Charlemagne

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlemagne was the first emperor to rule from the west after the fall of the Western Roman Empire roughly three centuries earlier. On Christmas Day in the year 800, inside St. Peter's Basilica, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head and proclaimed him emperor of the Romans. No reigning emperor had held that station in the west since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476. The man being crowned had been King of the Franks since 768 and King of the Lombards since 774. Yet historians still argue over what that crowning meant, whether he wanted it, and whether he even knew it was coming. His biographer Einhard claimed he would never have entered the church had he known the pope's plan. How did a Frankish king united most of Western and Central Europe? Why do multiple modern states still call him a founding figure? And what did he do to the Saxons that one historian called the greatest stain on his reputation? The answers run through a long reign of conquest, reform, and a cultural revival that outlasted him by centuries.

• 2. A Name Across Languages

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  Karlo was what Early Old French speakers called him, while the formal Latin of writing and diplomacy named him Carolus or Karolus. The modern English form, Charlemagne, descends from the French Charles-le-magne, meaning Charles the Great. German and Dutch speakers know him as Karl der Große and Karel de Grote. The Latin epithet magnus, meaning great, may have attached to him during his lifetime, though that is uncertain. The contemporary Royal Frankish Annals routinely called him Carolus magnus rex, Charles the great king. That epithet appears in the works of the Poeta Saxo around the year 900, and by 1000 it had become commonly applied to him. He was named after his grandfather, Charles Martel, and that name and its derivatives are unattested before Charles Martel and Charlemagne used them. The reach of the name went further still. Slavic languages adapted Karolus into their word for king, surviving as korol, krol, and kral, drawn either from Charlemagne's own influence or that of his great-grandson, Charles the Fat.

• 3. The Disputed Cradle

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  Charlemagne's year of birth is uncertain, though most likely 748. The 9th-century biographer Einhard reported him as 72 years old at his death, the Royal Frankish Annals gave his age imprecisely as about 71, and his original epitaph called him a septuagenarian. All three sources may have been shaped by Psalm 90, which reads "The days of our years are threescore years and ten." Some scholars believe Einhard, not knowing the true age, still chose a figure that fit the Roman imperial biographies of Suetonius, which he used as a model. Historian Karl Ferdinand Werner challenged the older tradition of a 742 birth year, pointing to an addition to the Annales Petaviani that recorded a birth in 747. Lorsch Abbey commemorated his date of birth as the 2nd of April from the mid-9th century, a date likely to be genuine. Matthias Becher built on Werner's work and showed that the 2nd of April in the recorded year would actually have fallen in 748, since the annalists began the year from Easter rather than the 1st of January. His place of birth remains unknown. Scholars have proposed the Frankish palaces at Vaires-sur-Marne, Quierzy, and Herstal, but none can be proven.

• 4. Brothers And Rivals

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  Pepin the Short, Charlemagne's father, had deposed the Merovingian Childeric and taken the throne by 751 or 752. When Pope Stephen II travelled to Francia in 754 to seek aid against the Lombards, he anointed Pepin as king, and the young Charlemagne was sent to greet and escort him. Pepin fell ill on campaign in Aquitaine and died on the 24th of September 768. Charlemagne and his brother Carloman I succeeded their father, with separate coronations on the 9th of October, Charlemagne at Noyon and Carloman at Soissons. They held separate palaces and spheres yet ruled a single Frankish kingdom in name. Their relationship frayed when Carloman returned home and left Charlemagne to finish the Aquitaine campaign alone, ending ten years of war with the capture of Duke Hunald. To navigate Roman affairs and Lombard ambition, Charlemagne's mother Bertrada travelled to Lombardy in 770 and brokered a marriage alliance with a daughter of King Desiderius. The rivalry ended abruptly. Carloman died suddenly on the 4th of December 771, leaving Charlemagne sole king of the Franks, and Carloman's widow Gerberga fled with her children to Desiderius's court in Lombardy.

• 5. The Lombard Crown

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  Pope Adrian I, who succeeded Stephen III in 772, sought the return of cities captured by Desiderius and appealed to Charlemagne for help. Charlemagne first offered gold for the return of papal territories and his nephews, and when that overture was rejected, he crossed the Alps to besiege the Lombard capital of Pavia in late 773. He left his uncle Bernard to hold the siege while he captured Verona, where Desiderius's son Adalgis sheltered Carloman's sons. After taking the city, no further record of his nephews survives, and the British historian Janet Nelson compares them to the Princes in the Tower. In April 774 he broke off to celebrate Easter in Rome, where Pope Adrian arranged a formal welcome and the two swore oaths over the relics of St. Peter. Disease then struck the besieged Lombards, who surrendered Pavia by June 774. Charlemagne deposed Desiderius and took the title of King of the Lombards, an act the authors of The Carolingian World call "without parallel." Rosamond McKitterick suggests the elective nature of the Lombard monarchy eased the takeover, and Roger Collins attributes the easy conquest to a Lombard belief that rightful authority belonged to whoever was powerful enough to seize it.

• 6. The Saxon Wars

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  The pagan Irminsul at Eresburg was destroyed by Charlemagne in his first war against the Saxons, who had been raiding the Frankish borderlands. That campaign began over 30 years of nearly continuous warfare against the Saxons. At an assembly in Paderborn in 777, many Saxons came under his rule, but the magnate Widukind fled to Denmark to prepare a new rebellion. In summer 782, Widukind returned to attack the Frankish positions and defeated a Frankish army before fleeing again. The annals record that Charlemagne then had 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded in the massacre of Verden, an episode Alessandro Barbero calls "perhaps the greatest stain on his reputation." Around that time he issued the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a harsh set of laws that imposed the death penalty for pagan practices and aimed at suppressing Saxon identity. The campaigns of the 790s grew even more destructive, with annal writers noting Charlemagne "burning," "ravaging," and "laying waste" to Saxon lands. He forcibly removed large numbers of Saxons to Francia and installed Frankish elites in their place. In 785 he met Widukind and persuaded him to end his resistance; Widukind agreed to be baptised with Charlemagne as his godfather. The final campaign came in 804, when Charlemagne seized Saxon territory east of the Elbe and gave the land to his Obotrite allies.

• 7. An Empire Of Reform

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  The Capitulare missorum generale of 802 required all free men to take an oath of loyalty to Charlemagne. It reformed the missi dominici, officials now assigned in pairs of a cleric and a lay aristocrat to administer justice and oversee governance in defined territories. He also ordered the revision of the Lombard and Frankish legal codes. The 806 charter Divisio Regnorum set the terms of his succession, granting the eldest son Charles the largest share, including Francia and Saxony, while confirming Pepin and Louis in their kingdoms. Diplomacy reached far beyond his borders. He requested an elephant from the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, and Harun provided one named Abul-Abbas, which arrived at Aachen in 802. Harun also gave Charlemagne nominal rule of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Recognition from the east came hard. Several delegations passed between Charlemagne and Empress Irene in 802 and 803, and the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes records that he offered marriage to Irene before she was deposed. Peace finally came when Nikephoros's successor Michael I sent envoys to Aachen in 811 to recognise Charlemagne as emperor, after which he issued the first Frankish coins bearing his imperial title.

• 8. The Carolingian Revival

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  Scriptoria in monasteries and cathedrals produced an estimated 90,000 manuscripts during the 9th century, copying both new and old works. This was the Carolingian Renaissance, a cultural revival fed by contacts across the Mediterranean, an influx of foreign scholars, and the length and relative stability of his reign. Charlemagne promoted learning as a matter of policy and patronage, aiming to create a more effective clergy, and set out his goals in the Admonitio generalis and the Epistola de litteris colendis. Intellectual life at court drew Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Visigothic, and Italian scholars, including Dungal of Bobbio, Alcuin of York, Theodulf of Orleans, and Peter of Pisa, with Franks such as Einhard contributing as well. The Carolingian minuscule script was developed and popularised in medieval copying, going on to influence Renaissance and modern typefaces. The legacy stretched into politics centuries later. Charlemagne died in 814 and was buried at the Palatine Chapel in Aachen, now part of Aachen Cathedral, and the Ottonians held their German coronations there through the Middle Ages. Since 1949 Aachen has awarded the Karlspreis in his honour, given annually to those who promote European unity, with recipients including Alcide De Gasperi and Winston Churchill.