Charlemagne (c. 748 - 814) was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and from 800 the first emperor to rule in western Europe since the fall of the western Roman Empire. [1] Through nearly continuous campaigning he brought most of western and central Europe under a single government, and his patronage of learning produced the revival of scholarship known as the Carolingian Renaissance. [2] He is often called the father of Europe, and his reign laid the institutional foundations of both France and the Holy Roman Empire. [3]
Background and accession
Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, was born around 748, the eldest son of Pippin the Short, the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and Bertrada of Laon. On Pippin's death in 768 the kingdom was divided between Charlemagne and his brother Carloman; the brothers' relations were poor, and Carloman's death in 771 left Charlemagne sole ruler. [1]
Conquest and expansion
Charlemagne campaigned almost every year of his reign. In 774 he invaded Italy at the request of the papacy, defeated the Lombard king Desiderius and took the Lombard crown, establishing Frankish authority over northern Italy and a lasting relationship with the popes. [2]
His longest and most brutal war was against the Saxons east of the Rhine, fought over more than thirty years and accompanied by forced conversion to Christianity, mass deportations and, at Verden in 782, the reported execution of thousands of captives. He also campaigned against the Avars in the middle Danube, whose treasury he seized, against the Bavarians, and across the Pyrenees into Muslim Spain, where the rearguard of his army was destroyed at Roncesvalles in 778 — the event later mythologised in the Song of Roland. [1]
Imperial coronation
On Christmas Day 800, in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. The act revived the imperial title in the West, complicated relations with the Byzantine Empire, which regarded itself as the sole legitimate successor to Rome, and established a precedent for papal involvement in imperial legitimacy that shaped medieval politics for centuries. Byzantine recognition of his title came only in 812. [3]
Government and the Carolingian Renaissance
Charlemagne governed through counts appointed to local districts and supervised by travelling inspectors, the missi dominici, and issued a large body of legislation in the form of capitularies covering justice, the church, agriculture and weights and measures. He reformed the coinage around a silver penny standard that influenced European currency for centuries. [2]
He drew scholars from across Europe to his court at Aachen, among them Alcuin of York, Einhard, Theodulf of Orléans and Paul the Deacon, founding a palace school and requiring monasteries and cathedrals to maintain schools. The resulting revival standardised Latin, produced the clear Carolingian minuscule script from which modern lower-case letters descend, and preserved a large proportion of the classical texts that survive today. [1]
Death and legacy
Charlemagne died at Aachen on 28 January 814 and was buried in the palace chapel he had built there. He was succeeded by his surviving son, Louis the Pious; the empire was divided among Louis's sons by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, producing the political outlines of later France and Germany. [2]
His life was recorded by his courtier Einhard in the Vita Karoli Magni, modelled on Suetonius and the first substantial secular biography of the Middle Ages. [3] Charlemagne became a legendary figure in medieval epic and was claimed as a founding ancestor by later French and German rulers. Modern assessments set his achievements in administration and learning alongside the violence of the Saxon wars.
