Charlemagne

Charlemagne, known in Latin as Carolus Magnus and in his own Frankish world simply as Karl, was born on April 2, 748 CE, somewhere in Francia. The exact birthplace is unrecorded, and even the year was disputed for centuries, though modern scholarship has settled on 748 after close study of the surviving annals ^[1]. He was the eldest son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon.

His family, later called the Carolingians, had climbed to power as mayors of the palace, the officials who ran the Frankish kingdom on behalf of the fading Merovingian kings. Charlemagne's grandfather Charles Martel had defeated an Arab raiding army near Poitiers in 732 and ruled Francia in all but name. In 751 Pepin took the final step: with papal approval he deposed the last Merovingian, Childeric III, and was anointed king of the Franks ^[2].

The boy grew up inside this new royal experiment. In 754 Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to seek Frankish protection against the Lombards, and he anointed Pepin's sons, including the young Charlemagne, at the abbey of Saint-Denis. The ceremony bound the Carolingian house to the papacy, a partnership that would shape the rest of Charlemagne's life ^[2]. Little else is known of his childhood; his biographer Einhard, who knew him personally in later years, admitted that he could find no reliable account of the king's earliest days ^[1].

Pepin died in September 768, and following Frankish custom the kingdom was divided between his two sons. Charlemagne received the outer arc of territories while his younger brother Carloman took a compact block in the center. The brothers distrusted each other almost at once, and their quarrel threatened civil war until Carloman died suddenly in December 771. Charlemagne ignored the claims of his brother's infant sons, whose mother fled to the Lombard court, and took the whole inheritance for himself ^[3].

The Lombard connection soon drew him into Italy. Pope Hadrian I appealed for help against the Lombard king Desiderius, whose daughter Charlemagne had briefly married and then repudiated. The Frankish army crossed the Alps in 773, besieged the capital at Pavia, and forced its surrender in June 774. Rather than install a client, Charlemagne took the Lombard crown himself, ruling thereafter as king of the Franks and of the Lombards ^[3].

While in Italy he visited Rome, the first Frankish king to do so, and confirmed his father's promise of territories to the papacy. The visit deepened the alliance between the Carolingians and Saint Peter's successors, and it gave the young king a taste of the imperial city whose title he would one day carry ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Charlemagne usually meets the conqueror first. His longest and harshest war was fought against the pagan Saxons east of the Rhine, a struggle that ran with interruptions from 772 to 804. Frankish victory came through repeated campaigns, mass deportations, and forced baptism; the annals record the execution of some 4,500 Saxon captives at Verden in 782, an episode that has troubled his reputation ever since ^[4]. He also destroyed the Avar khaganate on the Danube in the 790s, seizing treasure hoarded from decades of raiding, annexed Bavaria from its duke Tassilo III, and established a fortified march south of the Pyrenees around Barcelona. A failed expedition into Spain in 778 ended with the ambush of his rearguard at Roncesvalles, the seed of the later Song of Roland ^[3].

The crown of his career came in Rome. On Christmas Day 800, as Charlemagne rose from prayer in Saint Peter's basilica, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head and the assembled Romans acclaimed him emperor. Einhard claimed the king would not have entered the church had he known what was coming, a remark historians still argue over, but Charlemagne kept the title and used it for the rest of his life ^[1]. The coronation revived the idea of a western empire after more than three centuries and provoked long negotiations with the Byzantine court, which finally recognized his imperial title in 812 ^[5].

Charlemagne's achievements were not only military. He governed through written instructions called capitularies, sent paired inspectors known as missi dominici to check on local counts, and reformed the coinage around a new silver penny. Above all he sponsored what scholars call the Carolingian Renaissance. He gathered learned men from across Europe, including Alcuin of York, Paul the Deacon, and Theodulf of Orleans, and ordered cathedral and monastery schools to teach correct Latin. Scribes in Carolingian workshops copied classical and Christian texts in a clear new script, Caroline minuscule, and the survival of much ancient Roman literature depends on those copies ^[6].

Einhard left an unusually vivid portrait of the man. Charlemagne was tall and strongly built, fond of hunting and of swimming in the hot springs at Aachen, moderate in food but impatient with fasting, and given to inviting crowds of guests to join him in the baths. He spoke Frankish and Latin and understood some Greek. He tried late in life to learn to write, keeping tablets under his pillow to practice letters, but made little progress ^[1].

His household was large and complicated. He married several times: his wives included Hildegard, mother of his principal heirs, then Fastrada, and later Liutgard, and he had further children by concubines. Around eighteen children are attributed to him. He kept his daughters close, refusing to let them marry, a decision Einhard noticed and tactfully declined to explain ^[1].

Charlemagne was conventionally and seriously pious. He attended church morning and evening, gave alms to Christians abroad as far as Jerusalem, and lavished attention on his palace chapel at Aachen, built in the 790s with marble columns brought from Italy. The octagonal chapel still stands at the core of Aachen Cathedral, which in 1978 became one of the first sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List ^[7].

From the mid 790s Charlemagne campaigned less in person and settled increasingly at Aachen, whose warm springs suited an aging ruler. Government flowed out from the palace there, and envoys arrived from Byzantium, from Anglo-Saxon England, and famously from the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, whose gifts to the Frankish court included an elephant named Abul-Abbas ^[3].

Succession planning dominated the final decade. In 806 he drafted a division of the realm among his three legitimate sons, but Pepin of Italy died in 810 and the eldest, Charles the Younger, in 811. Only Louis the Pious, king of Aquitaine, survived. In September 813 Charlemagne summoned Louis to Aachen and crowned him co-emperor with his own hands, notably without papal involvement ^[5].

Early in the following winter the old emperor fell ill with fever and pleurisy after bathing. He died at Aachen on January 28, 814 CE, in the forty-sixth year of his reign, and was buried the same day in his palace chapel ^[1].

Few medieval rulers left a deeper mark. The empire itself proved fragile: Louis the Pious struggled to hold it, and in 843 the Treaty of Verdun split the Carolingian lands among Charlemagne's grandsons, a division often treated as the distant ancestry of France and Germany. Yet the imperial idea endured. Otto I revived the western imperial title in 962, and the Holy Roman Empire that grew from it lasted until 1806, always looking back to the coronation of 800 ^[5].

The cultural legacy proved even more durable. Caroline minuscule, revived by Renaissance humanists who mistook it for ancient Roman writing, became the model for the lowercase letters used in print today. The schools, corrected texts, and libraries of the Carolingian revival gave later Europe most of what it knew of classical Latin literature ^[6]. Among curious Charlemagne facts, his very name entered the languages of eastern Europe: words for king such as the Polish krol and Hungarian kiraly derive from Karl.

Memory kept reshaping him. Frederick Barbarossa arranged his canonization at Aachen in 1165, though the wider church never formally confirmed the cult. Medieval poets made him the white-bearded hero of the chansons de geste, Napoleon invoked him, and after 1945 he was recast as a symbol of European unity; the city of Aachen has awarded its Charlemagne Prize for services to European unification since 1950. Historians today read him with more caution, weighing the brutality of the Saxon wars against the reach of his reforms, but the scale of what he built is not in dispute ^[4].