Charlemagne

Holy Roman Emperor (r. 800-814)

• Born: April 2, 0742
• Birthplace: Probably Aachen (also known as Aix-la-Chapelle), Austrasia (now in Germany)
• Died: January 28, 0814
• Place of death: Aachen (also known as Aix-la-Chapelle), Austrasia (now in Germany)

By 800, when he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, Charlemagne had revived the Roman idea of universal empire, had preserved through the Carolingian Renaissance much of the written legacy of the ancient world, and had established the foundation for a European civilization distinct from that of ancient Rome and from the contemporary Byzantine and Islamic Empires.

Early Life

Charlemagne (shahr-luh-mahn-yuh or SHAHR-luh-mayn) was born in the kingdom of the Merovingian Franks, founded on the ruins of Roman Gaul by Clovis I, whose people's nominal conversion to Roman Christianity made them the allies of the Papacy against the Arian heresy. Under Clovis's factious and often inept successors, whose cruelty was anything but Christian, the kingdom was at times split into as many as four parts. Though it was reunited by the end of the seventh century, real power by then had passed from the Merovingians to Charlemagne's ancestors, who became hereditary holders of the office of mayor of the palace. Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles Martel, ruled over an increasingly powerful Frankish state from 714 to 741, during much of which time there was no Merovingian on the throne. On his death, power passed to his sons, Pépin III the Short and Carloman, though the latter entered a monastery in 747, leaving his elder brother as mayor to Childeric III. Charlemagne was the eldest child of Pépin III and Bertrada, his Friedelehe more than a concubine, but not canonically a wife, so that their son was arguably illegitimate. He was called Charles the name Charlemagne, which means “Charles the Great,” is an anachronism, though its usage is so common that to avoid it is pointless.

Charles Martel and especially Pépin III and Carloman brought the still nearly pagan Franks more firmly within the Christian fold through cooperation with pro-papal Anglo-Saxon missionaries, the most important of whom was Saint Boniface of Wessex. This helped facilitate good relations with Pope Zacharias, whose approval allowed Pépin in 751 to depose Childeric I and take for himself the title king of the Franks without fear of the stigma of usurpation. At Pépin's coronation, Pope Stephen II, who had journeyed from Rome to Saint-Denis, personally placed the crown on the new king's head. At that time, the pope recognized as Pépin's joint heirs Charlemagne and his younger brother, Carloman, who was born in 751 and was unquestionably legitimate, since by then his father and Bertrada were legally married. Charlemagne accompanied Pépin on his campaigns against the Lombards in northern Italy, undertaken at the behest of the pope. On Pépin's death in 768, however, the seventeen-year-old Carloman perhaps because of the circumstances of his birth received by his father's will the central portion of the kingdom, while the twenty-six-year-old Charlemagne was left with an unwieldy strip of land running along the Atlantic coast and turning inland beyond the Rhine River. Relations between the brothers were thereafter bitter, and in 769, Carloman refused to aid Charlemagne in putting down a rebellion in Aquitaine. Carloman died in 771, however, and his vassals paid homage to Charlemagne, thus reuniting the kingdom of the Franks.

Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer and a resident at his court for twenty-three years, provided a detailed description of the ruler in his Vita Karoli magni imperatoris (c. 829-836; Life of Charlemagne, 1880), though this work modeled on the Roman historian Suetonius's rather eulogistic lives of the Caesars must be read critically. While admitting that Charlemagne was paunchy and had a short, thick neck and a high-pitched voice, Einhard stressed his favorable features and huge physique the opening of his tomb in 1861 revealed that he was nearly 6 feet, 4 inches (193 centimeters) tall, so that at a time when malnutrition stunted the growth of many, he was truly a giant among men. The king was cheerful, generous, and fond of the hunt, boon companions, and especially his daughters; he was also capable of fearsome anger. Einhard, the monk Alcuin of York, and others attributed to Charlemagne virtues both Christian and Stoic wisdom, devotion to the Church, love of learning, clemency, self-control, and temperance in eating and drinking (temperance being a relative term).

By his first marriage to the Frankish Himiltrude, probably a Friedelehe, Charlemagne produced a son, Pépin the Hunchback (who was later barred from the succession, revolted, and was forced into a monastery). In 770, the king's mother, Bertrada, persuaded him to put aside his first wife and marry the daughter of Desiderius, king of the Lombards, though a year later, Charlemagne repudiated her as well. He then married a Swabian noblewoman, Hildegarde, who bore him four sons Charles, Pépin, Lothair, and Louis the Pious and three daughters Rotrude, Bertha, and Gisela. Later he married Fastrada (the mother of Theoderada and Himiltrude), who was followed by Lintgard and a series of concubines.

Life's Work

Charlemagne was above all else a warrior, carrying out some sixty campaigns, about half of which he led personally. His only failure came in 778, when he crossed the Pyrenees to do battle with the Christian Basques in Spain, was unsuccessful in an attempt to capture Saragossa, and had to settle for establishing a Spanish march (buffer state) in Barcelona. Ironically, this is his most famous campaign, for the defeat of his rear guard at Roncevaux during the return home became the basis for the Chanson de Roland (twelfth century; {I}Song of Roland{/I}, 1880), the greatest of the medieval French {I}chansons de geste{/I} (songs of deeds), in which Charlemagne and his soldiers appear as idealized heroes. Elsewhere the king was victorious. In 773, he invaded the Lombard kingdom of Desiderius, whose daughter Charlemagne had recently repudiated and who was harboring Gerberga, his brother Carloman's widow, and her sons, potentially rivals to the Frankish throne. After successfully besieging Pavia and seizing the Lombard crown in 774, Charlemagne visited Pope Hadrian I in Rome, strengthening his ties with the Papacy by reconfirming the Donation of Pépin, in which his father had granted to the popes the lands in central Italy known as the Papal States.

By 772, Charlemagne had begun a long series of hard-fought wars against the Saxons to the north of Frankland, which were not complete until 804. Over and over Charlemagne's forces invaded Saxony and forced the inhabitants to accept Frankish rule and the Christian faith, only to have them renounce Christ and rebel at the first opportunity. Though Charlemagne, at the beginning of these wars, destroyed the Irminsul, a wooden pillar considered sacred in Saxony, the Saxons clung fiercely to paganism, which the Frankish king found particularly offensive. Though he broke the back of Saxon resistance in 779 with the defeat of the chieftain Widukind and began sending in Christian missionaries, the Saxons revolted again in 782, so provoking Charlemagne that he had more than forty-five hundred Saxons massacred. In the last decades of the struggle, there were further massacres, massive deportations, and virtual colonization by the Franks. Thereafter Christianity took firmer root, and by a curious twist of fate it was a Saxon ruler, Otto I (Otto the Great), who in the mid-tenth century revived in Germany the claim to universal empire earlier resurrected by Charlemagne, for by 800, the latter ruler had laid the foundation for a Carolingian Empire, harking back to the days of Roman domination in the West.

Meanwhile Charlemagne put down rebellions in 776 in Lombardy and in 788 in Bavaria, where Duke Tassilo III had been causing trouble for Frankish rulers intermittently since the reign of Pépin III the Short. The addition of Bavaria to Charlemagne's ever-expanding territories brought him into contact with the Avars (or Huns as they were sometimes called), who occupied Hungary and Austria and had wreaked havoc on the Byzantine Empire since the days of Emperor Justinian. In 791, Charlemagne drove the Avars back into the valley of the Danube River, and by 795 his son Pépin (the son of Hildegarde) had pushed them out of Carinthia in southern Austria, capturing in the process an immense Avar treasure accumulated in part from tribute paid by the Byzantine Empire. This treasure was so great that, according to Einhard, it required fifteen wagons pulled by four oxen apiece to carry it. In any case, it was sufficient to finance Charlemagne's patronage of scholarship, support of the Church, and building of a suitably “imperial” capital at Aix-la-Chapelle. Though there were additional, for the most part punitive, campaigns against Slavic peoples to the east, the victories against the Avars and the Saxons marked the extent of Charlemagne's conquests; these were essentially complete by 804, even if he later faced rebellion from Brittany and in 810 marched against the Danish king Guthrodr (or Godefrid), who was assassinated before a battle could take place.

By the turn of the century, then, Charlemagne controlled all of Western and Central Europe except for southern Italy (still controlled by the Byzantine Empire), the Iberian Peninsula (most of which was held by Muslims), the British Isles (in the hands of various groups of Anglo-Saxons and Celts), and Scandinavia (from which groups of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Vikings were already beginning to issue). He spread his influence still further through diplomatic contacts with other rulers. Between 771 and 777, he and the Byzantine empress, and later saint, Irene carried on eventually unsuccessful negotiations for the marriage of his daughter Rotrude and the young Constantine VI. After Irene deposed and blinded Constantine, Charlemagne apparently proposed marriage to her, in spite of her advanced age, but she too was deposed in 802. (These proposals have led some to flights of fancy about the union of the eastern and western claimants to the Roman imperial mantle, but in practice, the difficulties associated with such a project would have been insurmountable.) Charlemagne also corresponded between 789 and 796 with the most powerful of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon kings, Offa of Mercia; exchanged envoys with the mighty Islamic caliph of Baghdad, Hārūn al-Rashīd; and established contacts with various other rulers. Finally, by threatening Byzantine possessions in Italy, he compelled Emperor Michael I to recognize his claim to the title of emperor in the West in 813, thirteen years after his coronation by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 800.

Charlemagne's coronation, during his fourth visit to Rome (the earlier visits occurred in 774, 781, and 787), is perhaps the most controversial feature of his reign. The king had gone to Rome to restore Leo to power after an antipapal rebellion in 799 drove him across the Alps to seek assistance. Scholars are uncertain whether it was Charlemagne's advisers or those of the pope who first proposed the imperial coronation. The Annales regni Francorum (c. 788-829; Frankish Royal Annals, 1970) indicate that it was the Franks, but according to the attributed author of the Annales, Einhard, the king was surprised and infuriated when the pope placed the crown on his head just as he was about to rise from prayer. If the latter is true, Charlemagne eventually accepted the coronation, as is indicated by his insistence on Byzantine recognition. The coronation was also part of later debates about the relationship of secular and ecclesiastical authority, but there is no doubt that Charlemagne exercised enormous influence over the Church inside the Carolingian Empire, even if it did not quite approach the caesaropapism of the emperors in Constantinople. Charlemagne generally cooperated with the Papacy but yielded little power in his cartularies (or book of charters and title deeds of an estate) he frequently made law for the Church himself.

Charlemagne's support was crucial to the success of Roman Christianity in the West, where he lent it moral, political, and financial support and spread the faith into newly conquered territories, though often by the harsh means of baptism at the point of a sword. He also built churches, like that in his capital at Aix-la-Chapelle, and it was faith that led to his patronage of that revival of learning known as the Carolingian Renaissance. From all of Europe, Charlemagne brought scholars men such as Theodulf of Orléans, Paul the Deacon, and Einhard to work under the leadership of Alcuin of York to preserve the written legacy, both pagan and Christian, of the ancient Roman world. It is true that these clerics were no innovators and that their work made little impression on contemporary society at large, but through their preservation of knowledge, they exerted an immeasurable influence on an emerging European civilization that outlived both Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire.

Significance

When Charlemagne died in 814, he was by far the most powerful man in Western Europe and ruled over an empire that rivaled in size that of his Roman predecessors. Yet the Carolingian Empire barely outlived him by a generation. Indeed, the seeds of its destruction were already present at his death, for even if Charlemagne had taken or had been given the title of emperor, with all of its historic connotations, his realm lacked the administrative machinery that had kept the Roman Empire going for centuries, even under weak, criminal, or lunatic rulers. Charlemagne owed his success to his own personality and ability, to the dynamics of an expanding empire, and to being in the right place at the right time. All these things were transient.

In administering his far-flung empire, Charlemagne was dependent on the aid of semiautonomous counts ruling over vast tracts of land. By giving them enough authority to be effective, he also made them powerful enough to be potentially dangerous rebels. He supervised these unpaid, noble officials by grouping together counties outside the old Frankish kingdom under provincial governors known as dukes, margraves, or prefects, and by annually sending out officers called missi dominici to inquire into local administration. Yet such supervision was at best less than stringent, communication was poor, and ultimately the entire system rested on officials’ loyalty to the king's person, their fear of his wrath, and his ability to offer them the prospect of further rewards as the empire continued to grow. Moreover, rebellion was a problem in even the most dynamic period of growth; by 804, the empire had ceased to expand; and a decade later, its architect and the focus of fifty years’ allegiance was gone. By 843, in the Treaty of Verdun, the sons of Charlemagne's heir Louis the Pious Lothair, Charles the Bald, and Louis the German had split the Carolingian Empire into three parts. Over the next century, these too would disintegrate.

Yet the legacy of Charlemagne lived on. The idea of universal empire was revived by the Holy Roman Emperors and continued into the modern era to influence both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. More important, it was in the age of Charlemagne that barriers among the various peoples of Western Europe were broken down and that there first came into existence a new European civilization, sharing elements with, but different from, ancient Rome, Byzantium, and Islam a civilization that, despite the political fragmentation of the ninth and tenth centuries, would survive, with a shared heritage, a common culture, and a single faith.

The Carolingian Kings

Reign

• Ruler

687-714

• Pépin II of Heristal (mayor of Austrasia/Neustria)

714-719

• Plectrude (regent for Theudoald)

719-741

• Charles Martel (the Hammer; mayor of Austrasia/Neustria)

747-768

• Pépin III the Short (mayor of Neustria 741, king of all Franks 747)

768-814

• Charlemagne (king of Franks 768, emperor 800)

814-840

• Louis the Pious (king of Aquitaine, emperor)

840-855

• Lothair I (emperor)

843

• Treaty of Verdun divides Carolingian Empire into East Franks (Germany), West Franks (essentially France), and a southern and middle kingdom roughly corresponding to Provence, Burgundy, and Lorraine)

843-876

• Louis II the German (king of Germany)

843-877

• Charles II the Bald (king of Neustria 843, emperor 875)

855-875

• Louis II (emperor)

877-879

• Louis II (king of France)

879-882

• Louis III (king of France)

879-884

• Carloman (king of France)

884-887

• Charles III the Fat (king of France)

887-898

• Odo (Eudes; king of France)

887-899

• Arnulf (king of Germany 887, emperor 896)

891-894

• Guy of Spoleto (Wido, Guido; emperor)

892-898

• Lambert of Spoleto (emperor)

893-923

• Charles III the Simple (king of France)

915-923

• Berengar I of Friuli (emperor)

923-929?

• Robert I (king of France)

929-936

• Rudolf (king of France)

936-954

• Louis IV (king of France; Hugh the Great in power)

954-986

• Lothair (king of France; Hugh Capet in power 956)

986-987

• Louis V (king of France)

Note: The Carolingians ruled different parts of the Frankish kingdom, which accounts for overlapping regnal dates in this table. The term “emperor” refers to rule over what eventually came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire.

Bibliography

Becher, Matthias. Charlemagne. Translated by David S. Bachrach. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. A brief biography of Charlemagne that also discusses the history of the Holy Roman Empire and the history of France to the year 987. Includes a bibliography and index.

Chamberlin, Russell. The Emperor: Charlemagne. New York: Franklin Watts, 1987. This popular biography with a very useful introduction is based on essential primary and secondary sources and is rich in detail.

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972. An English translation of Einhard’s biography written between 829 and 836, the Vita Karoli magni imperatoris, and of Notker’s Gesta Karoli magni, as published in 1867.

Fichtenau, Heinrich. The Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne. Translated by Peter Munz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. This excellent study stresses the role of religion in the emperor’s career and examines Charlemagne as an individual, the question of the imperial title, the Carolingian Renaissance, the role of the nobility and officials, the circumstances of the poor, and the decline in the emperor’s final decade.

Ganshof, F. L. The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy: Studies in Carolingian History. Translated by Janet Sondheimer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971. This work contains articles on Einhard, Alcuin, government and institutions, Charlemagne’s use of the oath and the written word, Frankish diplomacy, Charlemagne’s “failure,” and the decline of the Carolingian Empire.

Halphen, Louis. Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, edited by Richard Vaughan. Vol. 3 in Europe in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies. Translated by Giselle de Nie. New York: North-Holland, 1977. A very highly regarded study, this work covers Charlemagne’s predecessors and the establishment of the Carolingian Empire, the empire under Louis the Pious, and its disintegration following the Treaty of Verdun. It is a more thorough study than most. Contains a number of plates and several very useful maps.

Havighurst, Alfred F., ed. The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision. 4th ed. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1976. This collection contains a series of articles by a distinguished group of medievalists examining the famous thesis of Henri Pirenne, who argued that rather than a sharp break between the ancient world and the Middle Ages, there was a gradual change, and that a new European civilization emerged only in the eighth century (a view now widely accepted), with Islam rather than Charlemagne as the principal agent of change (a view generally disregarded here).

Loyn, H. R., and John Percival, eds. The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. This work contains selections from several biographies of Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, and the latter’s sons; from a number of Charlemagne’s capitularies; from letters of Charlemagne, Alcuin, and Pope Adrian I; and from various charters and other documents. Useful primary material, also of interest to the nonspecialist desiring to get something of the flavor of the age.

Morrissey, Robert. Charlemagne and France: A Thousand Years of Mythology. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Detailed coverage of Charlemagne and his influences, his legendary place in history, his life and literature, and more. Includes a bibliography and index.

Scholz, Bernhard W., and Barbara Rogers, trans. Carolingian Chronicles: Frankish Royal Annals and Nithard’s Histories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. An English translation of the royal annals. This is one of the essential primary sources for Charlemagne’s life and reign.