Charlemagne
Compartir
1. Who was Charlemagne, and why does he matter?
Charlemagne, whose name means Charles the Great, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first Emperor of the Romans since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, crowned on Christmas Day 800. He ruled until his death in 814, and his reign is one of the most consequential in the history of western civilisation. He matters for several distinct reasons. He unified an enormous territory covering most of modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy under a single political authority for the first time since Rome, and the administrative, legal, and cultural structures he built gave shape to the early medieval world. He launched the Carolingian Renaissance, a systematic attempt to revive education, scholarship, and cultural life across his empire. He forged a new model of Christian kingship that European monarchies would imitate for centuries. And the division of his empire after his death produced the political outlines that became, very roughly, the modern nations of France and Germany. Historian Jennifer Davis has written that Charlemagne invented medieval rulership, and the claim is difficult to contest.
2. What was Charlemagne's background, and how did he come to power?
Charlemagne was born around 747 or 748, the eldest son of Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian King of the Franks. His family had already transformed the political landscape of western Europe: his grandfather was Charles Martel, the man who had defeated the Muslim advance at Tours in 732, and his father Pepin had deposed the last Merovingian king in 751 with papal blessing and been anointed king by the pope, establishing the principle that Carolingian royal authority rested on a foundation of both Frankish power and ecclesiastical sanction. When Pepin died in 768, he divided the kingdom between his two sons, Charlemagne and Carloman, in keeping with Frankish custom. The joint reign was brief and tense, but Carloman died in 771, leaving Charlemagne as sole king. He was around twenty-three years old. His early years on the throne were immediately dominated by the two challenges that would define the first three decades of his reign: the protection and expansion of the Frankish relationship with the papacy, and the conquest and Christianisation of the pagan peoples on the kingdom's frontiers, above all the Saxons.
3. What was the Saxon Wars, and why were they so long and brutal?
The Saxon Wars, fought from 772 to 804, were the longest, most costly, and most morally contested of all Charlemagne's campaigns. The Saxons were a pagan Germanic people occupying a vast territory in what is now northern Germany, and they had resisted Frankish expansion and Christian missionaries for generations. Charlemagne's attack in 772 began with the destruction of the Irminsul, a sacred pillar that was one of the central objects of Saxon religious life, a deliberate act of spiritual as well as military aggression. Over the following three decades, Charlemagne fought eighteen major campaigns, but the Saxons repeatedly submitted, accepted baptism, and then revolted as soon as his armies withdrew. The darkest episode came in 782, after a Saxon rebellion led by the chieftain Widukind resulted in the ambush and destruction of a Frankish force. Charlemagne's response was the Massacre of Verden, in which he ordered the execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners who had participated in the revolt. The Royal Frankish Annals record the event plainly. Historian Alessandro Barbero has called it perhaps the greatest stain on Charlemagne's reputation, and even his own adviser Alcuin of York urged him that God's word should be spread by persuasion rather than the sword. By 804, after mass deportations, forced conversions, and the codification of laws carrying the death penalty for pagan practices, the Saxons were finally and permanently subdued.
4. What were Charlemagne's other major military campaigns?
Beyond Saxony, Charlemagne conducted over fifty military campaigns that extended Frankish power across most of western Europe. In 774 he responded to a papal appeal and invaded the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy, whose king Desiderius had been threatening Rome. The conquest was swift, and Charlemagne took the Lombard royal title, confirmed the papacy's territorial possessions, and sent Desiderius and his family to a monastery. In 788 he moved against Bavaria, whose duke Tassilo III had been nominally subordinate to the Franks but maintained effective independence. After a staged legal process that found Tassilo guilty of disloyalty, Charlemagne deposed him and absorbed Bavaria directly into his realm. From 791 to 796 he campaigned against the Avars, a powerful nomadic people settled in the Carpathian basin in what is now Hungary, whose raids had plagued the eastern frontier for years. The Avar khagan submitted and converted to Christianity, and the vast treasure the Franks seized from the Avar ring-forts was so enormous that contemporaries wrote of it with astonishment. Charlemagne also campaigned in Spain, crossing the Pyrenees in 778 in an operation that ended in the ambush at Roncevaux Pass already encountered in the legend of Roland. A Spanish March was eventually established south of the Pyrenees as a defensive buffer.
5. How did Charlemagne become Emperor, and what did the coronation mean?
The coronation of Christmas Day 800 was one of the pivotal events of European history, and the circumstances surrounding it were deliberately obscure. In 799 Pope Leo III had been attacked by a faction of Roman nobles, physically assaulted and nearly blinded, and had fled to Charlemagne for protection. Charlemagne escorted him back to Rome and presided over a tribunal that cleared Leo of the charges against him. Two days later, as Charlemagne rose from prayer at the tomb of Saint Peter, Leo placed an imperial crown on his head and the assembled Romans acclaimed him Emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne's own biographer Einhard claims the king was surprised by the ceremony and would never have entered the church had he known it was planned, a claim historians generally regard with scepticism given that the crown had been visibly present in the basilica. Whether the coronation was primarily Leo's initiative or primarily Charlemagne's remains debated. What is certain is that it served both parties: Charlemagne gained the legal and symbolic authority of an emperor, equal in status to the ruler of Byzantium, and able to exercise legitimate jurisdiction across the whole of Latin Christendom; Leo gained the prestige of having bestowed the imperial dignity and the protection of the most powerful ruler in western Europe.
6. How did Charlemagne govern his vast empire, and what were the missi dominici?
The practical problem of governing an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central Italy with the communications technology of the ninth century was immense. Charlemagne addressed it through a combination of administrative innovation and relentless personal presence. He divided his territory into counties, each governed by a count who was responsible for military leadership, the collection of taxes, and the administration of justice. To prevent these counts from becoming independent warlords, he instituted the missi dominici, royal envoys sent in pairs, one a cleric and one a lay official, to travel through defined territories, inspect the counts' conduct, hear complaints from the population, enforce the king's decrees, and report directly back to him. He also held annual general assemblies, the Mayfield, at which the leading men of the realm gathered to discuss policy, hear new legislation, and transact the business of the empire. He maintained direct control by managing large royal estates personally and by moving constantly through the kingdom, conducting business from wherever he happened to be. The system was more effective during his own reign, when his personal authority and energy animated it, than afterward, when it gradually degenerated into the feudal devolution of power to local lords.
7. What was the Carolingian Renaissance, and what did it achieve?
The Carolingian Renaissance was Charlemagne's sustained programme of educational, cultural, and religious reform, and it constitutes one of the most significant intellectual achievements of the early medieval period. Charlemagne was himself a man of unusual intellectual curiosity: he could speak Latin fluently and understood Greek, he tried to learn to write in his adult years though Einhard notes he never fully mastered it, and he kept books beside his bed to read at night. He drew scholars from across Europe to his court at Aachen, most notably Alcuin of York, the leading scholar of the age, who ran the palace school and became Charlemagne's closest intellectual adviser. The reforms Alcuin and his colleagues implemented were wide-ranging. Latin literacy was systematically improved, partly because accurate Latin was essential for correct theology and effective administration. A new standardised script, the Carolingian minuscule, replaced the diverse and often illegible local scripts that had developed across the former Roman world; it is the direct ancestor of the lowercase letters used in modern European printed alphabets. Monasteries were established and reformed as centres of education and manuscript copying, which preserved enormous quantities of ancient Latin learning that might otherwise have been lost. Schools were established across the empire, from palace schools for the nobility to cathedral schools for future clergy. The cultural programme was not merely decorative: Charlemagne understood that a literate clergy was essential to a functioning church, and a functioning church was essential to his model of Christian empire.
8. What was Charlemagne's relationship with the church, and how did he view his own authority?
Charlemagne's relationship with the papacy and with Christianity was fundamental to everything he did, but it was a relationship he consistently managed on his own terms rather than the church's. He regarded himself as the anointed servant of God, responsible before the Almighty for the spiritual as well as the temporal welfare of his people. He summoned and presided over church councils. He imposed theological positions on matters of doctrine, including the addition of the filioque clause to the Nicene Creed, which contributed to the growing divergence between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. He corrected popes, lectured clergy, and treated the church as an institution that existed in fundamental partnership with, but ultimate subordination to, royal authority. He was deeply and genuinely pious by the standards of his age, attending services daily, giving generously to the church, and spending his final years in religious devotion at Aachen. But his piety was that of a king who considered himself God's deputy on earth, not a suppliant before ecclesiastical authority. The tension between royal and papal power that his coronation inaugurated would haunt European politics for centuries.
9. What do we know about Charlemagne as a person, and what sources describe him?
The most important source for Charlemagne as a human being is the biography written by Einhard, a Frankish scholar who had been a member of the court and knew the emperor personally. Einhard composed his Vita Karoli Magni in the 820s, modelling it closely on the Roman biographies of Suetonius. He describes Charlemagne as physically imposing, unusually tall for his era at around 1.84 metres, with a powerful build, a long neck, and large, expressive eyes. He was energetic, addicted to hunting and swimming, and fond of the hot springs at Aachen which he used throughout his life. He was a voracious eater who enjoyed roasted meats over almost anything else and was difficult to restrain on matters of diet. He had four legitimate wives, numerous concubines, and possibly eighteen children. He was devoted to his daughters and refused to allow them to marry, which created problems at court as they formed what Einhard diplomatically describes as irregular attachments. He was generous in patronage, brutal in war, meticulous in administration, fascinated by astronomy and the stars, and deeply impatient with doctors who tried to moderate his diet and lifestyle in old age.
10. How did Charlemagne die, and what is his legacy?
Charlemagne died of pleurisy on 28 January 814 at Aachen, having spent his last years crowning his son Louis the Pious as co-emperor and preparing the succession. He was buried in the cathedral he had built at Aachen, which became a pilgrimage site. Louis inherited a largely intact empire but lacked his father's personal authority to hold it together, and after Louis's death in 840, his three sons fought a civil war that ended with the Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided the empire into West Francia, East Francia, and a middle kingdom. West Francia became France; East Francia became Germany; the middle kingdom was disputed between them for over a millennium. The outline of modern Europe was traced, very roughly, in that settlement. Charlemagne's legacy has been claimed and contested at every period since his death. Napoleon invoked him as a predecessor of French imperial greatness. German nationalists claimed him as the founding father of the German nation. Medieval kings across Europe modelled their courts on his. The Holy Roman Empire, which lasted in various forms until 1806, regarded itself as his continuation. Pope John Paul II called him the father of Europe. He was a man of extraordinary energy and ambition whose achievements were real and whose brutalities were real, and the two cannot honestly be separated. The world he built was unmistakably the foundation on which medieval European civilisation rested.