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.