, all serving as platforms for royal power, assemblies, and the distribution of patronage.
The palace at Ingelheim illustrates what these buildings were meant to communicate. Its chapel was reportedly lined with images from the Bible, and its hall carried a cycle of paintings celebrating great rulers, including rulers of antiquity alongside Carolingian figures such as Charles Martel and Pippin III. Contemporary chronicler Einhard held that building such structures was evidence of Charlemagne's kinship with the emperors of ancient Rome.
No permanent capital existed. The court was itinerant until around 802, travelling between palaces at Frankfurt, Ingelheim, and Nijmegen to maintain presence across the kingdom. Charlemagne was so committed to judgment that Einhard recorded he would rule on legal cases even while dressing.
The empire was divided into between 110 and 600 counties, each administered by a count. Counts were responsible for justice, levying soldiers, maintaining roads, and collecting dues. A second institution, the Missi Dominici, sent paired inspectors across the empire four times a year, each journey lasting a month. One inspector was a cleric, one secular, the pairing intended to reduce the risk of bribery. A reform in 802 made this formerly ad hoc office permanent. The legal system itself rested on the principle of plurality: different ethnic groups were entitled to be tried under the law of their own nation, a inheritance from the Merovingian dynasty.
Charlemagne also standardised loyalty through oaths. By 802, all men over the age of 12 were required to swear fidelity directly to him.
Louis the Pious was Charlemagne's third son, originally crowned King of Aquitaine at the age of three. With the deaths of his two older brothers, he inherited the entire empire on Charlemagne's death in the winter of 814. What he inherited was not only an empire but a dynasty already fraying at the seams.
Louis moved quickly to consolidate. He arrived at Aachen upon hearing of his father's death and exiled many of Charlemagne's trusted advisors, including Wala, who was a potential rival by blood: Wala and his siblings were descendants of the youngest son of Charles Martel. Monastic exile was Louis's preferred tool for neutralising rivals without killing them.
The difficulties began with succession. In 817, Louis designated his sons from his first marriage: Lothar as co-emperor and king of Italy, Pepin as king of Aquitaine, and Louis the German as king of Bavaria. When his fourth son Charles the Bald was born from his second marriage, Louis tried to carve out a share for him too. His older sons resisted. The appointment of Bernard of Septimania as chamberlain in the late 820s deepened the rift; Lothar was stripped of his co-emperorship in 829 and sent back to Italy. Pepin, frustrated by his father's interference in Aquitaine and implicated in a failed 827 campaign, joined the revolt. Civil war broke out during Lent in 830.
Louis was dethroned by his sons and held through the summer as an emperor in name only. He recovered, was restored to the throne at the church of St. Stephen in Metz by 835, and then watched the conflict reignite. When Pepin died in 838, Louis crowned Charles king of Aquitaine; the nobility instead elected Pepin's son Pepin II, a dispute not fully settled until Pepin II's death in 860.
After Louis died in 840, Lothar claimed the whole empire. Charles the Bald and Louis the German went to war against him. The Battle of Fontenay in 841 went against Lothar, and the following year the Oaths of Strasbourg saw Charles and Louis formally declare Lothar unfit for the throne. Scholars consider those oaths a milestone in European history, marking the origin of what would become France and Germany.
The Treaty of Verdun in 843 settled, at least on paper, the division that war had already produced. Lothar kept the imperial title and the Central Frankish Realm, the corridor between the Rhine and Rhone rivers. Louis the German received the Eastern Frankish Realm east of the Rhine, the precursor to modern Germany. Charles the Bald received the Western Frankish Realm to the west of the Rhone.
What followed was a cascade of further divisions. By the Treaty of Prüm in 855, Lothar split his own territory among his three sons. The resulting fragments kept colliding: Louis II, dissatisfied with receiving no new territory on his father's death, allied with his uncle Louis the German in 858. Lothar II tried to divorce his wife Teutberga in 862, offering land to Louis II in exchange for support, triggering repeated conflicts with his uncles and the pope. Lothar II died in 869 without legitimate heirs after the pope blocked the divorce; his kingdom was divided by the Treaty of Meerssen between Charles the Bald and Louis the German in 870.
In 884, Charles the Fat managed to reunite all Carolingian kingdoms for the last time, but the reunion was brief. He suffered from what contemporaries believed to be epilepsy, and he bought off Viking raiders besieging Paris in 886 rather than fighting them. The court read this as cowardice. His nephew Arnulf of Carinthia raised a rebellion the following year; Charles fled to Neidingen and died there in 888.
What remained was a landscape of regional powers. Arnulf held Carinthia, Bavaria, Lorraine, and what would become Germany. Count Odo of Paris was elected king of Western Francia. Count Berengar of Friuli took Italy. Upper Burgundy went to Rudolph I, Lower Burgundy to Louis the Blind. The legitimate Carolingian line was eventually restored in the western kingdom in 898 and held on there until 987, with a break from 922 to 936. In the east, the illegitimate line lasted until 911.
The Carolingian Empire survived less than a century in its unified form, yet the structures it built and the image it projected lasted far longer. Historians have long debated whether to call the Carolingians the founders of feudalism. Marc Bloch dismissed the search for feudalism's origins as "the idol of origins," but the Carolingian template clearly shaped what came after in central medieval political culture.
The Ottonian dynasty, which eventually inherited the Holy Roman Emperor title, went out of its way to link itself to the Carolingians even though the Ottonians descended from Charlemagne's old enemies in Saxony. Four of the five Ottonian emperors had themselves crowned in Charlemagne's palace at Aachen specifically to signal continuity with the Carolingian line. In later medieval art, Charlemagne was depicted as an idealized knight and model of chivalry, his actual campaigns and executions smoothed away by centuries of reverential imagery.
The Carolingian system of capitularies, the law codes that Charlemagne issued through assemblies and disseminated via the Missi Dominici, demonstrated that a large multi-ethnic empire could be governed through written rules rather than purely personal authority. The legal scholar Sören Kaschke regards capitularies as among the most important surviving sources for how the Frankish Empire actually functioned. The palace chapel at Aachen, dedicated in 796, became Aachen Cathedral and still stands. Charles the Bald dedicated his own palace chapel at Compiègne to the Virgin Mary in 877, explicitly echoing the Aachen chapel's dedication to the Mother of God. That act of imitation, performed even as the empire was breaking apart, captures something essential about the Carolingian legacy: successors reached back toward it even when they could not hold it together.
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Common questions
When was the Carolingian Empire founded and how long did it last?
The Carolingian Empire began in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor, and it effectively ended in 887-888 when Charles the Fat was deposed and died. The empire lasted roughly 87 years in its unified form, though Carolingian rulers continued to hold power in the eastern and western kingdoms for decades afterward.
Why did Pope Leo III crown Charlemagne as emperor in 800?
Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne in exchange for political protection, deliberately disregarding the universalist claims of the weakened Byzantine Empire. The coronation took place on Christmas Day 800 in Rome.
How large was the population of the Carolingian Empire?
The population of the Carolingian Empire is estimated at roughly 10 to 20 million people, based on calculations of empire size and theoretical population densities. Historian Timothy Newfield has challenged the idea of steady demographic expansion during this period, arguing that scholars underestimate the frequency of famines in Carolingian Europe.
What was the Treaty of Verdun and why does it matter?
The Treaty of Verdun, signed in 843, formally divided the Carolingian Empire among the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious. Lothar received the Central Frankish Realm and the imperial title, Louis the German received the Eastern Frankish Realm east of the Rhine (the precursor to modern Germany), and Charles the Bald received the Western Frankish Realm. The treaty is considered a foundational moment in the creation of what became France and Germany.
What were the Missi Dominici in the Carolingian Empire?
The Missi Dominici were paired imperial inspectors sent out to enforce Carolingian authority throughout the empire. One inspector was a cleric and one was secular. They made four journeys a year, each lasting a month, and were responsible for communicating royal laws, judging cases, and occasionally raising armies. A reform in 802 made the office permanent rather than ad hoc.
Why did the Carolingian Empire collapse?
The Carolingian Empire fractured through a combination of civil wars over succession, the splintering of territories among heirs, Viking raids from the north and west, and the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887 after he bought off Viking raiders from Paris rather than fighting them. The death of Charles the Fat in 888 left no strong claimant, and the nobility elected regional kings from outside the dynasty or from its illegitimate line.
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