Charlemagne

By Lin Yue

On Christmas Day in the year 800, as Charles, king of the Franks, knelt in prayer in St. Peter's basilica, Pope Leo III placed a crown on his head and the congregation acclaimed him emperor. The Roman Empire in the West had been dead for three centuries. Charlemagne spent the rest of his life trying to bring it back — and in the essentials, he succeeded.

Charles was born in 742, son of Pepin the Short, the mayor of the palace who had seized the Frankish throne. He became king in 768, sole king after his brother Carloman's death in 771, and spent the next forty years at war: the Saxon wars ground on for three decades, ending with the mass baptism of a conquered people and the infamous execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden in 782; the Lombard kingdom of Italy fell in 774, making him king of the Lombards too; campaigns pushed into Spain, Bavaria, and the Slavic east. By 800 he ruled most of Western Christendom, from the Pyrenees to the Elbe.

But conquest was the lesser half of his achievement. Charlemagne understood that an empire needs administrators more than armies, and administrators need books. He gathered scholars at his palace school in Aachen — above all Alcuin of York, the English monk who became his minister of education — and launched what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance: the copying of classical and Christian texts in the clear new script of Carolingian minuscule, the script from which our lowercase letters descend. Something like ninety percent of the classical Latin literature that survives did so because Carolingian monks copied it. He standardized weights, measures, and coinage, sent out missi dominici — traveling royal inspectors — to keep counts honest, and legislated for church and realm in capitularies that tried to impose order on a warrior aristocracy.

Einhard, his biographer, describes a big, restless man who loved swimming, hated ceremony, and tried to learn to write too late in life — the great king kept writing tablets under his pillow and never mastered the hand. When he died in 814, his empire would split within a generation at Verdun (843) into the ancestors of France and Germany. But the idea he planted — a Christian empire uniting the West under one ruler and one faith — haunted Europe for a thousand years, through the Holy Roman Empire to Napoleon. The French call him Charlemagne, the Germans Karl der Grosse, and both claim him as father.

Impact on civilization

Charlemagne's empire became the political template of medieval Europe: the union of Frankish kingship, Roman imperial title, and Christian church that would define the Holy Roman Empire for a millennium, and the ancestor of both France and Germany. The Carolingian Renaissance preserved classical Latin literature — the monks' copies in Carolingian minuscule are the reason most Roman texts survive — and created the lowercase script the West still writes in. His administrative system of counts, missi dominici, and capitularies founded medieval governance, and his palace school at Aachen revived learning after centuries of contraction. Crowned "Father of Europe," he fixed the idea that Western Christendom was a single political community — the first draft of a united Europe. His coronation in 800 also created the precedent that emperors are made by popes — the investiture idea that would convulse medieval Europe in the struggle between church and state for three centuries. And his division of the empire among heirs, however ruinous in the short term, drew the map from which France and Germany would emerge as nations.