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Charlemagne
Timeline
768
Charlemagne inherits Frankish throne jointly with his brother Carloman III
770
Charlemagne marries Desiderata of Lombardy, the marriage is dissolved the next year
771
Death of Carloman III leaves Charlemagne in sole control.
771
Charlemagne marries Hildegard of the Vinzau, his second wife
772-803
Offensive against pagan Saxons under Widukind
773
Charlemagne invades Lombardy
774
Charlemagne crowned king of Lombardy
774
Donation of Pepin upheld – establishment of Papal states under Carolingian control
778
Beginning of operations against Muslims in Spain, defeat at Ronscevalles
780
Carolingian miniscule developed at Corbie Abbey
782
Arrival of Alcuin in Aachen signals beginning of Carolingian Renaissance
783
Charlemagne marries Fastrada, his third wife
788
Deposition of Duke Tassilo of Bavaria
789
Admonitio Generalis sets out Charlemagne’s vision of a moral, educated society
792
Work begins on Charlemagne’s ‘capital’ – the palace of Aachen
794
Charlemagne marries Luitgard, his fourth wife
795
Offensive against the Avars
797
Council of Frankfurt upholds Catholic supremacy
799
Charlemagne is offered Byzantine throne through marriage to Empress Irene
799
Leo III seeks Charlemagne’s protection after his arrest by the Romans
800
Coronation of Charlemagne as first Holy Roman Emperor
802
Charlemagne imposes a universal oath of fealty from all adult males within the empire
802
Programmatic Capitulary issued developing social and legal policies
804
Carolingian Empire reaches its apogee covering an area of over one million square km
811
The ‘Spanish Marches’ are completed by Carolingian advance to the River Ebro
814
Capitulary for the Jews issued banning usury
814
Death of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious inherits.
Fig. 1: Charlemagne’s Empire
Character and context
Initially King of the Franks, latterly the first ‘Holy Roman Emperor’, Charlemagne presided
over the largest medieval empire in European history. Of comparable size to the Western
Roman empire of Constantine, it would remain unequalled until Napoleon at the turn of the
19th century. On one level, Charlemagne’s remarkable success was the product of continuity
– his predecessors Charles Martel and Pepin had firmly established Carolingian rule over the
already impressive Merovingian Frankish kingdom and had established the effective working
relationship with the Papacy that Charlemagne would exploit relentlessly during his reign. He
was also lucky, the problem of partitive succession which plagued the Frankish kingdom did
not apply to him – his sole co-ruler Carloman III died suddenly in 771 leaving him
undisputed sole ruler, a position moreover which he held for an unusually long period of 46
years, giving his regime innate strength through continuity.
Such spectacular imperial achievement could not have been achieved without the unique
energy and vision of its ruler. In accordance with the pessimistic spirit of his age,
Charlemagne did not consciously seek revolution, or even change but rather a reversion to the
greater glories of the Roman past. His clear intention was nothing less than the reestablishment of the western Roman Empire, an unoriginal ambition shared by the
Merovingians before him and by generations of Byzantine Emperors in the east. Unlike them
however, he succeeded, territorially by 800 his realm was of a comparable size and in that
year he became the first western European since Roman days to receive the title of
‘Emperor’. Out of such unique success, Johannes Fried believes, genuine change in the nature
of government and its relationship with the governed was inevitable, even if subconscious:
‘Charlemagne may be regarded as one of the men of action who wanted to preserve and
renew things at the same time and yet achieved something genuinely new’1.
Court, power projection and vision
Early medieval rulers perforce travelled extensively. Poor communications and limited
central government meant that royal ‘progresses’ through the entire realm were necessary for
a ruler to reassert their authority, whilst wars invariably required the personal leadership of a
king. Although he undoubtedly fulfilled both of these roles, the sheer size of his empire plus
Charlemagne’s personal preference for comfortable living meant that as far as possible he
remained within the western regions of modern Germany where his family’s personal estates
were located at palaces at Worms, Ingelheim and above all Aachen (Aix-La-Chapelle). As a
consequence a stronger notion of geographically centralised government existed under
Charlemagne, known as the ‘palace’ after the building that housed it – the palatium publicum.
It was in essence the precedent for the Court – the key feature of personal monarchy that
would define European government throughout the medieval period. It is significant that for
the first time a European ‘capital’ city had been established north of the Mediterranean,
presaging the emergence of northern Europe as a power base in its own right during the
medieval period.
Centralisation required a much larger coterie of ministers, administrators, ambassadors and
servants than that utilised by his predecessors, perhaps two thousand, something only made
possible by Charlemagne’s exceptional wealth. The palatium publicum was a tool for the
projection of Charlemagne’s personal power, and as such needed to reflect the wealth,
civilising influence and culture of its ruler, setting a precedent for what later rulers would
refer to as ‘Majesty’. To that end Aachen in particular was built to an unrivalled physical
splendour, its still surviving Palatine Chapel consciously echoes both the past glories of
Rome and conscious imitation of the existent Byzantine imperial tradition – Charlemagne’s
inspiration was Justinian’s Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Elaborate ceremony
emphasising the might and majesty of the king, again consciously imitating the byzantine,
accompanied the functions of this court. At mealtimes for instance, only Charlemagne’s table
was set with a tablecloth whilst courtiers were encouraged to dress in finery, consciously
contrasting with the king who affected a simple form of dress as a nod to his humility and to
his Frankish heritage, as his chronicler Einhard relates:
‘He used to wear the national, that is to say, the Frank, dress-next his skin a linen shirt and
linen breeches, and above these a tunic fringed with silk; while hose fastened by bands
covered his lower limbs, and shoes his feet, and he protected his shoulders and chest in winter
by a close-fitting coat of otter or marten skins. Over all he flung a blue cloak, and he always
had a sword girt about him, usually one with a gold or silver hilt and belt; he sometimes
1
Fried J. Charlemagne (Harvard, 2016) p. 550.
carried a jewelled sword, but only on great feast-days or at the reception of ambassadors from
foreign nations. He despised foreign costumes, however handsome, and never allowed
himself to be robed in them, except twice in Rome, when he donned the Roman tunic,
chlamys, and shoes; the first time at the request of Pope Hadrian, the second to gratify Leo,
Hadrian's successor. On great feast-days he made use of embroidered clothes, and shoes
bedecked with precious stones; his cloak was fastened by a golden buckle, and he appeared
crowned with a diadem of gold and gems: but on other days his dress varied little from the
common dress of the people.’2
Fig. 2: The 14th century Bust of
Charlemagne
containing
his
skullcap.
Fig. 3: The Palatine Chapel of Aachen, part of the Palace of Charlemagne
built in 792.
The bulk of courtiers attending upon Charlemagne were aristocrats drawn from the 42 noble
families of the empire whose loyalty was conditional on personal advantage, in return for
service they expected patronage in the form of gifts of land. Factions inevitably formed, and
to prevent them from turning into potential palace coups, Charlemagne sent most of his many
sons to distant royal domains. Although often dismissed as innately unstable and dependent
on continuous conquest to fulfil the demands of the aristocracy for fresh lands, this mode of
personal monarchy pioneered by Charlemagne actually functioned with comparative stability.
Although he did face some aristocratic rebellion in his early reign, by the 790s the great noble
families of the empire such as the Widonids provided Charlemagne with loyal military
service and effective local government, enabling him to delegate the running of the empire
whilst retaining the reins of power at its core, thereby avoiding the vicious circle of imperial
coups and provincial rebellion which had destroyed the vitality of the western Roman
Empire. Efficiently managed self–interest lay at the heart of this. As Wickham3 has observed,
Charlemagne was immensely generous in his grants of land to his aristocracy but he tempered
this by dispersing these grants across his empire; the Widonids receiving land on the French
coast and central Italy in addition to their family estates on the river Rhine – over a thousand
kilometres apart; and by making them conditional rather than hereditary – every generation
had to have their rights to the land renewed by the king. Such grants were moreover often
2
3
Einhard The Life of Charlemagne Ch. 23 trans. Turner S.E. (New York, 1880).
Wickham C Medieval Europe (Yale, 2016) p. 65.
linked to the holding of imperial offices (honores) which could be withdrawn at the king’s
pleasure.
Moreover, Charlemagne’s apparently easy going personality possessed a ruthless core. He
could, and did act decisively against any threat to his position, including from his own family
as Einhard relates, describing the aftermath of a plot by Charlemagne’s illegitimate son Pepin
the Hunchback to assassinate his father in 792:
‘This Pepin shammed sickness, and plotted against his father in company with some of the
leading Franks, who seduced him with vain promises of the royal authority. When his deceit
was discovered, and the conspirators were punished, his head was shaved, and he was
suffered, in accordance with his wishes, to devote himself to a religious life in the monastery
of Prüm… all the traitors were banished, some of them without mutilation, others after their
eyes had been put out’4.
Charlemagne’s ruthless pragmatism was even more apparent in his treatment of his four
wives whom he married for strictly diplomatic purposes and apparently allocated them no coregnal responsibilities in the manner of Justinian and Theodora. The first, Desiderata, was a
Lombard princess whom he divorced within two years to marry Hildegard whose family
connections bought him the support of the Alemannian provinces that had formally belonged
to his deceased brother Carloman. She gave Charlemagne eight children in 12 years, the
childbirth of the last of which killed her. Unsentimentally the king immediately married
Fastrada, winning the allegiance of the eastern Franks at a time when he was waging war
beyond their border with the Saxons. He continued this pattern after Fastrada died in 794,
renewing his alliance with the Alemannians by marrying Luitgard.
In his relations with his family and nobility therefore, Charlemagne’s conduct was very much
on a par with his predecessors, albeit more effective in its maintenance of his power. The
innovation lay in his love of learning, and of scholars. To that end his court became the hub
of a veritable Carolingian Renaissance, attracting the finest minds in Europe such as the
Northumbrian Alcuin, Peter the Grammarian from Italy and Theodulf the Visigoth from
Spain. The acknowledged leader of these savants, Alcuin, aspired to recreate and go beyond
the finest traditions of classical learning, declaring his intention to create a ‘new Athens’ 5 in
Aachen. It is principally owing to Alcuin and his pupil Einhard’s work6 that we have the most
detailed primary record of Charlemagne’s reign of any early medieval monarch. Crucially as
Davis relates, Charlemagne’s respect for these scholars provided an opportunity for the reassertion of moral government as the Roman Catholic Church understood it: ‘For centuries
the Roman church had been striving to give Frankish kings a real understanding of the value
of civilisation and the duty of a Christian king’7. In Charlemagne they found a willing pupil.
Under the scholar’s influence, Davis continues, Charlemagne’s vision of rule broadened
hugely in comparison to his predecessors: ‘He considered it his duty as a Christian king not
only to protect his subjects but also to educate them. Such an idea would have seemed
ridiculous to the Merovingian’s, who treated their kingdom as nothing more than a
4
Einhard Ch. 20.
Alcuin to Charlemagne Letter 170 March 799.
6
Alcuin’s letters and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne completed between 817 and 833.
7
Davis RHC A History of Medieval Europe (London, 1970) p. 137.
5
property… But to Charlemagne it seemed no more than his duty. He was convinced that he
was living in a world which had lost its culture, and he was determined to restore it’8.
The sincerity of Charlemagne’s attachment to this new, enlightened model of kingship can be
seen in his use of the scholars who flocked to his court. No mere academic ornaments, many
were assembled into a ‘cabinet’ of advisors – Alcuin himself was an extremely busy man
being put to work reassembling the remnants of classical learning from across Charlemagne’s
empire whilst simultaneously serving as headmaster of a court school at Aachen for the sons
of the nobility and serving as a quasi-prime minister as ‘chancellor’ of imperial government.
A Carolingian Renaissance?
Alcuin’s court school was the beginning of the first recorded attempt at instituting a state
system of education. Drawing inspiration from the message of universal learning contained in
Charlemagne’s favourite book, St Augustine’s City of God, monasteries and cathedrals were
encouraged to establish their own schools across the empire. The result was a network which
stretched from the Pyrenees to eastern Germany. Local centres of excellence sprang up on the
model of the ‘scholar monasteries’ of Alcuin’s native Northumbria: Fulda in Wurzburg and
Corbie in Picardy being the most impressive.
In the pre-print age, Charlemagne’s centrally directed effort at increasing book production
was equally vital in promulgating his Renaissance. Fried estimates as many as 10,000 new
books9 were created in Charlemagne’s reign, an effort that must have required over a million
goats, sheep and calves whose skin was required for the vellum parchment. To render these
texts accessible to the newly literate a new, clear method of calligraphy was developed by the
monks of Corbie Abbey and imposed throughout the empire – ‘Carolingian minuscule’, the
source of modern lower case typefaces. Effective though this promulgation of knowledge
may have been it was achieved at a huge cost, indeed so onerous was this burden on the
monasteries charged with book production that in 817 they unsuccessfully petitioned
Charlemagne’s successor Louis the Pious to be allowed henceforth to produce books only for
their own needs.
The consequences of the Carolingian Renaissance on European learning cannot be
underestimated however. As works of art, Carolingian manuscripts such as the Lorsch
Gospels and Dagulf Psalter set a standard that all subsequent medieval book production
would be measured against. More significantly however the Renaissance arrived at a crucial
moment when learning was on the brink of extinction across much of Western Europe.
Charlemagne anticipated the humanists in his view that the pagan ‘classics’ were as worthy
of preservation as the Christian ‘fathers’ and thus amongst his books we see Jerome and
Augustine rubbing shoulders with Virgil and Aristotle. In the ensuing centuries the
Carolingian scholastic monasteries would maintain this outlook, and within them a dedicated
group of monastic scholars such as William of Moerbeke who would devote their lives to
seeking out, preserving and copying the classics from diverse locations within western
Europe, the Byzantine Empire and even the Muslim middle east. In so doing the Carolingian
8
9
Ibid. pp.136-7
Fried (2016) p.242
Renaissance ensured the survival of the foundations of ‘European’ culture as we would
understand it today.
Fig.4: Sample of Carolingian miniscule script
Fig. 5: The Lorch Gospel
Charlemagne the warrior
Despite his intellectual pretensions, Charlemagne’s principal occupation was warfare. For the
bulk of his reign he waged war on multiple fronts across his empire, and it was his success in
this, perhaps more than anything else that shaped his legacy on European history. The realm
that Charlemagne inherited had to a large extent been purged by his two predecessors Pippin
and Charles Martel of the internal strife that had plagued the later Merovingians and thus he
was free to concentrate on fulfilling the ultimate aspiration of the Frankish kings – the reunification of Western Europe by conquest.
The presumption of warfare as the normal state of politics under Charlemagne is reflected in
the institution of the placitum generale – a general assembly or proto-parliament of the
leading clergy and nobility of the empire held yearly. At the start of each assembly matters
concerning the governance of the whole realm would be discussed such as the legal status of
peasantry or regional variations in monastic codes of conduct. Its main purpose however was
to organise the resources’ of the empire for war, as Davis calls it ‘A meeting of the Frankish
nation in arms’10, and in reflection of this it met not at Aachen or another central location
within the empire, but on the particular border which Charlemagne had decided would bear
the main effort of the Carolingian army that year. After a period of discussion; unlike his
Merovingian predecessors Charlemagne was noted for his ability to incorporate the views of
others into his plans; the placitum generale would convert from an assembly into a military
headquarters and soldiers from across the empire would be instructed to muster on its
location by means of very precise royal summons, typified by that issued to the Abbot of St
Quentin in 806:
‘Be it known to you that this year our placitum generale has been fixed on Saxony, in the
eastern district, on the river Bode, at the place called Strassfurt. Therefore we order you to be
10
Davis p. 141
at this place with your full contingent with your men armed and prepared on the 14th of the
Kalends of July’.11
Charlemagne’s wars fall into two broad categories: ostensibly ‘defensive’ wars designed to
stabilise his frontiers and acts of blatant aggression designed to expand them. Within the
former category falls his actions against Ummayyad Spain and the Sorb/Bohemian lands of
the modern Czech Republic – in both cases he established ‘marchlands’ – militarised areas
permeable to trade but sufficiently fortified to hamper invasion. To the latter belongs his
conquest of Saxony, the last pagan stronghold in Western Europe and his aggressive
campaign against the Avars, most recent of the invaders from the Eurasian steppe. These
actions saw Charlemagne’s savage, almost fundamentalist approach equating conquest,
forced Christian conversion and absorption into his empire as his God given duty. The Saxon
invasion, featuring forced deportations of entire populations was sufficiently severe to cause
Alcuin to threaten resignation in 797, upon which Charlemagne partially relented and
removed the policy of forced baptism on pain of death he had just imposed on the Saxons. Of
his actions against the Avars, Einhard’s sombre record bears testimony to its genocidal
character, leading as it did to: ‘The utter depopulation of Pannonia, and the site of the Khan's
palace, now a desert, where not a trace of human habitation is visible bear witness how many
battles were fought in those years, and how much blood was shed. The entire body of the
Avar nobility perished in this contest, and all its glory with it.’12
The other main theatre of war, northern Italy, was a mixture of defence and aggression. It
comprised an extremely aggressive invasion of Lombardy in 773 culminating in a sustained
siege of its capital Pavia, a display of what modern military theorists refer to as ‘shock and
awe’ which culminated in the surrender of the Lombard king Desidarius and Charlemagne’s
seizure of both the Lombard lands and crown. Significantly it was launched after an appeal
by Pope Hadrian who was losing papal territory in central Italy to the Lombards and who had
appealed to his legal overlord, the Byzantine emperor, for aid in vain. Charlemagne’s victory
therefore represented not only an expansion of his already vast empire but the eclipse of all
remaining Byzantine authority over the papacy, paving the way for Charlemagne’s papally
sanctioned enthronement as Holy Roman Emperor in 800.
War was a thoroughly merciless business in the 7th and 8th centuries, but the description of
contemporary chroniclers suggests that Charlemagne could be brutal even by the sanguinary
standards of the day. A possible explanation for this is that Charlemagne, although
undoubtedly courageous, had an indifferent record as a general. Although all his campaigns
were either victorious or at least brought to a satisfactory conclusion, he rarely displayed
tactical insight against what were usually numerically and technologically inferior opponents.
When he faced a skilled opponent this lack of insight could lead to defeat or even disaster, as
in Spain at Roncesvalles in 778 when the entire rear-guard of his army was ambushed and
slaughtered in a narrow mountain pass by a numerically inferior force of Basques.
11
Letter of Charlemagne to Abbot Fulrad. trans. Munro D. C. in Ed. Munro DC Translations and Reprints from
the Original Sources of European history ( University of Pennsylvania Press, 1900) Vol. VI, No. 5, pp. 11-12.
12
Einhard Ch. 13.
Fig. 6,7 and 8: Three faces of Carolingian warfare. Left to Right: The death of Roland at Ronscevalles, guerrilla warfare in
the Saxon forests, the Carolingian heavy cavalry – core of the army.
Nor does it seem that most of the Carolingian army was technically superior in its equipment
to its opponents, the elite heavy cavalry excepted. Charlemagne seems to have made few
technical innovations to the war machine he inherited from Charles Martel although Simon
Coupland has identified the appearance of a new, uniformly high grade of steel in
Carolingian swords from Charlemagne’s reign which he believes did convey a decisive
advantage in battle13. The king’s influence is more discernible in the social and administrative
aspects of war, as one might expect given Charlemagne’s strengths elsewhere. The Matter of
France, a cycle of poetry set in the Carolingian era describes how Charlemagne named his
twelve greatest warriors as ‘Paladins’, a brotherhood of warriors bound by an early form of
the chivalric code to fight honourably and protect each other. One of the victims of the
Roncevaux debacle, Roland became the hero of the most famous element of the Matter of
France, the Song of Roland and the definitive role model for the knight, a title that began to
be used in Charlemagne’s era to describe elite cavalry. This extract illustrates the conduct in
battle that ‘knights’ were expected to display:
‘Count Roland never hath loved the base [cowardice], Nor the proud of heart, nor the dastard
race, Nor knight, but if he were vassal good, And he spake to Turpin, as there he stood; "On
foot are you, on horseback I; For your love I halt, and stand you by. Together for good and ill
we hold; I will not leave you for man of mould. We will pay the heathen their onset back,
Nor shall Durindana [the name of Roland’s sword] of blows be slack." "Base," said Turpin,
"who spares to smite: When the Emperor comes, he will all requite."14
How complete these social mores were by Charlemagne’s reign is unclear, nor is it certain
that the Paladins ever existed in reality; the surviving version of the Matter of France dates
from as late as the 13th century 500 years after Charlemagne; but his ability to wage war
relentlessly and successfully for over thirty years indicates that a core of military
professionals must have developed within the Carolingian army and it seems entirely
Coupland S. ‘Carolingian Arms and Armour in the Ninth Century’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies:
v.21 (1990).
14
The Song of Roland ‘The Horn’ verse CLXXX trans. O’Hagan J. (London, 1883).
13
plausible that Charlemagne would have encouraged both their loyalty and their energy by the
development of a unique identity and code of conduct in the manner of the Paladins.
Charlemagne’s organisational astuteness is much less arguable and it is here that the
Carolingian army possessed a decisive advantage over its opponents. With the vast resources
at his command and an efficient central government run by able individuals, Charlemagne
was able to assemble and consistently supply substantial bodies of troops indefinitely –
something that no European king, not even Justinian, had been able to achieve since Roman
times. Numerous muster documents plus the official record known as the Royal Frankish
Annals survive with detailed instructions to landowners not only as to the troops they should
supply but also the commodities needed to support them. The letter referred to earlier by
Charlemagne to the Abbot of St Quentin for instances goes on to describe the equipment each
of his ‘armed and prepared men’ should possess:
‘Every horseman shall have a shield, lance, long sword, short sword, bow, quiver and arrows.
In your cart you shall have tools of every kind, hatchets, adzes, augers, axes, pick-axes, iron
spades and all other implements that are necessary against an enemy’15.
Such detail hints at a systematic approach to war unseen since Roman times. In particular
repeated references16 to the construction of bridges, and even an attempt to link the Rhine to
the Danube via a canal in 793, suggest the existence of a skilled corps of field engineers
providing mobility and counter mobility to Carolingian armies as well as the more basic
services of fortress construction.
Such skills and organisation were of particular advantage in the thickly forested and river
cleaved landscape of central Europe whose geography strongly favoured defence. This was
particularly relevant in the longest and most brutal of Charlemagne’s wars, his 32 year
campaign of subjugation against the pagan Saxons from 772-804. The war commenced on a
bitter note following mutual accusations of broken treaties and holy sites defiled on both
sides of the border. By 779 the ‘conventional’ phase of the war had come to an end with all of
Saxony at least theoretically occupied, many of her fortresses destroyed and her people
officially converted to Christianity. However stung by Charlemagne’s violently anti-pagan
Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae legislation and led by an determined and ingenious leader
Widukind, the Saxons waged protracted guerrilla war, exploiting Charlemagne’s frequent
absences on campaign elsewhere in the empire to infiltrate areas supposedly safely
Carolingian. Stalemate and mutual atrocity followed in a manner reminiscent of the
Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.
Crucially however, Charlemagne had no need to consider domestic public opinion in his
decision to continue prosecuting the Saxon War and thus, unlike Richard Nixon in Vietnam
he had no need to either seek a swift decisive conclusion to the war or to withdraw when this
conclusion failed to materialise. Instead he was able to steadily pile on pressure upon the
Saxons year on year, leading expeditions into the main areas of resistance, seizing hostages
from Saxon leadership and on at least one occasion, carrying out exemplary massacres of
15
Letter of Charlemagne to Abbot Fulrad. 804-811
Dalicsek, D. Charlemagne’s Saxon wars in the primary sources (University of Southern Denmark 2016)
pp.3-5 in http://www.academia.edu/ accessed on 04/01/17.
16
prisoners17. His ultimate victory seems to have resulted from the construction of a series of
fortified ‘frontier towns’ such as Bremen and Paderborn from which Saxony could be
partitioned into Carolingian style ‘counties’ and missionaries could be despatched. Hemmed
in by a network of permanent Carolingian military and theological operating bases, the Saxon
elite including Widukind conceded defeat, accepted baptism and were incorporated into the
Carolingian political order. Deprived of leadership, Saxon resistance withered and by the
mid-9th century its distinct pagan identity had withered away. Victory was thus less
accomplished by military skill as the relentless application of resources. It is significant that
Charlemagne confined his territorial ambitions on the eastern border of his empire to areas in
which this strategic, fortress driven approach to warfare was effective. When in 795 he
embarked on an equally brutal, religiously motivated war against the pagan Avars, he
exploited temporary weakness on their part caused by a lack of leadership to launch a
devastating sweep across their lands, ravaging their capital in the process. However he
confined actual occupation to the western area of Pannonia with its natural northern and
eastern frontier of the River Danube. As the ‘Avar March’, this area was resettled and
militarised, providing a buffer zone against aggression from the surviving Avars and other
stepped dwellers from the indefensible plains to the east of the Danube.
Charlemagne was undoubtedly sincere in his belief that his position was God given and
brought with it a duty to impose Christianity upon his neighbours, even at the point of a
sword. As we have seen however, this aggressive evangelism was tempered on his eastern
frontiers by a pragmatic understanding of what was achievable, and by the humane advice of
Alcuin to whom forced baptism was an abomination.
In one theatre of war however, Charlemagne’s zeal was unrestrained – the fluid frontier in
northern Spain and southern France between Christians and Muslims. Motivated perhaps by a
desire to emulate his grandfather Charles Martel, Charlemagne was also undoubtedly
influenced by contemporary views within Christendom that Islam, particularly the Spanish
Ummayyad emirates18, was the ultimate enemy of Christianity, as Davis notes, ‘It made no
difference that the Spanish Christians were not (as yet) deliberately persecuted by the
Muslims, since to the Franks the very fact of Muslim rule seemed oppressive’19.
Accordingly, despite his defeat at Ronscevalles in 778; ironically at the hands of Christian
Basques angered by Carolingian pillaging; Charlemagne regarded his south western border
with the Spanish emirates as unfinished business throughout much of his reign, seeking to
accomplish by intrigue what he had failed to achieve by force of arms, capturing the fortress
city of Barcelona in 797 for instance when its governor Zeid, having failed in his rebellion
against his overlord the Emir of Cordoba, handed it over in the interest of self-protection.
Ultimately, a defendable ‘marchland’ on the model of Pannonia was established in northern
Spain by 811 when after a sustained effort by the main Carolingian army, a frontier was
established along the line of the River Ebro enabling Charlemagne to threaten the rich
agricultural heartland of Valencia. Four of the surviving Spanish Christian kingdoms of
Pamplona (later Navarre), Aragon, Sobrarbe and Ribagorza acknowledged Charlemagne as
17
In 782 at Verden the Royal Frankish Annals tell us he executed 4,500 Saxon males of warrior age.
The clearest reflection of contemporary European views is the Mozarbic Chronicle of 754 written by a
Christian living under Muslim occupation in Spain.
19
Davis p.143.
18
their overlord creating a precedent for united action against the Umayyads. After
Charlemagne’s death however the non-aligned Christian state of Asturias claimed authority
over the other Christian realms and the slow process of ‘Reconquista’ of Spanish Muslim
lands began. Thus although Charlemagne undoubtedly helped lay the groundwork for this,
the first crusading movement, it would be an exaggeration to describe him as its progenitor.
Ironically Charlemagne’s most successful religiously motivated war took place against his
fellow Christians – the Lombards who menaced the papal states of central Italy. The conquest
of Lombardy in 774 added both territory and an extra crown to Charlemagne’s realm, but it
also directly led to the most spectacular event of his life, his coronation as Holy Roman
Emperor by Pope Hadrian in 800.
Why was Charlemagne crowned Emperor in 800?
Before 800 there was only one acknowledged ‘king of kings’ or emperor in Christendom, the
Byzantine emperor in Constantinople whose overlordship of much of western Europe was
still formally acknowledged by many powers, including the papacy who symbolically kept
the imperial palace of the Roman Emperors in Rome empty for his return. However,
following Charlemagne’s victory over the Lombards, as Munz writes, ‘Everything conspired
to make him appear as the divinely appointed head of the imperium christianum, co-extensive
with the vast regnum Francorum, and, so far as Western Europe, was concerned, almost
indistinguishable from the imperium Romanum’20.
The coronation owed as much to papal and Byzantine politics as Carolingian. In 799 a double
crisis enveloped these centres of Christendom – Pope Leo III was arrested and accused of
immoral conduct by a conspiracy of the Roman aristocracy whilst the Byzantine Emperor
Constantine VI was dethroned, mutilated and replaced by his own mother Irene in a palace
coup. Byzantine ambassadors offered Charlemagne the Byzantine throne via marriage to
Irene which he realistically apprised as an impractical prospect, although it would give him a
pretext for usurping the power of the Byzantine throne in the west. Charlemagne was able to
offer more practical assistance to Leo III however, acting as an arbiter between the Pope and
his accusers and restoring him to his position.
This restoration marked the culmination in the growth of a uniquely close relationship
between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty beginning with the Donation of Pepin in 756
which had created the papal states and continuing in Charlemagne’s reign through his
campaigns against pagans and Muslims, his support of the Catholic Church’s primacy in the
west at the Council of Frankfurt in 797, his salvation of the papal states from Lombard
aggression and above all in his confirmation of Pepin’s Donation in 774. Crucially in that
year Charlemagne became the first temporal ruler in Europe since the days of the Caesars to
enter Rome, albeit as a pilgrim not a prince. The papacy meanwhile, having seen at first hand
the reluctance of the Byzantines to intervene in its defence when menaced by the Lombards
and keen to separate itself from the eastern Orthodox Church seized on Irene’s coup as an
opportunity to renounce its allegiance to Constantinople; Leo argued that the position of
emperor could not be held by a woman and was therefore vacant; sought a new protector.
20
Munz P. ‘The imperial coronation of Charlemagne’ in History Today Vol. 9 Issue 7 July 1959 p. 4.
Exactly whose idea it was to crown Charlemagne emperor, the man himself or Leo is unclear,
but it certainly suited both parties. The event itself was a carefully managed piece of theatre
as Leo III’s biography, the Vita Leonis III relates:
‘On the day of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ all [who had been present at the council]
came together again in the same basilica of blessed Peter the apostle. And then the venerable
and holy pontiff, with his own hands, crowned [Charles] with a most precious crown. Then
all the faithful Romans, seeing how he loved the holy Roman church and its vicar and how he
defended them, cried out with one voice by the will of God and of St. Peter, the key-bearer of
the kingdom of heaven, "To Charles, most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and
peace-loving emperor, life and victory”. This was said three times before the sacred tomb of
blessed Peter the apostle, with the invocation of many saints, and he was instituted by all as
emperor of the Romans. Thereupon, on that same day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the most holy bishop and pontiff anointed his most excellent son Charles as king with holy
oil.’21
Fig.10: Renaissance artist Raphael’s 16th century fresco of Charlemagne’s coronation
Einhard tells us that Charlemagne was surprised and even irritated by this apparently
spontaneous gesture, although in reality this show of reluctance was for the benefit of the
Byzantine, with whom confrontation at this usurpation of their western imperium was
inevitable: ‘He bore very patiently with the jealousy which the Roman emperors showed
upon his assuming these titles, for they took this step very ill; and by dint of frequent
embassies and letters, in which he addressed them as brothers, he made their haughtiness
yield to his magnanimity, a quality in which he was unquestionably much their superior.’22
21
22
Vita Leonis III (795-816), Lib Pontificalis, II.
Einhard Ch. 28.
As to the precise nature of the authority Charlemagne now claimed as emperor, the key lies in
the enigmatic title he chose for himself: Holy Roman Emperor. As Heer observes, this title
was designed to convey different notions of Charlemagne’s new imperial authority to the
leaders of Western Europe’s Church and states:
‘To the Franks in general the coronation must have seemed a thorough going and visible
vindication of their faith… Christ had elected the King of the Franks and war leader of the
God-chosen Frankish people… to lead them on earth. The clerical intelligentsia… had the
satisfaction of seeing Charles established as the protector of all Roman Catholic Christians…
To the Romans on that day Charles had appeared… as a Roman emperor and his coronation
was a completely standard Roman imperial coronation. More concretely, he appeared to the
Romans as the master of their long standing Lombard enemies, as their champion against the
much detested Byzantines… and not least as master of the Pope’23.
It should also be added that millenarian angst played it part. With an ever growing gap
between east and west Christendom and the menace of Islam on its southern borders, many in
western Europe believed Armageddon and the Last Judgement was nigh. This included
Charlemagne himself who prefaced his capitulary of 793 on educational and Church reform
with the ominous sentence: ‘We are aware that in the Last Days false prophets have risen.’24
With the possibility of imminent apocalypse, Charlemagne was undoubtedly influenced by
the notion that Christendom must unite itself under an active and vigorous imperium if it was
to stave off the attentions of the Antichrist and his agents.
Impotent as they were under the uncertain leadership of Irene, the Byzantines’ response was
of derision rather than opposition to what they saw as a short lived and futile usurpation of
the rightful powers of their own emperor. In this they underestimated what was to prove a
seismic event – the elevation of a separate western emperor, and one whose power base lay
beyond the boundaries of the old Roman empire moreover, confirmed and strengthened the
notion of an emerging separate identity on the part of western Europeans. Tellingly the name
they, and their neighbours, gave to this new identity was not ‘European’ but ‘Frankish’, the
ethnicity of their new Emperor and his aristocracy who by 800 ruled over nearly all of them.
Church and State
A symbiotic relationship between Emperor and Pope was confirmed at Charlemagne’s
coronation, but for his part Charlemagne had no intention of letting the Papacy intrude in
what he now regarded as his right to universal imperium over western Christendom. He
regarded the Papacy’s role is entirely confined to spiritual authority as he makes clear in a
letter to Leo III in 796: ‘Our task is, with the aid of divine piety, to defend the Holy Church
of Christ with arms against the attack of pagans and devastation by infidels from without, and
to fortify it from within with knowledge of the Catholic faith. Your task, most Holy Father, is
to lift up your hands to God, like Moses, so as to aid our troops’.25
23
Heer F. The Holy Roman Empire (London, 1967) pp.11-12.
Introductory Gloss to Admonitio generalis (789).
25
Cited in Davis p. 146.
24
This bold statement, and Davis’ supporting assertion that Charlemagne reduced the Catholic
Church to ‘A department of state, a sort of ministry of prayer’26, is probably an exaggeration
but nonetheless as principle patron and protector of the Catholic Church, Charlemagne
exerted an overwhelming influence over its governance, selecting senior clergy, establishing
new dioceses in formerly pagan areas and above all presiding over ecclesiastical councils
designed to establish religious orthodoxy within the increasingly independent Catholic
Church. The Council of Frankfurt of 797, convened in response to the Byzantine Second
Council of Nicea in 787 from which western clergy were excluded, provides the first clear
instance of the western Catholic Church evolving a consciously separate theological position
to the eastern Orthodox, specifically relating to the worship of icons and the denunciation of a
new strand of Christianity known as Adoptionism27 as heresy. In 809 Charlemagne convened
the follow-up Council of Aachen which came up with a new definition of the Holy Trinity28,
again at variance with the Orthodox view. Significantly this time however Pope Leo III
resisted the definition too, suggesting that although Charlemagne’s control of the Frankish
clergy was complete, on matters of theology at least the papacy itself remained a free agent.
Charlemagne’s power over the Church was most apparent in his vigorous programmes of
clerical reform designed to improve both the education and the morals of the clergy within
his realm culminating in the Instruction of canons of Aachen of 816 which laid down a code
of conduct for secular clergy comparable to the Rule of St Benedict applied to monks.
Charlemagne, clearly modelling his imperial authority over the Church on that enjoyed by
Christian emperors from Constantine onwards, saw no difficulties in his universal authority
over church and state, nor apparently did many clergy for there is little evidence for anything
other than minor dissent to his jurisdiction. On the contrary, Charlemagne viewed the church
and state inseparable arms of good governance, the objective of both of which should be
unitas et consonantia (unity and harmony) between Christians and their rulers. This is
reflected in the composition of the missi (‘royal messengers’), the institution of government
charged with ensuring Charlemagne’s will was imposed on local government, church and
state alike. These missi comprised mixed teams of trusted nobility and senior clergy whose
principle role was to administer the oaths of allegiance to Charlemagne and his heirs required
of every subject of the empire over the age of twelve. Beyond this, missi had the right and
duty to intervene in any sphere of governance where they detected abuse to ensure that ‘All
shall live entirely in accordance with God's precept, justly and under a just rule, and each one
shall be admonished to live in harmony with his fellows in his business or profession; the
canonical clergy ought to observe in every respect a canonical life without heeding base gain,
nuns ought to keep diligent watch over their lives, laymen and the secular clergy ought
rightly to observe their laws without malicious fraud, and all ought to live in mutual charity
and perfect peace.’29 In addition to their own judgement, missi were provided with detailed
written instructions with title such as On Thieves and Robbers and On Coinage, documents
26
Ibid.
A notion developed in Spain that Jesus was the adopted, not natural son of God seeking a compromise
between the Christian view of Jesus as divine and the Islamic view of Him as a prophet.
28
Aachen asserted the divinity of God the Son as well as God the Father.
29
General Capitulary of the Missi (802).
27
so detailed that there effect was as Freid describes to impose ‘A restrictive ubiquity of royal
authority wherever they were applied’30.
This ‘ubiquity of royal authority’ was an impressive expression of personal power by
Charlemagne over an empire which, by 804 was over a million square kilometres in area and
inhabited by perhaps 20 million people31, almost double the land ruled over by the
Merovingians. Imperial governance was however, as Wickham suggests a case of ‘flexible
uniformity.’32 Its base unit was the county under the jurisdiction of a noble known as a count
responsible for the transmission of all state business including the dispensing of justice, the
collection of taxes and the maintenance of roads and bridges. Invariably drawn from the
ranks of the local nobility, these counts were technically dismissible but in reality many had
such strong ties to the land they administered that this was often not an option and their office
usually became hereditary. With the exception of Bavaria which preserved its own
government under the semi-independent rule of its Duke Tassilo until the later was deposed
in 788 all of the Carolingian lands were placed under the control of as many as 600 counts.
Counties were of wildly varying sizes however, their borders based on a combination of
natural, tribal and aristocratic frontiers33. East of the Rhine moreover, many of the larger
counties were subdivided into gaus34 which formed the principle units of local government.
Other than counts, the only universal ranks of local government within the empire were the
scabini, essentially judges, seven of which were allocated to each county to assist the count
with the interpretation of law. Cooperation between locality and centrality hinged therefore
on the written word rather than officialdom – specifically the capitulary, an instruction issued
by the clerks of Charlemagne’s household which has the force of law. The staggering level of
detail apparent in many of these capitularies hints that for all its simplicity, a relatively
sophisticated level of central control was attained over the localities. The capitulary De Villis
for instance, lays down in microscopic detail the management of Charlemagne’s own estates:
‘We desire that each steward shall make an annual statement of all our income, giving an
account of our lands cultivated by the oxen which our own ploughmen drive and of our lands
which the tenants of farms ought to plough; of the pigs, of the rents, of the obligations and
fines; of the game taken in our forests without our permission; of the various compositions;
of the mills, of the forest, of the fields, of the bridges and ships; of the free men and the
districts under obligations to our treasury; of markets, vineyards, and those who owe wine to
us; of the hay, firewood, torches, planks, and other kinds of lumber; of the waste lands; of the
vegetables, millet, panic; of the wool, flax, and hemp; of the fruits of the trees; of the nut
trees, larger and smaller; of the grafted trees of all kinds; of the gardens; of the turnips; of the
fish ponds; of the hides, skins, and horns; of the honey and wax; of the fat, tallow, and soap;
of the mulberry wine, cooked wine, mead, vinegar, beer, and wine, new and old; of the new
30
Freid p. 197.
Estimate from Henning J. ‘Early Medieval towns: The way of the economy in the Frankish area between
dynamism and deceleration’ in Ed. Henning J Post-Roman towns, Trade and settlement in Europe and
Byzantium Vol. 1 The Heirs of the Roman West (Berlin, 2007).
32
Wickham C Medieval Europe (Yale, 2016) p.69
33
The ultimate legacy of this unequal division was the patchwork of nearly 300 states that made up the late
medieval, purely German, Holy Roman Empire that endured until 1805.
34
In an effort to establish continuity with the Holy Roman Empire ‘First Reich’, a parody of the gau would be
resurrected as a unit of local government by the Nazi authorities of the Third Reich in the 1930s.
31
grain and the old; of the hens and eggs; of the geese; of the number of fishermen, workers in
metal, sword makers, and shoemakers; of the bins and boxes; of the turners and saddlers; of
the forges and mines-that is, of iron, lead, or other substances; of the colts and fillies. They
shall make all these known to us, set forth separately and in order, at Christmas, so that we
may know what and how much of each thing we have.’35
Nor were capitularies confined to taxation and the maintenance of good order, Charlemagne’s
self-imposed role as a moral reformer is reflected in systematic attempts at social engineering
apparent in capitularies issued throughout his reign. In addition to his uniquely ambitious
education programme laid down in the capitulary Admonitio Generalis of 789, the same
document lays down acceptable moral standards for clergy and the contents of sermons.
Another example later in his reign was the so called ‘programmatic’ capitulary of 802 which
features 40 articles covering areas including incest, the conduct of monks and nuns and the
treatment of widows and orphans. The degree to which these instructions were imposed is
unclear, but their confident tone, specific content and regular issue suggests that from
Charlemagne’s perspective at least, they were being implemented.
Transmitting and receiving these capitularies was a small professional central government
that accompanied Charlemagne on his travels headed by a Chaplain responsible for
supervising the Church, a Count Palatine who supervised the needs and conduct of the royal
household, a Chancellor who oversaw the king’s writing office or chancery and a few minor
officials who served as deputies to these individual such as the chamberlain and marshal. For
such a loose system of governance to function trust was essential. In the Germanic tradition
this trust was codified by means of an oath of fidelity or fealty to Charlemagne and his heirs,
gradually extended from the nobility to the entire male population over 12 between 779 and
802. Charlemagne moreover prohibited such oaths being sworn to anybody else within his
realm, breaking down surviving tribal loyalties.
Oaths provided a framework for obedience, but at the heart of Charlemagne’s power was his
largely successful personal relations with the leading clergy and nobility of the empire who
attended upon him in person. Numbering less than a hundred, these individuals enjoyed the
rewards in the form of patronage that royal trust brought, and largely responded with loyalty.
Charlemagne permitted and indeed required free discussion from these individuals as the core
of informed government, reflected in his fondness for formal and informal councils that met
throughout the year. Be it the military placitum generale, tête-à-tête in the hot spas of Aachen
that Charlemagne enjoyed bathing in or formal theological councils, it seems the same people
attended all of them, reflected in the tendency of these gatherings to issue proclamations on a
bewildering variety of matters simultaneously. The Council of Frankfurt for instance,
although in theory a strictly ecclesiastical affair, also dealt with the deposition of Tassilio,
Duke of Bavaria, grain prices and monetary reform.
35
The Capitulary De Villis (no date) trans. in James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History: Vol.
I: (Boston, 1904), pp. 137-139.
Finance
Despite its tiny central state, Charlemagne’s empire nonetheless required substantial
revenues, principally for the related activities of waging war and the giving of gifts to secure
supporters and to bribe enemies. His finances were helped by transfusions of wealth from the
plundered treasuries of Charlemagne’s enemies, but regular taxation was still required. Prior
to the 780s, such taxation had been hindered by the fact that only a small proportion of wealth
within Europe was in the form of transferable precious metal coinage or specie. This was
because all three major economic spheres in the 8th century, the Muslim, the Byzantine and
the Frankish used scarce gold as the material of their currency. Charlemagne’s father Pepin
the Short tentatively reintroduced the Roman silver denarius to Francia in the 730s, but it was
Charlemagne who exploited the newly discovered silver deposits, probably at Rammelsburg
in Saxony, to increase the circulation of the denarius and standardising its weight at 1.3
grammes to the point where, as ‘The silver denarii became the standard currency of virtually
all of Christian Europe.’36 The Carolingian denarii represents the most consistent and long
lasting of Charlemagne’s methods of power projection. In the short term it greatly promoted
trade through the increased financial liquidity that a dependable and relative numerous
currency could bring. Longer term it provided a precedent for the use of silver as the basis of
all northern and western European medieval currencies, such as the English penny and the
French denier. Interestingly, like its modern successor the euro, the area where the
Carolingian denarius struggled to achieve universal acceptance was the Mediterranean coast.
Here the ongoing Byzantine presence in Italy and the Muslim presence in Spain created an
economy more used to and happier with gold currency and south of the papal states post
Charlemagne the Byzantine tremisis and Arabic dinar reasserted themselves as currencies37,
thereby creating an early indication of the transition of Europe from an economy dominated
by the financial model of the Mediterranean to one in which south and north possessed
different, and often rival systems.
Fig. 11: Denarius of Charlemagne of 812
36
37
Day, W R ‘The monetary reforms of Charlemagne’ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 6 Number 1 1997 p.35.
Ibid pp.36-41.
Returning to the theme of power projection, it was not just the choice of material and
uniformity of Charlemagne’s denarius that created a lasting influence, but also its appearance.
As Coupland38 has observed, Charlemagne’s currency carries an ideological message,
pioneering as it does the subsequently standard medieval combination of a profile of the
ruler’s head surrounded by his abbreviated royal title on the side (in this case after 800
typically DNKARLVSIMPAGREFTL – Dominus Noster Karolus Imperator Augustus Rex
Francorum et Langobardorum ‘Our Lord Charles, Emperor Augustus, King of the Franks
and of the Lombards’), and some sort of Christian imagery such as a cross or the imperial
chapel at Aachen, coupled with a monogram indicating which mint issued the coin. Thus one
small piece of metal combines an assertion of temporal majesty, the approval of heaven and
traceability in the interest of economic reassurance – a potent combination which
characterised nearly all European currency until the modern age.
Charlemagne the lawgiver
Charlemagne was on paper a prodigious lawmaker, issuing 69 capitularies dedicated to legal
reform during his reign. This was particularly apparent after his coronation as Emperor in 800
which Freid believes acted as a stimulus toward addressing ‘The lack of consolidation and
integration within his empire, as well as the weaknesses of his Church and the increasing
hardships being suffered by the citizens of his realm’39.
However, this did not result in the production of a single law code was in the case of
Justinian, rather the issuing of definitive, clearly codified and where appropriate, modified
versions of the regional codes that applied across the Carolingian empire using the aural
traditions of the Thuringians, Franks, Bavarians, Alemannians, Saxons, Bavarians and
Lombards. Einhard is thus probably being realistic when he presents Charlemagne’s legal
reforms as expansive in reach but shallow in depth: ‘After he had received the imperial name
that, finding the laws of his people very defective (the Franks have two sets of laws, very
different in many particulars), he determined to add what was wanting, to reconcile the
discrepancies, and to correct what was vicious and wrongly cited in them. However, he went
no further in this matter than to supplement the laws by a few capitularies, and those
imperfect ones; but he caused the unwritten laws of all the tribes that came under his rule to
be compiled and reduced to writing’40.
Where Charlemagne was more ambitious was in the implementation and general spirit of his
law whose clearly stated desire for a just society reflects a real concern on his part with the
hardships many of his subjects were facing, entangled as they were in the painful transition
between the predominantly freeman society of postclassical Europe and the state of
bondsman that accompanied the rise of feudalism. Thus the wide ranging Programmatic
Capitulary of 802 combines an assertion of Charlemagne’s new imperial authority with
repeated instructions to judges, nobility and senior clergy alike to safeguard the interests of
the poor. The clergy for instance were required to offer shelter and food to both pilgrims and
the homeless, whilst judges were given the discretion to cancel the debts of the hopelessly
destitute. Charlemagne clearly meant these diverse injunctions to be fully implemented, for
38
Coupland S. Carolingian Coinage and the Vikings (Aldershot, 2005) pp. 211, 222-225
Freid p. 48
40
Einhard Ch. 29
39
they are accompanied by complicated instructions to his missi as to how they should be
policed.
Charlemagne’s final legal capitulary, the Capitulary for the Jews of 814 does indicate that his
social agenda had its limits when faced with the broad trends of socio-economic change
through which he lived. Personally tolerant of Judaism, his personal physician Ferragut was
Jewish, Charlemagne took pains to ensure they could trade unhindered throughout his realm.
Their traditional practise of money lending however, he deemed as a social evil 41 the
Capitulary outlaws it in uncompromising terms: ‘Let no Jew presume to take in pledge or for
any debt any of the goods of the Church in gold, silver, or other form, from any Christian.
But if he presume to do so, which God forbid, let all his goods be seized and let his right hand
be cut off.’42 Charlemagne’s action against usury was supported by the Church, who issued as
series of limitations and prohibitions culminating in an absolute ban in 1311. However
although usury was undoubtedly restrained by this capitulary, there is no evidence of it, nor
any subsequent legislation, successfully choking it off as an economic practise – for the
mercantile classes in particular, business was impossible without it, and dependent as they
were on tax income from trade, neither Charlemagne nor his successors could afford to
restrain the activities of commerce too closely.
Death and Legacy
By accident rather than design, Charlemagne’s realm was spared the instability of a partible
succession – he post deceased all his sons save Louis, who as Louis the Pious would inherit
the entirety of his father’s realm following the latter’s death form a combination of pleurisy
and fever in January 814. Louis would succeed in holding his father’s vast realm together, but
neither of them felt able to reformed the divisive Frankish tradition of partible succession,
and thus on Louis’ death the Carolingian realm fell into the familiar cycle of separation,
fratricide, reunion, crisis and finally the collapse of central authority that characterised its
predecessor the Merovingians. Whilst it would be unfair to suggest that Charlemagne’s
legacy was as fragile as that of Clovis; its dissolution after less than a century of existence
was chiefly the result of a triple assault on its frontiers by Muslims, Magyars and Vikings in
the 9th century that would have tested any contemporary realm to destruction; nonetheless if
we are to judge Charlemagne’s reign by his own avowed aim of restoring united imperium to
western Europe, then it must be judged a failure. Perhaps, as Fried suggests, Charlemagne’s
aims were simply impossible given the severely limited institutions of government in early
medieval Europe, certainly not within the lifespan of one man: ‘The consequences of a
centuries long lack of a strict central authority and the firm guiding hand of a system of law
and order could not be reversed over just a few decades’.43
Peter Wilson44 argues however that to regard Charlemagne’s legacy in these terms is a
misinterpretation of the king-emperor’s underlying intent. Neither he nor his predecessors,
Although Freid (p.482) also suggests that Charlemagne’s anger towards money lending was caused by a
tendency amongst his nobility of mortgaging their fiefdoms to buy estates in their own right and thus draw away
the peasant labour force from Crown land.
42
Article 1, ‘Capitulary for the Jews’ 814 in Cave RC and Herbert H. Coulson H.H. A Source Book for
Medieval Economic History, (New York 1965), pp. 172-173.
43
Freid p.483.
44
Wilson PH ‘The First European Union’ in History Today April 2016 Vol. 66 Issue 4 pp. 10-19.
41
nor successors had a vision of the Carolingian empire as a coherent, united state with a
recognisable core and permanent capital on the model of the contemporary Byzantine or
Ummayyad regimes. Although Charlemagne acted like an emperor in the Roman sense in his
desire to absorb territories, he retained the Frankish tradition of federal, as opposed to
imperial governance. To him his realm comprised innumerable separate territories; even the
Frankish part continued to be divided into its Merovingian sub-kingdoms; hence his failure to
change Frankish succession rules, nor to introduce more than rudimentary common
institutions of government across his realms, currency excepted. The very notion of
‘kingship’ in Charlemagne’s time was a relative one, and until this was more clearly defined
in the high medieval period, there could be no suggestion of establishing common
sovereignty within any western European realm, neither the vocabulary nor the will existed to
do so.
Chris Wickham’s definition of Charlemagne’s realm as an ‘experiment’45 is perhaps the most
apt – the product of a ruler who undertook an experiment in a brand of north European
imperium that combined the ambitions of Rome with the institutions of the Franks. From this
perspective Charlemagne did not fail, in fact he laid the foundations of Europe as we
understand it, for it was in his reign that ‘Europeans’ began to emerge as civilisation builders
in their own right rather than successors living in the shadow of ancient Rome. A new stable
currency, clarification of law, a refined relationship between Church and State, territorial
unity wrought by conquest Charlemagne gave all of these things to his realms enabling them
to develop an identity distinct from the Mediterranean civilisations that before Charlemagne
still dominated Europe. His empire proved too vast to sustain one identity, within a century
France had emerged in the west and the German Holy Roman Empire had emerged in the
east, but it is indicative of just how profound an influence Charlemagne exerted on the
shaping of these identities that their borders, even today, largely mirror those that
Charlemagne bequeathed in 814. He thus has a claim to be the most influential European in
history.
45
Wickham C Medieval Europe (2016) Ch. 4 ‘The Carolingian Experiment 750-1000’ pp. 61-79.
Historiography
Ancient
Einhard The Life of Charlemagne
The Annals of Lorsch
Frankish Royal Annals
Modern
Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was fulsome in his rpasies
of Charlemagne who he believed should be ‘Crowned with the praises of the historians and
philosophers of an enlightened age’. Gibbon believed Charlemagne’s reign marked the final
arrest of the decline in ‘civic virtue’ that had weakened Europe since the days of Late
Antiquity. Charlemagne’s blend of revived education and art, formidable war machine and
his political unification of the lands of Western Europe mark the beginning of a new ‘aera’ in
which Europe resumed its path of progress towards the ‘Enlightenment’ of his own age.
Military historian Bernard Bachrach in Charlemagne's Early Campaigns (768-777): A
Diplomatic and Military Analysis (2013) emphasises the function of Charlemagne’s empire
as an engine of war and believes that his reputation as a military commander has been
underestimated. Charlemagne, Bachrach points out, spent the bulk of his reign at war, and
utilised a mixture of carefully planned military campaigns and shrewd political negotiation to
consistently expand his power and influence within and beyond his expanding empire’s
borders. Moreover, Bachrach argues, areas Charlemagne annexed into his empire were
swiftly and effectively incorporated into the Carolingian tax and trade system creating a selfperpetuating rhythm of conquest and consolidation.
Johannes Freid’s biography of Charlemagne (2016) emphasises the Christian motivation of
Charlemagne’s reign, and the political influence of Alcuin and the other scholars of the
Carolingian Renaissance. Freid sees Charlemagne’s legacy as twofold, in the medium term
his assertion of the independence of the papacy from temporal justice would set up the
conflict between the political power of the papacy and European states that would dominate
medieval politics and culminate in the Reformation. Longer term, like Gibbon, Freid sees
Charlemagne as a unifier, whose geographical linkage of the lands of Western Europe
provided the basis for the develop of modern European states.
Chris Wickham in Medieval Europe (2016) disputes the concept of Charlemagne as the
originator of modern Europe. The Carolingian legacy, he believes, ends with the division of
the Empire into a French west and a German east, both of which develop identities
subsequently and independent of what he calls the ‘Carolingian experiment’. Scholars will
look in vain for any concept of political unity or national identity in the reign of Charlemagne
he asserts, because such concepts were utterly alien to the world Charlemagne lived in. The
only contemporary state from the early medieval era he believes develops into a modern
nation was 9th century Wessex which would ultimately emerge as England, by comparison
with the Carolingian Empire a tiny entity on the periphery of Europe.