Charlemagne: King of the Franks and Lombards and the First Emperor of the Medieval West

Among the rulers of the European Middle Ages no figure has cast a longer shadow than the Frankish king whom his own age called Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, and whom the centuries since have known by the French contraction of that name, Charlemagne. Born around the middle of the eighth century into the family that had governed the Frankish kingdom in all but name for three generations, he succeeded to the throne in the year 768 and ruled for forty-six years until his death in 814. In the course of that long reign he transformed a powerful but provincial Germanic kingdom into the dominant political power of western and central Europe, fused the greater part of Latin Christendom into a single dominion that stretched from the Atlantic coast to the middle Danube and from the North Sea to the heart of Italy, and on Christmas Day of the year 800, in the basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, received from the hands of the pope an imperial crown that revived in the West an imperial dignity which had lain vacant for more than three hundred years. The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor is one of the genuine turning points of European history, an event that announced the emergence of a new political order in the Latin West, distinct at once from the Byzantine empire that still called itself Roman and from the Islamic caliphate that now ruled the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

The achievement that earned Charlemagne his epithet was not the work of conquest alone, though conquest was its foundation. In more than fifty campaigns, many of which he led in person, he subdued the Lombard kingdom of Italy, broke the long pagan resistance of the Saxons in a war that lasted more than thirty years, annexed the duchy of Bavaria, destroyed the nomadic empire of the Avars on the Hungarian plain, and pushed the frontiers of his realm against the Slavs of the east, the Danes of the north, the Bretons of the Atlantic peninsula, and the Muslims of Spain. But he was also a ruler who understood that an empire must be governed as well as won, and the institutions he devised to administer his sprawling dominion, the network of counts and royal envoys, the stream of written decrees, the great assemblies of the realm, the reform of coinage and of weights and measures, gave the early medieval West a coherence it had not known since the fall of Rome. Above all he was the patron of a deliberate and far-reaching revival of learning, the movement that historians have named the Carolingian Renaissance, which gathered the finest scholars of the age to his court, reformed the script in which Latin was written, multiplied the copying of books, restored the study of grammar and the liberal arts, and preserved for the future much of the literary inheritance of classical antiquity that would otherwise have perished.

The man behind these achievements can be glimpsed with unusual clarity, for Charlemagne was the subject of one of the finest works of biography to survive from the early Middle Ages, the Life of Charles composed within a generation of his death by Einhard, a Frankish scholar who had served at his court and known him well. Einhard consciously modeled his work on the Lives of the Caesars written by the Roman biographer Suetonius, and from his pages there emerges a portrait of remarkable vividness: a tall and powerfully built man, fond of hunting and of swimming in the hot springs of his favorite residence, moderate in food and drink, devoted to his large and turbulent family, curious about the world, restless in the pursuit of knowledge, and capable of both calculated mercy and terrible severity. To Einhard's biography may be added the year-by-year narrative of the Royal Frankish Annals, the hundreds of surviving capitularies or royal decrees, the letters of the scholars who surrounded him, above all the Englishman Alcuin of York, and the physical evidence of the buildings, manuscripts, and coins of his reign. Few rulers of the early Middle Ages are so well documented, and yet the documentation, abundant as it is, leaves much in shadow, and the historian must always distinguish the Charlemagne of the records from the towering legendary figure that later ages constructed in his name.

For Charlemagne became, almost immediately after his death and increasingly across the following centuries, a figure of legend as much as of history. The poets of medieval France made him the central hero of a great cycle of epic songs, the chansons de geste, of which the oldest and greatest, the Song of Roland, transformed a minor military reverse in the Pyrenees into an immortal tale of heroism and betrayal, and surrounded the emperor with a company of legendary champions, the Twelve Peers or paladins. In 1165 he was formally canonized as a saint, at the instigation of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and although the Roman Church never fully ratified that canonization, his cult was tolerated and he was venerated for centuries, particularly at Aachen, as the blessed Charlemagne. The Holy Roman Empire that endured in central Europe until 1806 traced its origin and its legitimacy to his imperial coronation, and the throne on which more than thirty German kings were crowned at Aachen was believed to be his own. In the modern era he has been claimed as a founding father by both France and Germany, the two nations that emerged from the partition of his empire, and since 1950 the city of Aachen has awarded an annual Charlemagne Prize to those who have served the cause of European unity, honoring the emperor as a symbol of the continent's common heritage. He has been called, in a phrase coined by a poet of his own court, the Father of Europe.

The biography that follows traces the whole arc of that extraordinary life and afterlife: the rise of the Carolingian family from the office of mayor of the palace to the Frankish throne; the obscure early years of Charlemagne himself and the uneasy partition of the kingdom with his brother; the conquest of the Lombards and the long, harsh subjugation of the Saxons; the campaigns in Spain, Bavaria, and against the Avars; the building of an apparatus of government adequate to an empire; the alliance with the papacy and the dramatic coronation of 800; the cultural revival that gathered around his court at Aachen; the diplomacy that linked him to Byzantium and to the caliphate of Baghdad; his complicated domestic life and his many children; the careful and ultimately frustrated planning for the succession; his death and burial; the swift division of his empire among his grandsons; and the long unfolding of his legend and his legacy through the centuries that followed. It is the story of the man who, more than any other single individual, gave shape to the civilization of medieval Europe.

The Frankish World and the Rise of the Carolingians

The kingdom that Charlemagne inherited was the creation of the Franks, a confederation of Germanic peoples who had settled along the lower Rhine in the declining centuries of the Roman Empire and who, as Roman power in the West dissolved during the fifth century, expanded southward and westward into the rich provinces of Gaul. The decisive figure in the making of the Frankish kingdom was Clovis, who united the Frankish peoples under his rule, conquered most of Gaul in a series of campaigns at the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, and, in an event of enduring importance, accepted baptism into the Catholic Christianity of his Gallo-Roman subjects rather than the Arian form of the faith that most other Germanic conquerors had adopted. That choice aligned the Frankish monarchy with the Catholic episcopate and the Latin Church from the very beginning, and it gave the kingdom a religious unity that the other successor states of the Roman West conspicuously lacked. Clovis belonged to the family known as the Merovingians, after a legendary ancestor named Merovech, and his descendants ruled the Franks for two and a half centuries.

By the time of Charlemagne's grandfather, however, the Merovingian dynasty had sunk into a long and visible decline. The later Merovingian kings, raised to the throne as children and dying young, exercised little real authority; contemporaries and later writers dismissed them as the rois fainéants, the do-nothing kings, figures who retained the crown and the long ceremonial hair that was the mark of their royal blood but who were carried to the annual assembly in an ox-drawn cart and allowed to do little more than give formal assent to decisions taken by others. Real power had passed to the official known as the mayor of the palace, originally the chief steward of the royal household, who came to direct the government, command the armies, and dispose of the kingdom's lands and offices. From the late seventh century the office of mayor of the palace was effectively monopolized by a single ambitious family, the ancestors of Charlemagne, who derived their later name, the Carolingians, from the recurring family name of Charles.

The man who raised this family to the first rank was Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles, called Martel, the Hammer. As mayor of the palace he reunited the Frankish realm by force after a period of division, campaigned ceaselessly against the Frisians, the Saxons, the Bavarians, and the Aquitanians, and in the year 732 won the victory for which he is chiefly remembered, the defeat near Poitiers of a Muslim army that had advanced northward out of Spain. The Battle of Tours, as it is also called, halted the expansion of Islamic power into the heart of Gaul and confirmed Charles Martel as the foremost warrior of the Christian West. So complete was his dominance that in his last years he governed the Franks without troubling to install a Merovingian king at all, leaving the throne simply vacant, and on his death in 741 he divided his authority, as if it were a hereditary inheritance, between his two sons, Carloman and Pepin.

The two brothers governed together for a time, and then, in 747, Carloman renounced the world, laid down his office, and withdrew to become a monk, eventually settling at the great abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy. Pepin, known to history as Pepin the Short, was left as sole master of the Frankish kingdom, and he resolved to convert the substance of royal power, which his family had long held, into the title and dignity of kingship itself. The step required justification, for the Merovingian line, feeble as it had become, was still the legitimate dynasty hallowed by centuries of tradition. Pepin found that justification in the authority of the pope. He sent envoys to Rome to put a carefully framed question to Pope Zacharias: who ought to be king, the man who held the title or the man who exercised the power? The pope returned the answer that Pepin desired, and in the year 751, at Soissons, the last Merovingian king, Childeric the Third, was deposed, his royal hair was shorn, and he was confined to a monastery, while Pepin was raised on the shield in the Frankish manner and anointed king with holy oil, a ceremony that borrowed from the Old Testament the idea of a monarch consecrated by God.

The alliance between the new Carolingian monarchy and the papacy was sealed and deepened three years later. In 754 Pope Stephen the Second, hard pressed by the aggression of the Lombard kingdom that dominated northern Italy and finding no help from the distant Byzantine emperor who was the pope's nominal sovereign, made the unprecedented journey across the Alps to seek the protection of the Frankish king. At the abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris the pope personally anointed Pepin a second time, and with him anointed and blessed his two young sons, Charlemagne and Carloman, conferring on all three the Roman title of patrician and solemnly forbidding the Franks ever to choose a king from any family but Pepin's. In return Pepin twice led his army into Italy, defeated the Lombards, and compelled them to surrender a band of territory in central Italy which he formally bestowed upon the papacy. This grant, the Donation of Pepin, created the temporal dominion of the popes, the nucleus of the Papal States that would survive into the nineteenth century, and it bound the Frankish monarchy and the see of Rome together in a partnership that would shape the whole of Charlemagne's reign. When Pepin died in 768, he left his sons not merely the most powerful kingdom in the Latin West but a sacred royal dignity and a special relationship with the papacy that were the true foundations of all that Charlemagne would build.

Birth, Family, and the Years of Formation

The exact date of Charlemagne's birth cannot be established with certainty, a circumstance that is itself revealing of the age into which he was born, for the precise recording of such things was not yet a habit even in the households of the great. The Frankish sources agree that he was born on the second day of April, but they do not agree, and in most cases do not state, the year. The traditional date long accepted was 742, but a substantial body of modern scholarship, weighing the indirect evidence, has come to favor a later year, most probably 748, which would make him a small child at the time of the papal anointing of 754 and would place his birth shortly before, rather than several years before, his father's seizure of the crown. The place of his birth is likewise unknown; the heartland of his family lay in the region between the Meuse and the Rhine, in what is now eastern Belgium and the western Rhineland, and it was somewhere in that Austrasian homeland of the Carolingians that the future emperor first saw the light.

His father was Pepin the Short, soon to be king of the Franks; his mother was Bertrada of Laon, a noblewoman of distinguished Frankish family, remembered in later legend as Bertha of the Big Foot and known to have been a woman of strong character who played an active and visible part in the politics of her sons' early reigns. Charlemagne had one brother who survived to maturity, Carloman, younger than himself by two or three years, and a sister, Gisela, who would in time enter the religious life and become abbess of the convent of Chelles, remaining throughout her life a correspondent and confidante of her imperial brother. The family into which Charlemagne was born was thus, by the time of his earliest memories, a royal family, raised above the Frankish aristocracy from which it had sprung and conscious of a destiny that set it apart.

Of Charlemagne's childhood and education almost nothing is directly recorded. Einhard, his biographer, who is full and precise about the emperor's mature life, passes over his early years in near silence, remarking that he thought it foolish to write of matters about which no one now living could give reliable information and no written record survived. What can be said is shaped by inference from the customs of the Frankish ruling class and from the kind of man Charlemagne became. He was raised, certainly, as a warrior aristocrat, trained from boyhood in horsemanship, in the use of weapons, and in the hunt, which was at once the chief recreation and the principal military exercise of the Frankish nobility, a passion that Charlemagne would retain to the very end of his long life. He was raised, too, as a Christian, in a household that took its religion seriously and had bound its fortunes intimately to the Church.

It is unlikely that he received any formal schooling in letters as a boy, and the evidence suggests that he came late and with difficulty to the skills of reading and writing. Einhard records the famous and somewhat poignant detail that the emperor, in his mature years, kept writing tablets and notebooks beneath the pillows of his bed so that he might practice forming letters in his spare moments, but that because he had begun the effort too late in life the results were poor. Yet if Charlemagne was no scribe, he was very far from unlettered in any deeper sense. He spoke Latin, the language of the Church and of government, as fluently as his native Frankish tongue, a Germanic dialect; he understood spoken Greek better than he could speak it; and he developed, whether in youth or maturity, a genuine and lifelong appetite for learning, for the discussion of grammar, astronomy, and theology, and for the company of educated men. The education that mattered most in his formation, however, was the practical apprenticeship in rule that he received at his father's side. As a youth he accompanied Pepin on campaign and on the ceremonial progresses of the court, was present at the great assemblies of the kingdom, witnessed the conduct of war and diplomacy, and absorbed the arts of leadership in the only school the age provided for them, the school of direct experience. By the time his father died, Charlemagne, a young man of about twenty, had been thoroughly prepared for the exercise of power.

The Division of the Realm and the Death of Carloman

Pepin the Short died on the twenty-fourth of September 768, worn out by the strain of a long campaign in Aquitaine, and in accordance with the Frankish custom that treated a kingdom as a patrimony to be shared among a ruler's sons, his realm was divided between Charlemagne and his brother Carloman. The two young kings were raised to their thrones on the same day, the ninth of October 768, Charlemagne being consecrated at Noyon and Carloman at Soissons. The partition that the brothers inherited was an awkward and potentially dangerous one. Rather than dividing the kingdom into two compact and coherent blocks, it gave each brother a share that interlocked uncomfortably with the other's, and it assigned to them territories whose loyalties and interests did not align. Charlemagne received an outer crescent of lands curving around his brother's share, while Carloman held a more central and in some respects more secure inheritance. The arrangement seemed almost designed to generate friction, and friction was not long in coming.

The first crisis of the joint reign arose in Aquitaine, the great region of southwestern Gaul that Pepin had spent the last and most exhausting years of his life subduing. In 769, scarcely a year after the old king's death, a Aquitanian noble named Hunald raised the standard of revolt, and the suppression of the rising tested at once both the capacity of the new kings and the soundness of their partnership. The territory in question lay largely within Charlemagne's portion, and it was Charlemagne who marched to deal with the rebellion. He summoned his brother to join him with an army, as the obligations of their joint kingship required, but Carloman, whether from jealousy, from the advice of hostile counselors, or from a simple unwillingness to spend his strength in his brother's interest, came to the meeting and then withdrew, leaving Charlemagne to finish the campaign alone. Charlemagne did so with energy and success, driving the rebellion to collapse and compelling the duke of Gascony to surrender the fugitive Hunald. But the episode left a lasting mark, exposing the brothers' rivalry and demonstrating that the divided kingdom could not act as one.

In the tense interval that followed, the brothers' mother, the dowager queen Bertrada, emerged as the chief architect of Frankish policy, and she pursued a design intended to surround Charlemagne's untrustworthy brother with a ring of alliances and so to keep the peace. The centerpiece of her diplomacy was a marriage. She journeyed to Italy and arranged a match between Charlemagne and a daughter of Desiderius, the king of the Lombards, the very power against which Pepin had twice marched in defense of the papacy. The marriage, concluded around 770, alarmed the pope, who saw the Franks, his protectors, drawing close to his most dangerous enemy, and it set Charlemagne at odds with the papal alliance that was his father's most important legacy. Charlemagne also, at about this time, set aside or kept in an irregular union a Frankish woman named Himiltrude, who had borne him a son, the boy later known as Pepin the Hunchback. The Lombard marriage, however, proved short-lived. Within a year Charlemagne repudiated his Lombard wife and sent her back to her father, an act that turned the king of the Lombards into a bitter enemy and that would have momentous consequences.

The whole uneasy structure of the divided kingdom was abruptly resolved by an accident of mortality. On the fourth of December 771, Carloman died suddenly, while still a young man, of a disease the sources do not specify. His death removed at a stroke the rivalry that had hampered Frankish policy for three years, and Charlemagne acted with the decisiveness that would characterize his whole career. Carloman had left two infant sons, and by the logic of Frankish inheritance their father's portion of the kingdom should have passed to them, under the guardianship of their mother and her advisers. Charlemagne instead moved at once to take the whole of his brother's realm for himself. He secured the support of the leading men of Carloman's territories, many of whom evidently preferred a strong adult king to a long and uncertain regency for children, and he simply assumed direct rule over the entire Frankish kingdom. Carloman's widow, a woman named Gerberga, finding her sons disinherited and herself without protection, fled with her children and a few loyal followers across the Alps to the court of the Lombard king Desiderius, the very man whose daughter Charlemagne had so recently cast aside. There the dispossessed heirs of Carloman became pawns in the hands of an enemy, and their presence at the Lombard court gave Desiderius a weapon, and Charlemagne a reason for war.

The Conquest of the Lombard Kingdom

The kingdom of the Lombards had dominated the greater part of Italy for two hundred years. A Germanic people who had entered the peninsula in the late sixth century, the Lombards had carved out a powerful realm in the north, centered on the royal city of Pavia, together with two great and semi-independent duchies further south, at Spoleto and Benevento. For generations the Lombard kings had pressed against the territories still held in Italy by the Byzantine empire and against the central Italian lands that the popes regarded as their own, and it was precisely the Lombard threat that had driven the papacy into the arms of the Franks in the time of Pepin. By the early 770s the Lombard king Desiderius, harboring the disinherited sons of Carloman and nursing his grievance over the repudiation of his daughter, had become openly hostile to Charlemagne, and he pressed the new pope, Hadrian the First, to perform the anointing of Carloman's sons as kings of the Franks, a step that would have given the boys a powerful claim against their uncle. Pope Hadrian refused, and when Desiderius answered the refusal by seizing papal towns and threatening Rome itself, the pope appealed urgently to Charlemagne for the protection that the Franks had pledged.

Charlemagne, having first attempted a negotiated settlement and offered Desiderius a substantial sum of money to surrender the disputed territories, found his overtures rejected and resolved on war. In the autumn of 773 he led the Frankish host across the western Alps in two columns, forced the passes against Lombard resistance, and descended into the plain of northern Italy. Desiderius fell back upon his fortified capital, and Charlemagne laid siege to Pavia. The siege was a long one, for Pavia was strong and well provisioned, and it stretched through the winter and the spring. While his army maintained the blockade, Charlemagne did something no Frankish king had ever done: in the spring of 774 he went to Rome itself to keep the feast of Easter. His reception in the city was magnificent. The pope and the people of Rome came out to greet him with the honors traditionally reserved for an exarch or a patrician of the empire, and Charlemagne, in a gesture of profound symbolic weight, ascended to Saint Peter's and there, at the tomb of the apostle, solemnly confirmed and renewed the donation his father had made, the grant of central Italian territory to the papacy. The visit bound the Frankish king to Rome and to Saint Peter with a new intimacy, and it announced that the protector of the Roman Church was now a king with the power to make his protection effective.

Pavia could not hold out forever. In June 774, after a siege of some nine months, the city surrendered. Desiderius and his family were taken into Frankish custody, and the last king of the Lombards was sent into honorable confinement in a Frankish monastery, where he ended his days. Charlemagne did not, as a lesser conqueror might have done, simply annex the Lombard kingdom as a conquered province or hand it over to a Frankish governor. Instead he had himself recognized as king of the Lombards in his own right, assuming the Lombard iron crown and taking the formal title King of the Franks and of the Lombards. He thereby became the legitimate successor of Desiderius, ruling the Lombards as their own lawful king, preserving their laws and to a considerable extent their administrative structures, and confirming the Lombard nobles and bishops in their positions so long as they accepted his sovereignty. The two crowns were united in his person, but the Lombard kingdom retained a distinct identity within his wider dominion, and in later years Charlemagne would install his own young son Pepin as sub-king in Italy to govern it in his name.

The conquest of the Lombard kingdom was a decisive event, and not for Italy alone. It removed at a stroke the chief enemy of the papacy and made Charlemagne the unchallengeable protector and effective overlord of central Italy and of Rome. It nearly doubled the territorial extent of his power and gave him a direct interest and a direct presence in the affairs of the peninsula that he would never relinquish. It brought the Franks into contact, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, with the Byzantine territories in the south of Italy and with the still semi-independent Lombard duchy of Benevento, which Charlemagne would press hard but never fully subdue. And it demonstrated, early in the reign, the pattern that would mark all of Charlemagne's conquests: the willingness to absorb a defeated people into his realm not as slaves but as subjects under their own law, the readiness to legitimize his rule by assuming the traditional titles and forms of the conquered, and the close interweaving of military success with the interests of the Church. The conquest was not, however, entirely without aftershock. In 776 the Lombard duke of Friuli, Hrodgaud, rose in revolt, and Charlemagne was obliged to return to Italy to crush the rising, after which he tightened his grip on the northern Lombard lands. But the kingdom of the Lombards, as an independent power, had ceased to exist, and Italy had become, and would remain, a permanent part of the Carolingian world.

The Long War for Saxony

Of all the wars of Charlemagne's reign, the longest, the hardest, and the most savage was the war against the Saxons, a struggle that began in 772 and was not finally concluded until 804, occupying, with intervals of uneasy peace, more than three decades of the emperor's life. The Saxons were a Germanic people, kin in language and origin to the Franks themselves, who occupied the broad lands of northwestern Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe. They differed from the Franks, however, in two respects that made them at once a standing provocation and an exceptionally difficult enemy. They were pagan, worshippers of the old Germanic gods, and their most sacred object was the Irminsul, a great wooden pillar or tree-trunk that was held to support the heavens. And they were politically decentralized, divided into four main groupings, the Westphalians, the Eastphalians, the Engrians, and the Nordalbingians beyond the Elbe, with no king and no central authority, governed in peacetime by an assembly of nobles and choosing a war-leader only in time of need. This absence of any central power was the Saxons' great strength in the war that followed, for there was no single ruler whose submission could end the conflict, no capital whose capture would decide it, and no government that could make a treaty binding upon the whole people.

The war began in 772 when Charlemagne led an army into Saxon territory, stormed a stronghold, and, in a calculated act of religious aggression, destroyed the Irminsul, the central shrine of Saxon paganism. This first campaign set the pattern of what was to follow. Charlemagne would lead or send an army into Saxony, defeat the Saxons in the field, receive the submission and the hostages of the local nobles, accept their promises to keep the peace and to accept Christian baptism, and withdraw; and then, often within a year, the Saxons would rise again, repudiate the baptism imposed upon them, attack the Frankish garrisons and the missionaries, and raid across the frontier into Frankish territory. The cycle repeated itself with grim regularity through the 770s. The Saxon cause found a formidable leader in a Westphalian noble named Widukind, who emerged in 777 as the soul of the resistance and who, whenever a Frankish army withdrew, returned from refuge among the Danes to rally his people to renewed war.

The war reached its darkest point in the early 780s. In 782 a Frankish army was ambushed and destroyed by the Saxons at the Süntel hills, and Charlemagne, enraged by the disaster and by what he regarded as the repeated treachery of a people who broke their sworn oaths again and again, exacted a terrible revenge. At Verden, on the river Aller, having received the surrender of a large body of Saxons whom the rebels themselves handed over, he ordered, according to the Royal Frankish Annals, the execution in a single day of forty-five hundred of them. The massacre of Verden is the most notorious act of Charlemagne's whole career, and it has troubled his admirers ever since. Some historians have questioned the figure or suggested that the text describes deportation rather than slaughter, but the plain sense of the contemporary record is one of mass execution, and it stands as a stark reminder that the Christianizing conqueror was capable of ruthlessness on a horrifying scale. In the same period Charlemagne issued the harsh code of law known as the Capitulary on the Saxon territories, which made it a capital offense to refuse baptism, to cremate the dead in the pagan manner, to eat meat during Lent, or to conspire against Christians, and which sought, in effect, to compel the conversion of an entire people on pain of death.

Severity and bloodshed, however, did not break the Saxons; what eventually drew the most dangerous phase of the resistance to a close was a combination of military pressure and political accommodation. In 785, after further hard campaigning, Widukind himself, the great leader of the revolt, despaired of further resistance, came to terms, and accepted baptism, with Charlemagne standing as his godfather. The submission of Widukind ended the most intense period of the war, and for some years Saxony was relatively quiet. But the conflict was not over. Renewed risings broke out in the 790s, particularly among the Saxons of the north beyond the Elbe, and Charlemagne, recognizing at last that terror had failed, changed his methods. He moderated the harshest provisions of the earlier law in a new and milder capitulary, he worked through cooperative Saxon nobles whom he drew into his own aristocracy and rewarded with lands and office, and, most drastically, he resorted to the wholesale deportation of rebellious populations, uprooting tens of thousands of Saxons from the disaffected districts and resettling them deep within Frankish territory while planting Franks and loyal Slavs in their place. By 804 the resistance was finally exhausted, and Saxony, its old religion suppressed and its leading families absorbed into the Frankish order, was incorporated permanently into the Carolingian realm. The thirty-year war had been an atrocity and a triumph at once: it had brought a free people to submission at a fearful cost in blood and suffering, but it had also extended Latin Christendom decisively across the Rhine, and the Saxony that Charlemagne conquered would, within little more than a century, produce the dynasty that revived the empire in the East.

The Campaign in Spain and the Disaster at Roncesvalles

While the war in Saxony was still in its early years, Charlemagne was drawn into an entirely different theater of conflict on the southwestern frontier of his realm, beyond the Pyrenees, in the lands of Muslim Spain. The Iberian peninsula had been conquered by the armies of Islam in the early eighth century, and by Charlemagne's day it was ruled by the emirate of Cordoba, a state that had recently broken away from the authority of the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad under an independent Umayyad emir. That independence was resented and resisted by a number of local Muslim governors in the north of Spain, and in 777, at the great assembly held at Paderborn deep in Saxon territory, Charlemagne received an embassy from several of these dissident governors, foremost among them a man named Sulayman al-Arabi, the governor of Barcelona, who offered the Frankish king their submission and the surrender of their cities if he would lead an army across the mountains against the emir of Cordoba.

The prospect was tempting, promising an easy extension of Frankish power and of the Christian faith into the peninsula, and in 778 Charlemagne assembled a great army and crossed the Pyrenees in two columns. The campaign, however, did not go as the king had been led to expect. The promised cooperation of the Muslim allies proved unreliable; the important city of Zaragoza, which Charlemagne had counted on entering as a friend, closed its gates against him and could not be taken; and the king, with the situation in Saxony deteriorating behind his back and no prospect of swift success before him, decided to abandon the enterprise and return to Francia. As he withdrew he dismantled the walls of Pamplona, a city of the Christian Basques, an act that earned him the enmity of that fierce mountain people.

It was that enmity that produced the single most famous episode of the entire reign, an episode out of all proportion, in its eventual fame, to its actual military significance. On the fifteenth of August 778, as the Frankish army was making its way back through the high passes of the western Pyrenees, the rearguard of the column, encumbered with the baggage and strung out along a narrow defile at Roncesvalles, was ambushed by the Basques. Fighting from the heights with every advantage of ground and surprise, the Basques fell upon the rearguard, cut it to pieces, plundered the baggage train, and vanished into the mountains before the main army could turn back to its rescue. Among the many Frankish nobles who died in the defile was, as Einhard records, a certain Roland, the warden of the Breton March. In strict military terms the affair was a minor reverse, a lost rearguard in an unsuccessful campaign, and Einhard himself, while acknowledging that the wound it left could not be assuaged, treats it briefly. But the memory of the catastrophe took root, was retold and reshaped over the generations, and three centuries later flowered into the Song of Roland, the first and greatest of the French epic poems, which transformed the Basque ambushers into a vast Muslim army, the doomed warden Roland into the supreme hero of Christian chivalry, and a squalid mountain massacre into an immortal legend of valor, friendship, and betrayal.

The failure of 778 did not, however, end Charlemagne's interest in Spain. In the years that followed, the Franks established a defended buffer zone along the southern slope of the Pyrenees, the region that became known as the Spanish March, and pressed steadily southward. The campaign was carried forward chiefly by Charlemagne's son Louis, the sub-king of Aquitaine, and its great prize was the city of Barcelona, which after a long siege fell to the Franks in 801. The Spanish March, with Barcelona as its anchor, became a permanent Christian frontier province on Iberian soil, a base from which, over the long centuries of the reconquest, Christian power would slowly expand. Thus the campaign that began in disaster at Roncesvalles ended, a generation later, in the firm establishment of Frankish authority across the mountains, and in the creation of one of the most enduring of the marches that guarded the edges of the Carolingian world.

The Annexation of Bavaria and the Destruction of the Avars

To the southeast of the Frankish heartland lay the duchy of Bavaria, a Germanic land that was Christian and long associated with the Frankish kingdom but that had preserved, under its own ducal dynasty, the Agilolfings, a substantial measure of autonomy. The duke of Bavaria in Charlemagne's day was Tassilo the Third, a kinsman of the Carolingian house, for his mother and Charlemagne's mother were sisters, and a ruler who had governed his duchy ably for many years and who regarded himself as very nearly an independent prince. Tassilo had once, as a young man, sworn oaths of fidelity to Charlemagne's father, but in the intervening decades he had behaved as a sovereign, conducting his own wars and his own diplomacy, and his wife, a daughter of the deposed Lombard king Desiderius, gave him every reason to resent the power of the Franks.

Charlemagne resolved to end Bavarian independence, and he did so with a characteristic blend of military pressure and legal maneuver. In 787 he surrounded Bavaria with converging armies and compelled Tassilo, without a battle, to renew his oath of submission and to acknowledge himself a vassal holding his duchy from the Frankish king. The following year Charlemagne went further. Tassilo was summoned before the Frankish assembly, accused of having broken his oath, of plotting with the Avars, and of the grave crime, in Frankish law, of desertion from the host, a charge dating back to the campaign of 763. He was condemned to death, a sentence that Charlemagne then commuted, in an act of calculated mercy, to confinement in a monastery. Tassilo was tonsured and shut away, his family was likewise consigned to religious houses, and the duchy of Bavaria was simply abolished as an autonomous unit and absorbed directly into the Frankish realm, to be governed thereafter by Frankish counts and a royal prefect. Years later, in 794, the aged Tassilo was brought out of his monastery to a church council to renounce, formally and finally, any claim that he or his heirs might have to Bavaria, removing the last shadow of a legal challenge.

The absorption of Bavaria brought the Franks into direct contact with the most formidable power on their southeastern flank, the empire of the Avars. The Avars were a confederation of nomadic horsemen, originally from the steppes of central Asia, who for more than two centuries had dominated the great plain of the middle Danube, in the lands of modern Hungary, from which they had launched devastating raids deep into Europe and from which they had long extorted tribute even from the Byzantine empire. Their political center was a vast fortified encampment, surrounded by a system of ringed earthworks, known to the Franks simply as the Ring, and within it was accumulated the immense hoard of gold and silver that generations of Avar raiding and tribute-taking had gathered. After Bavaria fell to Charlemagne, conflict with the Avars became unavoidable, and in 791 Charlemagne launched the first great campaign against them, advancing down the Danube with a powerful army.

The war against the Avars, unlike the war against the Saxons, was relatively short and overwhelmingly decisive. The Avar confederation, weakened by internal feuds, proved unable to withstand the assault. In 795 and again in 796 Frankish armies, the second of them commanded by Charlemagne's son Pepin of Italy, broke into the heart of the Avar lands, stormed the Ring itself, and captured the accumulated treasure of the khaganate. The plunder was of legendary magnitude; the chroniclers describe long trains of wagons carrying the gold of the Avars back to Francia, and the windfall was so great that it perceptibly enriched the whole Frankish realm and allowed Charlemagne to be lavish in his gifts to the Church, to his followers, and to foreign rulers. The Avar state, deprived of its treasure and its prestige, collapsed and never recovered; within a few years the Avars as an independent power had effectively ceased to exist, their lands opened to Frankish influence, to Christian missionaries, and to the southward and westward movement of the Slavic peoples. The destruction of the Avars removed an ancient menace from the frontier of Europe and marked the high point of Charlemagne's career of conquest.

The Lesser Frontiers: Brittany, the Slavs, the Danes, and the South

Beyond the great wars against the Lombards, the Saxons, and the Avars, Charlemagne's reign was filled with a constant labor of frontier defense and frontier extension on every edge of his enormous realm, and the management of these lesser frontiers, though less dramatic than the central campaigns, was an essential part of the work of holding the empire together. In the far northwest, on the Atlantic peninsula of Brittany, the Celtic Bretons maintained a stubborn independence that the Franks never wholly overcame. Charlemagne sent armies against them, exacted their formal submission and tribute, and organized a defended frontier district, the Breton March, of which the warden Roland who died at Roncesvalles had been one of the early commanders; but Brittany was never truly absorbed, and the Bretons would reassert their independence under Charlemagne's successors.

Along the whole length of the eastern frontier, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, Charlemagne's realm now bordered upon the world of the Slavic peoples, who had spread across central and eastern Europe in the preceding centuries and who were organized into a great number of separate tribes and principalities. Charlemagne's policy toward the Slavs was generally not one of outright conquest but of the establishment of a protective glacis of client peoples beyond his own borders. Slavic groups such as the Abodrites of the Baltic coast became valued allies of the Franks, useful against the Saxons and the Danes, while others, such as the Wends and the Sorbs, felt the weight of Frankish armies and were compelled to pay tribute and acknowledge Frankish overlordship. To regulate this long and sensitive border, Charlemagne organized a series of marches, frontier commands under military governors, and he sought to control the cross-border trade, at one point issuing a decree that specified the points along the frontier at which merchants might lawfully deal with the Slavs and forbidding the sale of weapons to them.

In the north, the rise of Frankish power against the Saxons brought Charlemagne face to face with the kingdom of the Danes, and here, for once, he encountered a neighbor whom he could not subdue and who would, within a generation of his death, prove to be the most destructive of all the enemies of the Carolingian world. The Danish king Godfred, alarmed by the Frankish conquest of Saxony, which carried Charlemagne's power to the very base of the Danish peninsula, sheltered the Saxon resistance leader Widukind in his early years, raided the Frankish-allied Abodrites, and in 808 strengthened the great defensive earthwork, the Danevirke, that protected the southern approach to his kingdom. Godfred even threatened, according to the Frankish annals, to march on Aachen itself, and although he was murdered by one of his own followers in 810 before any such confrontation could occur, the episode revealed the limits of Charlemagne's reach. The Scandinavian world lay beyond his grasp, and the first Viking raids, the small, swift seaborne attacks that would grow into the great onslaught of the ninth century, had already begun to trouble the coasts of his empire in his final years, a shadow of the storm to come.

In the south, in Italy, Charlemagne's authority as king of the Lombards was challenged by the great Lombard duchy of Benevento, which occupied the southern third of the peninsula and which, though it acknowledged Frankish overlordship in form, preserved a real independence in practice. Charlemagne and his son Pepin of Italy campaigned against Benevento and exacted promises and tribute, but they never reduced it to obedience, and the duchy remained a stubborn enclave of autonomy. Off the southern coasts, and in the western Mediterranean, the rising naval power of the Muslims of Spain and North Africa raided the islands and the shores of Charlemagne's Italian and Provençal territories, and the emperor, whose strength was overwhelmingly that of a land power, organized coastguards and fleets to meet a threat that he could contain but not eliminate. On every frontier the pattern was the same: ceaseless vigilance, the organization of defended marches, the cultivation of clients and the punishment of enemies, the slow, grinding labor of holding the perimeter of a realm that had grown to a size unmatched in the West since the days of Rome.

The Government of a Vast Realm

The empire that Charlemagne assembled by conquest posed a problem of government more formidable than any that the early medieval West had yet faced. It stretched well over a thousand miles from the Spanish March to the Elbe and from the Danish border to the duchy of Benevento, it embraced a great diversity of peoples living under a variety of different laws, Frankish, Lombard, Bavarian, Saxon, Roman, and others, and it had to be administered without any of the instruments that a modern, or even a classical Roman, state would have regarded as indispensable: there was no professional bureaucracy, no standing army, no regular system of taxation in money, no body of salaried officials, and a population that was overwhelmingly rural, illiterate, and reachable only with great difficulty. That Charlemagne governed this realm with as much coherence as he did is one of the most remarkable of his achievements, and it was accomplished by a combination of inherited institutions, personal energy, and a few genuine innovations.

The fundamental unit of Carolingian local government was the county, and the key official was the count, a man of the high aristocracy appointed by the king to administer a district. The count presided over the local court of justice, raised and led the district's contingent of the army, collected the king's revenues and dues, and maintained the peace. In the dangerous frontier zones, several counties might be grouped under a single military commander, the warden of a march, with enhanced powers to meet the constant threat of war. The great weakness of this system was the difficulty of controlling the counts themselves, powerful aristocrats far from the king's eye, tempted always to treat their public office as a private possession and to favor their own families and followings. To counter that danger Charlemagne developed and systematized one of the most distinctive institutions of his reign, the missi dominici, the envoys of the lord. These were trusted men, sent out from the court in pairs, one a layman and one a churchman, each pair assigned to a circuit of counties, with authority to inspect the conduct of the counts and bishops, to hear complaints and appeals, to ensure that justice was being done and the king's commands obeyed, and to report back to the court. The missi were the eyes and ears of the central power, the mechanism by which Charlemagne sought to bind his distant officials to his will.

The instrument through which the royal will was expressed was the capitulary, a document issued in the king's name and so called because it was set out in chapters, in numbered headings. The capitularies of Charlemagne, of which a great many survive, are an extraordinarily varied body of material: some are legislative, amending or supplementing the law of one or another of the peoples of the realm; some are administrative, instructing the missi or the counts; some are concerned with the management of the royal estates; some are pastoral and religious, regulating the conduct of the clergy or the moral life of the laity; and the most ambitious of them attempt to set out a whole program for the right ordering of Christian society. The capitularies reveal a ruler with a genuine and unusual conviction that government could improve the lives and the souls of his subjects, and that the written word was the proper instrument of reform.

Binding the whole structure together were two further elements: the great assembly and the person of the king himself. Each year, traditionally in the spring or early summer, Charlemagne summoned the leading men of the realm, the lay magnates and the bishops and abbots, to a general assembly, where the business of the kingdom was discussed, where the host was reviewed before a campaign, where capitularies were promulgated and given the consent of the great, and where the king took counsel and made his decisions known. And underpinning all of it was the personal authority of Charlemagne, exercised through the loyalty he commanded and reinforced by the oath of fidelity that, in 789 and again in 802, he required every free man of the realm to swear to him. The Carolingian state had no capital in the modern sense and, for most of the reign, no fixed center; the king governed by moving constantly among his estates and palaces, consuming their produce, dispensing justice, showing himself to his people. It was a system that depended utterly upon the strength, the vigilance, and the prestige of the monarch, and it would prove, under Charlemagne's lesser successors, to be fragile. But in his hands, for the length of his reign, it gave the West a working government on a scale it had not known for centuries.

Charlemagne and the Church

It is impossible to understand Charlemagne, his conception of his own office, or the character of his rule, without grasping the centrality of the Christian religion to everything he did. He regarded himself not merely as a king who happened to be a Christian but as a ruler charged by God with responsibility for the Christian people committed to his care, responsible for their bodily welfare and their physical safety but responsible also, and above all, for their spiritual condition and their eternal salvation. This conviction, that the king was answerable to God for the religious health of his subjects, lay behind the whole vast effort of correction and reform that runs through the reign, and it made the Church not a separate institution standing apart from the state but the very substance and purpose of Charlemagne's government.

The relationship with the papacy was the most visible expression of this religious conception of kingship, and it was a relationship that Charlemagne inherited, sustained, and transformed. He maintained throughout his reign the alliance forged by his father, protecting the popes against their enemies and confirming and extending the territorial endowment of the Roman see. With Pope Hadrian the First, who occupied the see of Peter for more than twenty years of Charlemagne's reign, the king formed a genuine friendship; when Hadrian died in 795 Charlemagne is said to have wept as for a brother, and he had a splendid epitaph for the pope composed and inscribed and sent to Rome. Yet the relationship was never one of papal supremacy. Charlemagne respected the spiritual primacy of Rome and the unique authority of Saint Peter, but he regarded the practical direction of the Church within his dominions as very much his own affair. He summoned and presided over church councils, he appointed bishops and abbots, he legislated on matters of doctrine, liturgy, and clerical discipline, and he expected the pope to pray for the success of his arms and to attend to the spiritual office while the king saw to the governing.

The reforming impulse touched every part of the religious life of the realm. Charlemagne and his advisers sought to raise the educational and moral standard of the clergy, insisting that priests be able to understand the words of the services they performed and the scriptures they read, that bishops reside in their dioceses and supervise their clergy, and that monasteries observe a proper discipline. The great monastic reform of the reign was the effort, carried forward with the help of figures such as Benedict of Aniane, to make the Rule of Saint Benedict the single, universal standard for the monastic life throughout the empire, replacing the patchwork of older and looser customs. There was an attempt to standardize the liturgy of the Frankish Church on the Roman model, for which Charlemagne obtained an authoritative copy of the Roman service books from the pope. There was a concern for the correctness of the text of the Bible itself, and the scholar Alcuin and others labored to produce reliable, corrected versions of the scriptures. The most comprehensive single statement of the reform program was the great capitulary known as the General Admonition, issued in 789, a long document addressed to the clergy and people of the realm that set out, point by point, the standards of belief, conduct, learning, and worship that Charlemagne expected his Christian people to meet.

Charlemagne's sense of religious responsibility extended even into the realm of theology and doctrine, and here his confidence sometimes brought him into tension with Rome and with the Eastern Church. When the Byzantine empire, at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, settled its long internal dispute over the veneration of religious images, Charlemagne's theologians, working from a poor Latin translation of the council's decrees, produced a sharp critique, the Caroline Books, that rejected the Eastern position; and at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, summoned and dominated by Charlemagne, the Frankish Church took a line of its own on the question. The Franks also embraced, and Charlemagne personally championed, the addition to the Nicene Creed of the clause affirming that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the so-called Filioque, a clause that Rome itself was at that time reluctant to adopt and that would in later centuries become one of the great points of division between the Latin and Greek churches. In all of this Charlemagne acted as a man who believed that the right ordering of the faith was part of his God-given charge, and the partnership of throne and altar that he embodied, the king as the active guardian and reformer of the Church, would remain a defining feature of European political life for many centuries.

The Imperial Coronation of 800

The event that gave Charlemagne his place among the very greatest figures of European history, and that more than any other single act defined the new political order of the medieval West, was his coronation as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800. The road to that coronation began, as so often in Charlemagne's relations with Italy, with a crisis in Rome. In 795 Pope Hadrian had been succeeded by Leo the Third, a pope of less distinguished background and with powerful enemies among the Roman aristocracy. In April 799 those enemies struck: Leo was set upon in the streets of Rome during a procession, was assaulted and very nearly mutilated, his attackers reportedly attempting to blind him and cut out his tongue, and was imprisoned, before loyal supporters helped him to escape. The injured and fugitive pope made his way north, across the Alps, to Charlemagne, who was then at Paderborn in Saxony, and threw himself upon the king's protection. Charlemagne received him with honor, had him escorted back to Rome, and resolved to come to Italy himself to investigate the grave charges that Leo's enemies, in their turn, were now leveling against the pope, including accusations of perjury and immorality.

In the late autumn of 800 Charlemagne arrived in Rome. A council of bishops and nobles was convened to consider the accusations against Leo, and it concluded, in the end, that no one could presume to sit in judgment over the pope, the successor of Saint Peter; the matter was resolved when Leo, on the twenty-third of December, swore a solemn oath of his own innocence, purging himself of the charges. Two days later, on Christmas Day, Charlemagne attended Mass in the basilica of Saint Peter. As the king rose from prayer before the tomb of the apostle, Pope Leo placed a crown upon his head, and the assembled Roman people acclaimed him three times with the ancient formula: to Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-bringing emperor of the Romans, life and victory. Leo then performed before the new emperor the act of reverence that, by old custom, had been rendered to the Roman emperors. After more than three centuries during which the West had had no emperor of its own, the imperial dignity had been revived, and it had been revived in the person of a Frankish king.

The meaning and the circumstances of the coronation have been debated by historians for twelve hundred years, and the debate turns above all on a single, famously puzzling sentence in Einhard's biography. Einhard reports that Charlemagne so disliked the imperial title, at least at first, that he declared he would not have entered the church that day, great festival though it was, if he had known in advance what the pope intended to do. Scholars have argued endlessly over what this can mean. It is scarcely credible that the most powerful ruler in the West could have been crowned emperor against his will, or in genuine ignorance; the elevation must have been prepared and agreed in its essentials beforehand. The likeliest explanation is that what displeased Charlemagne was not the title itself but the form of the ceremony, the fact that it was the pope who placed the crown and the pope who appeared to confer the dignity, establishing a precedent that seemed to make the emperor the creature of the papacy. Charlemagne, who regarded his authority as coming directly from God, may well have wished the act to have been performed differently, and the care he later took, in 813, to crown his own son emperor with his own hands, without any papal involvement, lends weight to that reading.

Whatever Charlemagne's private feelings, the imperial coronation was an event of immense and lasting consequence. It declared that the Latin West was now, once again, the seat of a Roman empire, an empire Christian in character, Frankish in its ruling people, and centered no longer on the Mediterranean but on the lands north of the Alps. It gave a new dignity and a new universality to Charlemagne's rule, and it bound the imperial idea, from that day forward, to the city of Rome and to the blessing of the Church. The empire revived in 800 would have a long and complicated history; refounded by the German king Otto the Great in 962, it would endure, as the Holy Roman Empire, until its abolition in 1806, more than a thousand years after the Christmas coronation. And it created, at the very moment of its birth, a problem that would trouble European politics for centuries, the problem of the relationship between the two universal authorities of Christendom, the emperor and the pope, and of which of them, in the last resort, was the greater.

Empire, Byzantium, and the Problem of the Title

The revival of the imperial title in the West in the year 800 created an immediate and delicate difficulty, for the title of Roman emperor was not, in fact, vacant. It was held, and had been held in unbroken succession since antiquity, by the ruler in Constantinople, the sovereign of the Eastern Roman empire that modern historians call Byzantine but that called itself, simply and insistently, Roman. From the point of view of Constantinople there could be only one Roman emperor, the legitimate heir of Augustus and Constantine, and the coronation of a Frankish king in Rome by a bishop was not the revival of a vacant dignity but a usurpation, an act of rebellion against the true and only empire.

The Franks, for their part, had a justification ready, and it turned on the peculiar circumstances of the Byzantine throne at that moment. Since 797 the empire in Constantinople had been ruled by the empress Irene, who had gained sole power by the appalling expedient of deposing and blinding her own son. To Western eyes a woman could not, properly speaking, hold the imperial office at all, and so the Franks could maintain that the imperial throne was in truth vacant, that the men of Rome and the pope had therefore been free to bestow the imperial dignity where they chose, and that they had rightly bestowed it upon the one ruler in the West with the power and the piety to deserve it. There is even a report, which may or may not be true, that for a time a marriage was contemplated between Charlemagne and the empress Irene, a union that would have joined the two empires; but Irene was overthrown in 802 before any such scheme could come to anything.

The decade after the coronation was therefore occupied by a tense and intermittent struggle between the two empires, conducted partly through diplomacy and partly through war on the contested frontier where their interests met, in the northern Adriatic, around Venice and the Dalmatian coast. Charlemagne wanted, above all, recognition; he wanted the rulers in Constantinople to acknowledge that he too was an emperor, that there might legitimately be an emperor in the West alongside the emperor in the East. The Byzantines were deeply reluctant to concede anything of the kind. The deadlock was broken only at the very end of Charlemagne's life, and by a compromise. In 812 envoys from the Byzantine emperor Michael the First came to Charlemagne at Aachen and there, in exchange for Frankish concessions over Venice and the Dalmatian towns, formally acclaimed him as emperor. It was a carefully limited recognition. The Byzantines acknowledged Charlemagne as an emperor, a basileus, and addressed him with the imperial style; but they pointedly did not concede that he was emperor of the Romans, a title they continued to reserve, jealously and exclusively, for their own sovereign. Charlemagne was an emperor; the emperor of the Romans still reigned only in Constantinople.

For Charlemagne the recognition of 812, partial and grudging though it was, was a real diplomatic success, achieved in the last full year of his life, and it gave a measure of international legitimacy to the new Western empire. But the underlying issue was never resolved. The existence, from 800 onward, of two empires in Christendom, each claiming a Roman descent and a universal Christian mission, was a permanent feature of the medieval world, and the rivalry and mutual suspicion between the Latin West and the Greek East, of which the dispute over the imperial title was one early symptom, would deepen over the centuries, contributing in time to the formal schism of the two churches and culminating, with a terrible irony, in the sack of Constantinople by a Western crusading army in 1204. The coronation of 800 had given the West an emperor of its own, but it had also driven a wedge into the unity of Christendom that would never again be wholly removed.

The Carolingian Renaissance

If the conquests gave Charlemagne his empire, it was the revival of learning and culture that historians have named the Carolingian Renaissance that gave his reign its most enduring and most beneficent legacy. Charlemagne came to power in a Western Europe whose intellectual life had reached a low ebb. The collapse of the Roman educational system, the disorders of the post-Roman centuries, and the general impoverishment and ruralization of society had brought literacy and learning to the edge of extinction outside a handful of monasteries; the very text of the Bible and of the church services had become corrupt through careless copying; many of the clergy could barely understand the Latin words they were obliged to recite; and the inheritance of classical antiquity was in real danger of being lost altogether. Charlemagne, with a vision that does him extraordinary credit, grasped that this decay of learning was not merely a cultural misfortune but a religious emergency, for a clergy that could not read could not properly teach the faith, and a people poorly taught could not be saved.

The remedy he applied was to gather to his court the most learned men who could be found anywhere in the Latin world and to make of his itinerant household a center, a clearinghouse, and an engine of intellectual revival. From Italy came the grammarian Peter of Pisa, who is said to have given Charlemagne himself instruction in Latin grammar, and the historian Paul the Deacon, the author of a famous History of the Lombards. From Visigothic Spain came Theodulf, a poet of real distinction who became bishop of Orléans. From among the Franks themselves came Charlemagne's own biographer Einhard and the court poet Angilbert. But the towering figure of the movement, the man who more than any other gave it direction and energy, was an Englishman, Alcuin of York, a product of the cathedral school of York, which was then perhaps the finest center of learning in all of Europe. Charlemagne met Alcuin in Italy in 781 and persuaded him to come to the Frankish court, where for many years he presided over the palace school and served as the king's chief adviser in all matters of religion and education, before retiring to end his days as abbot of the great monastery of Saint Martin at Tours.

The achievements of the movement these men led were varied and far-reaching. Charlemagne issued decrees, such as the famous circular letter On the Cultivation of Learning and the educational provisions of the General Admonition, commanding that schools be established at cathedrals and monasteries and that the clergy be properly taught. The standard of the Latin language itself was raised, and a more correct, more classical Latin, recovered through the study of grammar, came again into use among the educated, a development that, by widening the gap between this learned Latin and the everyday speech of the people, was itself one of the conditions for the eventual emergence of the Romance languages. The texts of the Bible, of the liturgy, and of the Fathers of the Church were studied and corrected. Above all, an immense effort of copying was undertaken in the monastic scriptoria, an effort that multiplied the number of books in existence and that rescued from oblivion a great part of the literature of classical Rome; the overwhelming majority of the works of Latin antiquity that survive today do so because they were copied in a Carolingian monastery, and the oldest manuscript of very many ancient authors is a Carolingian one.

It was in the service of this great campaign of copying that Carolingian scholars perfected the most quietly influential single product of the whole movement, a new style of handwriting. The Carolingian minuscule was a clear, rounded, disciplined script, easy to read and easy to write, with well-separated words and a developed system of capital and small letters, and it replaced the cramped, crabbed, and regionally various hands of the earlier period. So successful was it that it spread across Europe and remained the standard book hand for centuries; and when, in the fifteenth century, the humanists of the Italian Renaissance sought a beautiful and legible script for their own books, they took as their model the Carolingian minuscule, which they mistook for the hand of classical antiquity itself, and from their revival of it descend, by way of the early printers, the ordinary lower-case letters in which books are printed to this day. The Carolingian Renaissance did not produce great original works of literature or thought; its character was conservative, a labor of recovery, correction, and transmission rather than of invention. But it was precisely as an act of preservation that it mattered most. It saved the inheritance of the ancient world at the moment of its greatest peril, it re-established schools and the habit of learning, and it laid the indispensable foundation on which all the later intellectual achievement of medieval Europe would be built.

Aachen and the Palace of the Emperor

For most of his reign Charlemagne, like the Frankish kings before him, had no fixed capital. He governed his realm in motion, traveling endlessly with his court among the royal estates and palaces scattered across the kingdom, consuming the produce of each in turn, holding his assemblies and his courts wherever he happened to be, and showing his face and his power directly to the people of each region. But in the last two decades of his life Charlemagne increasingly settled, and at last settled permanently, upon a single favored residence, and in doing so he created what was, in effect, the first true capital that the medieval West had known: the palace complex at Aachen, in the Rhineland, the city the French call Aix-la-Chapelle.

The choice of Aachen was partly a matter of geography and partly a matter of personal pleasure. The site lay close to the ancestral heartland of the Carolingian family and was well placed for the affairs of the Saxon and the eastern frontiers that dominated the later part of the reign. But Aachen had also a particular natural attraction that drew Charlemagne to it: the place was the site of warm mineral springs, known and used since Roman times, and Charlemagne, as Einhard tells us, took an intense delight in swimming and in the natural hot baths, and was so skilled and devoted a swimmer that no one could surpass him. He built at Aachen a great bath fed by the springs, large enough, the biographer says, for a hundred men to swim in at once, and he loved to invite not only his sons but his nobles and his friends and even his bodyguard to bathe with him there.

From about 794 Charlemagne made Aachen his principal residence, and he undertook there a great program of building intended to create a palace worthy of an emperor and consciously evocative of the Christian Roman past. The palace complex was extensive, comprising a great hall for assemblies and ceremonies, residential quarters, administrative buildings, and quarters for the scholars and clergy of the court, all of it laid out as a deliberate statement of imperial dignity. Its supreme architectural achievement, and the building that survives today as the core of the cathedral of Aachen, was the Palatine Chapel, the emperor's own church. Designed under the direction of Odo of Metz, it was a structure of a sophistication unmatched anywhere in the West for centuries: an octagon, ringed by an aisle and a gallery and crowned by a dome, built of stone and richly adorned with marble columns, some of which were brought, with papal permission, all the way from Rome and Ravenna, and with bronze grilles and doors cast in workshops at Aachen itself. The chapel was modeled, in its essential conception, on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, the sixth-century imperial church of the emperor Justinian, and the borrowing was a calculated one, a claim in stone to the inheritance of the Christian Roman emperors.

In the gallery of this chapel, raised above the floor and facing the altar, stood the emperor's throne, a simple seat built of plain slabs of white marble, set at the top of a short flight of steps. From that throne Charlemagne could look down upon the worship in the church below, and the placing of it expressed, with great economy, his whole conception of his office, the Christian emperor presiding over the worship of his people, set above them and yet within their community of faith. The throne would have an extraordinary afterlife: for some six hundred years, from the tenth century to the sixteenth, more than thirty kings of Germany came to Aachen to be enthroned upon it as part of their coronation, seating themselves in the place of Charlemagne and so claiming a share in his legitimacy and his glory. Aachen in Charlemagne's last years was a true center of empire, the place where the court resided, where the school flourished, where the scholars gathered, where foreign embassies were received, where the emperor held his Christmases and his Easters, and where, when his life ended, he would be buried. It was the nearest thing the early medieval West possessed to a Rome of its own, and it was the creation of Charlemagne.

Economy, Coinage, and the Ordering of Daily Life

The economy of the empire over which Charlemagne ruled was overwhelmingly agrarian, a world of villages, fields, woodland, and pasture in which the great majority of people lived by working the soil and in which money played only a small part in the ordinary transactions of everyday life. Wealth was measured above all in land and in the produce of land, in grain and cattle and the labor of dependent peasants, and the social order rested upon the great estate, worked partly by the direct labor of the lord's unfree dependents and partly by the renders and services owed by tenant families. Trade and the use of coined money were largely confined to the towns, the frontier markets, and the long-distance routes plied by professional merchants; the rural world that was the empire functioned, for the most part, on a basis of self-sufficiency and exchange in kind. Charlemagne nonetheless took a close and characteristically energetic interest in the material ordering of his realm, for he regarded the just regulation of buying and selling, of weights and measures, and of the relief of the poor as no less a part of his God-given charge than the defense of the frontiers or the reform of the Church.

The most enduring of his economic measures was a thoroughgoing reform of the coinage. The monetary arrangements that Charlemagne inherited had fallen into a degree of disorder, with coins of varying weight and quality struck at many places, and he, with his father before him, set about imposing a single, controlled, and trustworthy standard. The system that emerged, and that bore Charlemagne's stamp for the rest of the Middle Ages, was based upon silver. The unit of account was the pound, a fixed weight of silver, and the pound was divided, for reckoning, into twenty shillings and the shilling into twelve pence, so that the pound contained two hundred and forty pence. Of these denominations only the penny, the silver denarius, was actually struck as a coin; the pound and the shilling were units of account, ways of counting pennies, not pieces of metal. Around the early 790s Charlemagne issued a new, heavier, and finer penny and concentrated the right of minting firmly in royal hands, so that the coins bore the king's name, his title, and his monogram and were issued to a uniform standard from a controlled number of mints. So sound and so authoritative was this silver standard that it spread far beyond the Carolingian lands and outlasted the empire itself; the division of the pound into twenty shillings and two hundred and forty pence, first fixed in the decrees of Charlemagne, would survive as the basis of the English currency until as late as the year 1971.

Hand in hand with the reform of the coinage went an effort to standardize the weights and the measures by which goods were bought and sold. Charlemagne issued decrees commanding that honest and uniform measures of capacity and weight be used throughout the realm, and he is credited with the introduction of a new and heavier standard pound. He legislated repeatedly on the conduct of markets, on the tolls that might lawfully be levied on merchants and the many that might not, and on the suppression of the fraudulent and extortionate practices by which the powerful preyed upon traders and the poor. Behind these measures lay a consistent conviction that commerce was a legitimate and necessary activity which it was the duty of the ruler to protect against dishonesty and oppression, and to keep within the bounds of justice.

The economic foundation of the monarchy itself was the vast complex of royal estates scattered across the realm, whose produce fed and clothed and supported the itinerant court as it moved from residence to residence. For the management of these crown lands Charlemagne issued one of the most remarkable documents of his reign, the capitulary on the estates, a long and minutely detailed set of instructions to his stewards. It specified the crops to be grown and the livestock to be kept, the crafts and the workshops the estates were to maintain, the accounts that were to be rendered and the honesty that was expected of those who rendered them, and it descended even to such particulars as the trees and herbs that were to be planted in the gardens. The capitulary on the estates is a precious window into the rural economy of the age, and it reveals, once again, the same temperament at work, a ruler who believed that good order was the fruit of attention to detail and who was prepared to give that attention himself.

Charlemagne's concern for the material welfare of his subjects showed itself most clearly in his response to scarcity. The early Middle Ages were never far from hunger, and the empire was struck, in the first decade of the ninth century, by years of severe dearth and famine. Charlemagne responded with measures that reveal the moral economy of his rule: he issued decrees fixing maximum prices for grain and other foodstuffs in the years of scarcity, so that speculators might not grow rich upon the desperation of the starving; he condemned the hoarding of food and the practice of usury; he urged, and where he could commanded, the giving of alms and the relief of the poor; and he called upon his people to fasting and prayer as a remedy for what was understood as a visitation of divine displeasure. The trade of the empire, meanwhile, flowed along the great rivers and the coasts, carried in good part by the Frisian merchants of the North Sea shore, and passed through emporia such as Dorestad and Quentovic that linked the Frankish lands to England, to Scandinavia, and to the wider world. In all of this, in the silver penny and the standard measure, in the ordered estate and the capped price and the relieved poor, the same purpose may be discerned that ran through every part of Charlemagne's government, the conviction that the right ordering of the world, in its smallest material details no less than in its greatest affairs, was the proper and the inescapable business of a Christian king.

Diplomacy and the Wider World

The power and the fame of Charlemagne reached far beyond the borders of his own dominions, and the diplomatic correspondence and exchange of embassies that filled his reign reveal a ruler regarded, across much of the known world, as one of the great sovereigns of the age. Within the Latin Christian world he dealt as the dominant power with the lesser kingdoms on his periphery. With Anglo-Saxon England his relations were close, sometimes friendly and sometimes strained; he corresponded and dealt with Offa, the powerful king of Mercia, and although a proposed marriage alliance between their children fell through amid a quarrel that briefly interrupted trade between the two realms, the long-term relationship was one of mutual respect, and a steady traffic of scholars, pilgrims, and merchants passed between Charlemagne's realm and the island that had given him Alcuin. With the Christian kingdom of Asturias, the small surviving Christian state in the mountains of northern Spain, Charlemagne maintained cordial contact, and its king Alfonso the Second sent him gifts and tokens of friendship.

The most celebrated of all Charlemagne's diplomatic relationships, and the one that most captured the imagination of his own age and of later generations, was the exchange of embassies and gifts with the most powerful ruler of the Islamic world, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, the caliph whose reign is the half-legendary setting of the Thousand and One Nights. The two monarchs, whose realms did not touch and who had no quarrel, found in each other a useful and a prestigious correspondent. They shared, in a sense, common rivals, for the caliph of Baghdad was the enemy of the Umayyad emir of Spain whom Charlemagne also opposed, and both had reason to be wary of Byzantium. Charlemagne, moreover, had a particular interest in the welfare of the Christians of the Holy Land and of the holy places of Jerusalem, which lay within the caliph's dominions, and Harun was willing to allow the Frankish emperor a recognized role as their protector and patron; the patriarch of Jerusalem sent Charlemagne the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and a banner, tokens of that protectorate.

The embassies that passed between Aachen and Baghdad carried magnificent gifts, and one of them became the most famous single object of the reign. In 802 there arrived at Charlemagne's court, sent by Harun al-Rashid and brought across the Mediterranean and over the Alps with enormous difficulty, a live elephant, an Asian elephant named, in the Frankish records, Abul-Abbas. The arrival of so prodigious and so utterly unfamiliar a beast astonished the Franks, and the elephant lived for some years as a marvel of Charlemagne's court, accompanying the emperor on at least one of his journeys, before it died in 810. With the elephant and on other occasions came other wonders: an intricate water clock of brass that marked the hours by dropping balls into a basin and by the appearance of mechanical horsemen, fine textiles, perfumes, and other treasures of the East, objects that displayed to the Franks the wealth and the sophistication of the Abbasid civilization and that advertised, to all who saw them, the standing of the emperor who could command such friendships. Through these exchanges, conducted across the whole breadth of the known world, Charlemagne's court at Aachen was linked into a web of diplomacy that reached from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, and the Frankish emperor took his place, in the estimation of his contemporaries, among the foremost rulers of the earth.

Wives, Children, and the Imperial Household

The domestic life of Charlemagne was as crowded, as turbulent, and in some respects as unconventional as his public career was grand, and it has always presented his admirers with a certain difficulty, for the great Christian emperor and reformer of the Church was, in his marital conduct, very far from a model of Christian propriety. Over the course of his long life he had, by the usual reckoning, five wives in succession, together with a number of concubines whose status was openly acknowledged, and from these unions sprang a large brood of children, legitimate and illegitimate alike, whom the emperor cherished and kept close about him.

His first connection was with a Frankish woman named Himiltrude, whose exact status, whether wife or concubine, was disputed even in his own day; she bore him his eldest son, Pepin, later called the Hunchback because of a curvature of the spine. Then came the brief and politically calculated marriage to the unnamed daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, the union arranged by Charlemagne's mother and repudiated within a year. His third and most important marriage was to Hildegard, a young noblewoman of Swabian and partly Frankish descent, whom he married around 771 and who remained his wife until her death in 783. Hildegard was the mother of the children who mattered most to the future of the dynasty, among them the three sons who would survive into adulthood, Charles, called the Younger, Pepin, who would be made king of Italy, and Louis, who would be made king of Aquitaine and who would in the end be his father's sole heir, as well as several daughters. After Hildegard's death Charlemagne married Fastrada, an East Frankish noblewoman, whose reputation in the sources is harsh and who was blamed, perhaps unfairly, for a cruelty of temper that was said to have provoked conspiracies against the emperor; she died in 794. His fifth wife was an Alemannic woman named Liutgard, who died in 800 and left no surviving children. After Liutgard's death the aging emperor did not marry again but kept several concubines, who bore him further children.

Charlemagne's relations with his children were marked by a deep and demonstrative affection and by a striking determination to keep them gathered around him. Einhard records that the emperor would not dine without his children, that they accompanied him on his journeys, his sons riding at his side and his daughters following behind under the protection of the guard, and that he took a close personal interest in their education, ensuring that his daughters as well as his sons were instructed in letters and that the daughters were also taught the womanly accomplishments of spinning and weaving. This devotion had, however, a notable and much-discussed peculiarity. Charlemagne never permitted any of his daughters to marry. The reasons are not stated in the sources but are easy to surmise: a son-in-law would have been a man with a claim, through his wife, upon the inheritance and the loyalties of the realm, a potential rival and a complication, and the emperor preferred to forgo the diplomatic advantages of marrying his daughters to foreign princes rather than create such rivals or send his beloved daughters away. The daughters, kept unmarried at court, nonetheless conducted love affairs and bore children of their own, irregularities that the indulgent emperor tolerated within his household, though they caused scandal and were sharply curtailed after his death by his pious and severe successor.

Not all of Charlemagne's domestic life was harmonious. His eldest son, Pepin the Hunchback, excluded from the succession in favor of the sons of Hildegard and resentful of his position, became in 792 the center of a conspiracy of disaffected nobles against his father. The plot was discovered, its lay participants were punished, some with death, and Pepin the Hunchback himself was spared his life but was tonsured and confined for the remainder of his days in the monastery of Prüm. It was a grim echo, within Charlemagne's own family, of the fate he had dealt to so many of his defeated enemies, and a reminder that even the household of the great emperor was not free of the ambition, jealousy, and intrigue that attended the exercise of supreme power.

The Person of Charlemagne

Thanks above all to the biography written by Einhard, who had known him personally and observed him closely, the physical person and the private habits of Charlemagne can be described with a vividness rare for any figure of the early Middle Ages. Einhard, consciously imitating the manner in which the Roman biographer Suetonius had described the emperors of antiquity, set down a detailed portrait, and its main features are confirmed, in their essentials, by the examination of the emperor's surviving remains, which when measured in modern times indicated a man of a little over six feet in height, very tall for his age.

Einhard describes Charlemagne as large and strong, of commanding stature though not ungainly, with a body that was robust and well proportioned. He had, the biographer says, a round head, large and lively eyes, a nose somewhat longer than the average, a fine head of hair, white in his later years, and a cheerful, animated face, so that whether he stood or sat his presence was always one of great dignity and authority. His neck was thick and rather short and his belly grew somewhat prominent in his later years, but these things, Einhard insists, were not noticed because of the symmetry of the rest of his body. His health was generally excellent, sustained by constant exercise, until the last few years of his life, when he was troubled by fevers and walked with a limp; characteristically, he disregarded the advice of his physicians, whom he came positively to dislike because they urged him to give up the roast meat he loved and to content himself with boiled.

His habits and tastes were those of a vigorous, temperate, and sociable man. He was passionately devoted to hunting and to riding, the natural exercises of a Frankish noble, and to swimming, in which, as has been told, he excelled all others. He was moderate in food and drink, abstemious in wine, and held drunkenness in particular contempt; he disliked long banquets and preferred a modest table, at which, however, he loved to have stories read aloud or, especially, the works of Saint Augustine, of whose great book The City of God he was particularly fond. He dressed, by deliberate choice, in the plain traditional costume of the Franks, a linen shirt and breeches, a tunic, hose, and in winter a coat of otter or marten skins, and over all a blue cloak, and he carried always a sword; only twice in his life, and then only at the express request of the pope, did he consent to put on the long tunic and the cloak of a Roman patrician, for he despised foreign dress however splendid. He was a fluent and ready speaker, even eloquent, and his voice, Einhard notes with a touch of frankness, was clear but rather high and light for so large a frame.

Above all, the portrait that emerges is of a man of restless intelligence and genuine intellectual curiosity, unusual in a warrior king of his age. He was, Einhard says, eager in the pursuit of learning, devoted to the liberal arts, and a great honorer of scholars; he studied grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and gave particular attention to astronomy, learning to calculate the movements of the heavenly bodies. He spoke Latin like his own tongue and understood Greek better than he could speak it. He was diligent and persevering in everything he undertook, and the famous detail of the writing tablets kept beneath his pillow, on which the grown emperor labored, with little success, to teach his hand the unfamiliar art of forming letters, captures the whole character of the man: a ruler of mature years and immense power who was not too proud to struggle with a beginner's task, and who believed, with a seriousness that shaped his entire reign, that learning was worth the labor.

The Final Years and the Question of the Succession

The last decade of Charlemagne's life was, by comparison with the storm of campaigning that had filled the decades before, a quieter time, a period of consolidation rather than conquest, in which the aging emperor, increasingly settled at Aachen and increasingly troubled by ill health, turned his attention to the ordering of his Church, the correction of his realm, and, above all, the supremely important question of what would become of his empire after his death.

By the custom of the Franks, a kingdom was divided among a ruler's sons, and Charlemagne fully intended to follow that custom. In 806 he summoned an assembly and promulgated a formal document, the Division of the Kingdoms, that set out in careful detail how his dominions were to be partitioned, after his death, among his three surviving legitimate sons. To Charles the Younger, the eldest, was to go the Frankish heartland and the largest share; to Pepin, already king of Italy, was assigned Italy together with Bavaria and the adjacent lands; and to Louis, already king of Aquitaine, was assigned Aquitaine, the Spanish March, and the southwest. The document of 806 was concerned only with the territorial inheritance and, strikingly, said nothing whatever about the imperial title itself, a silence that has been much discussed and that suggests Charlemagne, at that date, may have regarded the empire as a personal dignity attached to his own person rather than as an institution to be automatically transmitted.

Fate, however, overturned the careful arrangements of 806. Within a few years two of the three heirs were dead. Pepin, the king of Italy, died in 810, and Charles the Younger, the eldest son and the designated principal heir, died in 811. Of the three sons of Hildegard who had been expected to share the empire, only the youngest, Louis, the king of Aquitaine, remained alive. The deaths of his sons were a heavy personal grief to the old emperor, coming in the same years as the death of his beloved elephant and amid a general sense, which the chroniclers record, of omens and forebodings; but the deaths also, by accident, resolved the problem of the succession in a way that the planned partition of 806 had not. The empire would not, after all, be divided. It would pass whole and undivided to a single heir.

In 813, feeling the approach of the end, Charlemagne acted to settle the succession beyond any doubt. He summoned his son Louis from Aquitaine to Aachen, and there, before a great assembly of the magnates of the realm, he formally made Louis his colleague and his heir. The ceremony that followed was of profound significance, and it was, by every account, a deliberate statement. In the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, Charlemagne caused the imperial crown to be placed upon the altar, and then he commanded his son to take up the crown and to place it upon his own head. There was no pope present; the act was performed by the emperor and his son alone, within the Frankish church, by the authority of the reigning emperor and with the acclamation of the Frankish people. Whatever the precise meaning of the coronation of 800, Charlemagne in 813 made certain that the imperial dignity passed to his heir as a Frankish dignity, conferred without the intervention of Rome, and the contrast with the Christmas ceremony thirteen years before can hardly have been unintentional. With Louis crowned co-emperor and sent back to govern Aquitaine, the succession was secure, and Charlemagne, his life's work in order, had only a few months left to live.

Death and Burial

Charlemagne returned from a last autumn hunt in the forests near Aachen at the end of 813 and spent the winter, as had become his custom, in the palace by the warm springs. In January 814 he was seized by a high fever, and, with the obstinacy that Einhard remarks upon, he attempted to treat it himself in the manner he trusted, by fasting, believing that abstinence from food would drive out the illness as it had so often done before. This time the remedy failed. To the fever was added a sharp pain in the side, the symptom the physicians of the day called pleurisy, an inflammation of the chest, and the old emperor, weakened by age and by his self-imposed fasting, could not throw it off. He received the holy communion, and on the morning of the twenty-eighth of January 814, after an illness of only about a week, Charlemagne died in his palace at Aachen. He was in his late sixties, or by the older reckoning of his birth date past seventy; he had reigned as king of the Franks for forty-five years and as emperor for thirteen, one of the longest and incomparably the most consequential reign of the early Middle Ages.

The grief of his court and of his people was deep and, by every account, genuine, for whatever the severities of his rule, Charlemagne had been a ruler of overwhelming presence and prestige, and to very many of his subjects he was the only sovereign they had ever known. His body was washed and prepared with the customary rites, and then, on the very day of his death, with a haste that the season and the circumstances perhaps required, he was buried within the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, the great octagonal church that he had himself raised and adorned and that he had surely always intended as the place of his rest. He was the first person to be buried in the church, and his tomb at once made the chapel a place of the highest dignity, the burial church of an emperor.

A tradition that took shape somewhat later, and that cannot be wholly verified, holds that Charlemagne was interred not lying down in the ordinary manner but seated upright upon a throne, robed and crowned in his imperial regalia, with a copy of the Gospels open upon his knees and his sword at his side, an emperor enthroned even in death. Whatever the exact manner of the first burial, the tomb of Charlemagne became, over the centuries, an object of veneration. In the year 1000 the emperor Otto the Third, a fervent admirer of Charlemagne and a promoter of his memory, is said to have had the tomb opened and to have gazed upon the remarkably preserved body of his great predecessor. In 1165, when Charlemagne was formally raised to the honors of a saint, his remains were taken up from the grave; and in the following decades they were enclosed in a magnificent gilded and jeweled reliquary, the Shrine of Charlemagne, which stands in the cathedral of Aachen to this day, while the supposed throne of his burial and the relics associated with him became treasures of the church. The simple chapel that received his body in haste on a January day in 814 thus became, and remains, one of the great memorial places of European history.

The Division of the Inheritance

The empire that Charlemagne left to his son Louis, known to history as Louis the Pious, was the greatest political construction that the West had seen since the fall of Rome, but it was an inheritance held together very largely by the personal authority, the prestige, and the ceaseless energy of the man who had built it, and it would not long survive him intact. The story of the three generations after Charlemagne is, in its broad outline, the story of the dissolution of his empire, and that story is essential to any understanding of his place in history, for it was out of the wreck of the Carolingian empire that the political map of modern Europe began to take shape.

Louis the Pious, who succeeded in 814, was a conscientious and devout ruler, sincerely committed to his father's program of religious reform, but he lacked Charlemagne's commanding force of personality and his sureness of touch, and his reign was consumed by a long and bitter struggle over the inheritance. The trouble arose from the irreconcilable conflict between two principles: the desire, on the one hand, to keep the empire and the imperial title united and undivided, a unity now reinforced by the idea that the empire was a sacred Christian whole that ought not to be carved up; and the deep-rooted Frankish custom, on the other hand, that every son of a king had a right to a share of the realm. Louis had several sons, and his repeated attempts to provide for them all, complicated by the birth of a fourth son to a second marriage and by the resulting need to revise the settlement, set the sons against their father and against one another. The last years of Louis the Pious were disgraced by open rebellion, by the humiliation of the emperor at the hands of his own children, and by civil war.

When Louis died in 840 the conflict among his surviving sons broke out in full fury. The eldest, Lothair, who held the imperial title, sought to make his supremacy real over his younger brothers; the others, Louis, called the German, and Charles, called the Bald, combined against him, and in 841 they crushed Lothair's army in the great and bloody battle of Fontenoy. Two years of further conflict followed, until at last, in 843, the three brothers met at Verdun and agreed to a division of the empire, the Treaty of Verdun, which is one of the genuine landmarks in the history of Europe. By its terms the empire was split into three parts. To Charles the Bald went the western portion, the lands that would become France. To Louis the German went the eastern portion, the lands east of the Rhine, the German-speaking territories that would become Germany. And to Lothair, who retained the now largely empty imperial title, went a long, narrow, and incoherent middle kingdom, stretching from the North Sea down through the Rhineland and Burgundy to Italy, a realm without natural unity that would soon fragment further and whose disputed borderlands, Alsace, Lorraine, the Low Countries, would be fought over by its western and eastern neighbors for the next eleven hundred years.

The Treaty of Verdun did not, in the minds of those who made it, abolish the empire or renounce the ideal of Christian unity; it was understood as a division of administration among brothers who were still, in theory, partners in a single Christian commonwealth. But in practical effect it was the permanent partition of Charlemagne's creation, and from its three parts the future emerged. The western kingdom became France; the eastern kingdom became Germany; and the imperial title, after a period of decline and confusion, was eventually refounded in the eastern, German lands by Otto the Great in 962, beginning the long history of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne's unified empire had lasted, as a single state, barely a generation beyond his death. And yet the partition itself, by giving rough shape to the enduring nations of France and Germany, ensured that even in its dissolution his empire would determine the political geography of Europe.

The Legend of Charlemagne

Almost from the moment of his death, and with increasing power across the medieval centuries, Charlemagne ceased to be merely a historical king and became a legend, one of the supreme legendary figures of the European imagination, the subject of epic poetry, of romance, of folklore, and of cult, until the man of history was all but buried beneath the towering mythical figure that bore his name. The making of the legend began with the chroniclers and biographers of the ninth century, with Einhard's admiring portrait and with the later, more fanciful account by the monk Notker of Saint Gall, who gathered up the anecdotes and the marvels that were already, within two generations, clustering around the emperor's memory.

The richest growth of the legend, however, was in the epic poetry of medieval France, in the great body of heroic songs known as the chansons de geste, the songs of deeds, which from the eleventh century onward made Charlemagne and his court the central matter of a whole tradition of vernacular literature, the so-called Matter of France. The oldest and the finest of these poems was the Song of Roland, which took the historical disaster of the rearguard at Roncesvalles in 778 and transfigured it utterly: the Basque ambushers became a vast pagan army of Saracens, the slain warden Roland became the peerless hero of Christendom, betrayed to his death by the treachery of his stepfather Ganelon and dying gloriously amid the slaughter of his companions while too proud to sound his horn for rescue until it was too late; and over the whole tragedy presided Charlemagne, depicted not as the vigorous man of his fifties that he had actually been in 778 but as a towering, white-bearded patriarch of two hundred years, the sacred champion of the faith, who avenges Roland and to whom the very angels speak. Around this central poem there grew up a vast cycle of others, which surrounded the emperor with a fixed company of legendary champions, the Twelve Peers or paladins, and sent them through endless adventures of war against the pagans. In these poems Charlemagne is the ideal Christian emperor, the fountain of chivalry and of justice, and the historical king has vanished into a figure of pure myth.

To the literary legend was added a religious cult. In 1165 the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who wished to glorify the imperial office and to associate his own dynasty with the splendor of the first emperor, procured from an antipope of his own party the formal canonization of Charlemagne as a saint. The Roman Church, because the canonization had been pronounced by an antipope, never officially confirmed it, but neither did it altogether suppress the cult, and Charlemagne continued for centuries to be venerated as a saint, especially at Aachen, where his feast was kept on the anniversary of his death and where his relics, enclosed in their golden shrine, drew pilgrims. He was honored as a holy emperor, a defender of the Church, and the patron of his city.

The legend, once made, proved extraordinarily durable. Charlemagne became one of the Nine Worthies, the canonical roll of the greatest heroes of history and legend that the later Middle Ages loved to celebrate, standing among such figures as Alexander, Julius Caesar, and King Arthur. His name and his deeds passed into the literature of Italy, where the Renaissance poets Boiardo and Ariosto took up the old French stories of his paladins and spun them into the glittering romances of Orlando, Roland under his Italian name. And the figure of the great emperor, the unifier of Europe, the founder of an order, never lost its hold on the European imagination, so that even in the modern, secular age the legend of Charlemagne, transmuted into the idea of Charlemagne as the first builder of a united Europe, would be invoked again. The man had become a symbol, and the symbol had a life of its own, quite as long and quite as influential as the life of the king of history.

The Legacy in European History

When the legend is set aside and the historian asks what Charlemagne actually changed, what difference his life made to the long course of European history, the answer is found to be very large indeed, large enough to justify the judgment, often made, that he is one of the genuine makers of Europe. His legacy may be considered under several heads: the political, the religious, the cultural, and the symbolic.

Politically, Charlemagne's most visible creation, the unified empire, did not outlast his grandsons, and in that narrow sense his life's work failed. But the failure is less important than what survived the failure. The partition of his empire at Verdun in 843 traced, in its broadest lines, the enduring division of western Europe into a French west and a German east, and the political geography of the continent, including the long and tragic history of the contested middle lands between France and Germany, descends directly from that division of Charlemagne's inheritance. The imperial title that he revived, refounded in 962, endured for more than eight further centuries as the Holy Roman Empire and remained, all that time, a central institution and a central idea of European, and especially German and Italian, political life. And the model of kingship that he embodied, the powerful Christian monarch who was at once a war-leader, a lawgiver, a judge, and the guardian of the Church, set the pattern of medieval rulership.

Religiously, Charlemagne did as much as any single human being to shape the Christianity of medieval Europe. His conquest and forcible conversion of the Saxons and his pressure on the Avars and the Slavs of the eastern frontier extended Latin Christendom decisively across the Rhine and the Elbe and opened central Europe to the faith. His tireless reform of the Church, the raising of clerical standards, the spread of the Benedictine rule, the correction of the scriptures and the liturgy, gave the Western Church an order and a discipline it had lacked. And the close partnership of throne and altar that he embodied, the conviction that secular and spiritual authority were partners in a single Christian enterprise, became the governing assumption of medieval European civilization, even as the question of which partner was the senior generated the great church-and-state struggles of the centuries that followed.

Culturally, the legacy is perhaps the clearest and the least disputed of all. The Carolingian Renaissance that Charlemagne sponsored and drove rescued the literary inheritance of classical antiquity at the moment of its greatest danger, re-established schools and the discipline of learning, and produced, in the Carolingian minuscule, the ancestor of the very letters in which European languages are printed today. Almost every classical Latin text that survives owes its survival to a Carolingian copyist, and the unbroken tradition of Western learning, running on through the cathedral schools and the universities to the present, has one of its decisive points of renewal in the court and the monasteries of Charlemagne.

And symbolically, finally, Charlemagne bequeathed to Europe the enduring idea of its own unity. He was the last ruler before modern times to govern, as a single realm, the greater part of western and central Europe, and the memory of that unity, the memory of a Christian empire embracing the peoples who would become the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Low Countries, and more, remained a powerful presence in the European imagination. It is no accident that, when in the aftermath of the catastrophic European wars of the twentieth century the founders of a new movement for European integration looked for a patron and a symbol, they found him in Charlemagne, that the prize awarded at Aachen for service to European unity bears his name, and that the contemporary poet's title for him, Father of Europe, has been taken up again in our own time. The unity he achieved was the work of conquest and did not endure; but the idea of European unity, of which he remains the great historical emblem, has proved one of the most enduring of all his legacies.

Historical Assessment and Conclusion

To assess Charlemagne fairly, across the gulf of twelve centuries, is to hold in balance achievements of the first magnitude and actions that the modern conscience cannot but condemn, and the effort to hold that balance is itself instructive, for it warns against both the uncritical hero-worship that surrounded his memory for so long and the easy censoriousness that would judge a ruler of the eighth century by the standards of the twenty-first. He was, beyond any reasonable dispute, a man of extraordinary ability and extraordinary energy: a soldier who led his armies in person across half a continent for more than forty years, a statesman who devised the means to govern a realm of unprecedented size, a reformer who grasped, more clearly than any contemporary, that the health of religion and of learning was the foundation of a Christian society, and a ruler whose force of character was so great that it held together, by his personal authority alone, a structure that could not survive him. The sheer scale of what he attempted, and the sheer scale of what, within his own lifetime, he accomplished, set him apart from every other ruler of the early medieval West.

Yet the same record contains the long agony of the Saxon wars, with the forced conversions, the deportations of whole populations, and, above all, the mass execution at Verden, an act of cold and deliberate slaughter that no appeal to the standards of the age can entirely excuse and that Charlemagne's own warmest admirers have always found it necessary to confront. His rule was, in the most literal sense, an empire built by the sword, and the peace and the order and the cultural revival that historians rightly praise were purchased at a heavy cost in conquest, coercion, and blood. The judgment of history on Charlemagne must take in both the cathedral and the killing-ground; it cannot honestly take in only one.

There is, too, the question of how much of the achievement was the man's own and how much was the work of his age and his circumstances. Charlemagne inherited a kingdom already the strongest in the West, already enriched by his grandfather's victories and his father's conquests, already bound to the papacy by his father's policy and consecrated by his father's anointing. He was the heir of a rising power, and a less gifted man in his place might still have done great things. But the comparison with what came before and after is decisive. His Carolingian predecessors had built the kingdom; it was Charlemagne who transformed it into an empire, who revived the imperial title, who sponsored the cultural renewal, and who gave the whole enterprise its scope and its ambition. And his successors, inheriting his empire, could not hold it. The unique combination of military skill, administrative imagination, religious seriousness, intellectual curiosity, and inexhaustible personal energy that the enterprise required was his own, and the empire was, in the end, the lengthened shadow of one remarkable man.

The final reckoning, then, is that of a figure genuinely and rightly called great, with all the moral ambiguity that the careers of the great so often carry. Charlemagne did not, as the legend would have it, single-handedly create European civilization; civilization is never the work of one man. But he gave it, at a critical moment, a form, an impetus, and a direction that it would not otherwise have had. He extended and consolidated Latin Christendom; he revived the idea and the institution of empire in the West; he rescued the learning of the ancient world and refounded the schools that would carry it forward; he set the pattern of medieval kingship and the medieval partnership of church and state; and he left, in the memory of his unified realm, the enduring dream of a united Europe. Twelve centuries after his death at Aachen, the cathedral he built still stands above his bones, the script his scholars perfected is still, in its descendants, the script of the Western world, the nations carved from his empire still occupy the center of the continent, and the prize that bears his name is still awarded, in his city, to those who labor for the unity he once imposed and that Europe has sought, by gentler means, to recover. Few human beings have left a deeper or a more lasting mark upon the history of a civilization, and the Frankish king whom his own age, with reason, called Charles the Great has kept that title, by the verdict of all the ages since, as his own.