The Carolingian Empire

The Carolingian Empire was the most powerful political entity in early medieval Europe. At its height in the early ninth century, it stretched from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the North Sea to the heart of Italy, binding together the former provinces of the Western Roman Empire under a single Christian ruler. For a brief, extraordinary generation, the empire of the Charlemagne seemed to revive the unity, learning, and authority of Rome. Within fifty years of his death in 814, that empire was carved in three at the Treaty of Verdun and within a century it was collapsing under the pressures of partition, civil war, and external invasion. Even so, the Carolingian achievement reshaped the European Middle Ages. It defined France and Germany as distinct cultural zones, established the papacy as a temporal as well as spiritual power in central Italy, and produced a cultural revival, the Carolingian Renaissance, that gave the Latin West the educational and theological tools on which the High Middle Ages would build.

The Carolingian name and the rise of a dynasty

The dynasty took its name from Carolus — Charles. The first great Charles, Charles Martel, never held a royal title, but as mayor of the palace under the dying Merovingian kings he won the Battle of Tours in 732 and halted the Muslim advance into Francia. His son Pepin the Short deposed the last ineffective Merovingian ruler in 751 and, with the blessing of Pope Zachary, took the Frankish crown for himself. The popes gained a powerful protector in the north; the Carolingians gained the sacred legitimacy that only a Church-anointed kingship could confer.

Pepin confirmed the donation of 754, in which he handed the pope the lands of central Italy that his armies had wrested from the Lombards. That gift, the foundation of what would become the Papal States, bound the Carolingians to Rome for the rest of the dynasty’s history. The pope, in turn, anointed Pepin and his sons, Charles and Carloman, in the Frankish royal ceremony at Saint-Denis, making their rule an outward sacrament of Christian kingship.

The Franks before Charlemagne

To understand the empire Charlemagne built, one must understand the kingdom he inherited. The Merovingian Franks had ruled most of Gaul since Clovis’s baptism in the late fifth century. By the seventh century, however, real power had drifted from the long-haired Merovingian kings to the mayors of the palace — great aristocrats who commanded the army, the treasury, and the royal fisc. The Merovingians remained on the throne because kingship in the Frankish world was sacred and indivisible: the royal line could be humiliated, even imprisoned, but it could not be deposed.

That fiction ended in 751. Pepin the Short was crowned with the consent of a Frankish assembly and the approval of the pope. He sent a delegation to Rome to confirm his election, and the new pope, Stephen II, crossed the Alps in 754 to anoint him and his sons at Saint-Denis. The act gave the Frankish monarchy a Christian consecration that the Merovingians had not enjoyed and that the Carolingians would jealously guard. The Franks were now the chosen people of a new Christian empire in the West.

Charlemagne’s wars of conquest

When Charlemagne became sole king in 771, the Franks already controlled much of western Europe. What Charlemagne added, in nearly five decades of constant campaigning, was the rest: Lombard Italy, Saxon Germany, the Spanish March, and the great Slavic frontier beyond the Elbe. Each of these wars was simultaneously a military operation, a missionary campaign, and a political settlement, and together they defined the geographical and spiritual shape of the empire.

The conquest of the Saxons, begun in 772 and not concluded until 804, was the longest and most brutal. The Saxons were a confederation of pagan peoples who raided Frankish churches and villages from across the Rhine. Charlemagne’s response was unprecedented in scale. He advanced into Saxony year after year, felling the sacred tree at Irminsul in 772, baptizing the survivors, and codifying the laws of the new Christian land in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a harsh legal code that made refusal to baptize or relapse into paganism a capital crime. By the time the Saxon leader Widukind submitted and was baptized at Attigny in 785, an entire people had been brought into the Frankish Church.

In Italy, Charlemagne answered the appeal of Pope Adrian I and invaded the Lombard kingdom in 773. He captured Pavia in 774, took the iron crown of Lombardy, and confirmed his father’s donation to the pope. He returned repeatedly to Italy over the next three decades, and his son Pepin of Italy ruled the peninsula as a Frankish sub-king from 781. The empire thus straddled the Alps, ruling north and south of the mountains from a court that moved between Aachen, Herstal, Compiègne, and Rome.

Beyond the Pyrenees, the Frankish realm met the Muslim emirate of Córdoba in a long, inconclusive border war. Charlemagne’s own expedition against Zaragoza in 778 ended in the disaster of Roncesvalles, immortalized in the Chanson de Roland. A generation later, however, his son Louis the Pious established the Spanish March and turned the tide. By the 820s, Frankish counts such as Barcelona’s Bernard of Septimania were pushing deep into Catalonia.

In the east, Charlemagne’s armies campaigned against the Avars on the Hungarian plain, destroyed their ring-fortress of the Ring, and incorporated the Pannonian basin. Slavic peoples beyond the Elbe — the Obotrites, the Wiltzi, the Sorbs — were brought into the Frankish orbit as tributary peoples, and Christian missionaries fanned out into the new frontier. By 800, the Carolingian Empire was the largest political unit in the West since the fifth century.

The imperial coronation of 800

On Christmas Day in the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the Pope Leo III in old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The ceremony was at once a political act, a religious act, and a symbolic revival. It transferred the title of Roman Emperor, dormant in the West since 476, to a Frankish king; it recognized Charlemagne as the protector of the Roman Church; and it implicitly asserted that the pope had the power to confer imperial authority.

Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard reported that the king would not have entered the church that day had he known what was about to happen, but the report is suspicious. Whatever the immediate choreography, the coronation had been years in the making. Pope Leo III had been violently attacked by Roman factions in 799 and had fled north to the Frankish court at Paderborn to seek Charlemagne’s help. Charlemagne escorted the pope back to Rome in November 800, presided over a synod that cleared him of the charges against him, and was crowned emperor three weeks later. The arrangement suited both men. Leo gained a powerful protector; Charlemagne gained a sacred title that elevated him above the mere kings of the West.

The coronation also opened a question that would haunt the medieval West for centuries: did imperial authority come from the pope or from God and the people? The papacy would long argue the first; the empire, the second. The answer was never settled. The Byzantine emperors, who had claimed the title continuously since 476, were furious, and the imperial chancery at Constantinople refused for a decade to acknowledge Charlemagne’s elevation. Only in 812, after long negotiations, did the Byzantine emperor Michael I Rangabe at last recognize his imperial colleague in the West, with each side claiming parity.

The church, the courts, and the law

The Carolingian Empire was as much a religious as a political project. The king was not only a ruler of men; he was the defender of the Church, the protector of the pope, the patron of bishops, the reformer of the liturgy, and the champion of the Christianization of the pagan frontier. The most ambitious piece of legislation surviving from the reign is the Admonitio Generalis of 789, a long set of instructions covering the duties of bishops, the care of the poor, the tithe, the schools, the liturgy, and the catechism. It was issued in 789, in the same year that the Synod of Frankfurt condemned Adoptionism, and it shows the king acting as a kind of universal Christian magistrate. The same pattern can be seen in the Capitulare de villis, the Capitulare missorum, the Capitulare de partibus Saxoniae, and the dozens of other royal instructions that fill the capitulary collections.

The Church was the only institution that could give the empire the moral unity the dynasty needed. The bishops, drawn from the great aristocratic families and trained in the cathedral and monastic schools, were the local elites of the realm. The monks, reformed under the Benedictine Rule and gathered in the great abbeys of Corbie, Tours, Reichenau, Saint Gall, and Fulda, were the literate class. The parish system, slowly extending across the countryside, was the network through which royal authority reached the villages. The king worked through this network, supporting it, reforming it, and using it. The result was a state that was both secular and sacred, a Christian commonwealth in which the political and the religious were inseparable.

The law, in the same way, was tied to the Christian order. The Frankish legal tradition, in the Salic Law, the Ripuarian Law, the Lombard Law, the Bavarian Law, and the Saxon Law, was written down in revised and expanded forms under the Carolingians, often with explicit Christian preambles. The capitularies added a third layer: royal instructions of general application, issued in assembly, intended to fill the gaps in the older law codes. The result was not a modern legal system, but it was a coherent body of written law that has no parallel in the contemporary West.

The economy of the empire

The Carolingian economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. The vast majority of the empire’s twenty-five million people lived in villages, on manors, working the land. The great estates of the king, the bishops, the abbots, and the greater aristocrats were the principal economic units. The Capitulare de villis, an inventory of the royal estates written for the missi who were to inspect them, gives a vivid picture of how a great estate was organized. There were fields, meadows, vineyards, woods, fisheries, workshops, and a long list of serfs, slaves, and free tenants, with the count of the livestock and the tools they used.

Trade, in the eighth and ninth centuries, was significant. The Frankish silver denarius, the only silver coin in the Latin West, was minted in some four hundred mints across the empire, and it circulated widely. The trade of the North Sea, with the Frisians, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Scandinavians, was brisk. Dorestad, the great Frisian port at the mouth of the Rhine, was one of the busiest emporia of the early Middle Ages, and the archaeology of Dorestad, Hedeby, Birka, and other contemporary trading towns has revealed a rich material culture. Mediterranean trade, through Marseille, Arles, and the Italian ports, brought silks, spices, and luxury goods from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. The trade in slaves, of which the Vikings would later be the chief practitioners, was a normal part of the early medieval economy.

By the ninth century, however, the Viking and Magyar attacks were disrupting the trade routes, and the silver coinage was rapidly debased. The reform of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, who in 864 issued a new silver denarius of much higher purity, briefly revived the economy. But the silver mines of the empire were exhausted by 880, and the coinage almost disappeared. The local exchange of goods and the use of the precious metals in the form of jewelry, plate, and coin fragments took over. The economy of the tenth century, in many parts of the former empire, was more primitive than that of the eighth.

Carolingian society was hierarchical, militarized, and aristocratic. At the top stood the king, the imperial household, and the great magnates — the dukes, the counts, the bishops, and the abbots. The dukes were the regional military commanders, ruling over a group of counties; the counts were the local administrators, judges, and military leaders. The bishops, in the same way, were territorial magnates with military obligations. The abbots of the great monasteries, Reichenau, Saint Gall, Corbie, Fulda, Tours, were peers of the bishops in many respects. Below the magnates stood the lesser nobility, the vassi and the ministeriales, who held their lands as a benefice in return for military service. The free peasantry, the ingenui, lived in the villages and owed military service and rents to their lords. The unfree, the servi and the ancillae, were tied to the land.

The whole society was bound together by an elaborate system of mutual obligations, often expressed in the language of the family. The king was the father of his people; the lord was the father of his men. The obligations of loyalty, fidelitas, ran up and down the social scale. The Carolingians did not invent feudalism, but they gave it much of the vocabulary and many of the institutions that would shape the High Middle Ages. The counts, the benefices, the homage, the vassalage, the fidelitas — all of these were Carolingian forms, even if they were developed more fully after the dynasty’s fall.

Aachen and the court

The court of Charlemagne had no permanent capital, but the palace at Aachen, in the Rhineland, was the place to which the king returned again and again. The palace, of which the chapel survives, was the most ambitious building program of the early Middle Ages. The chapel, modeled on San Vitale in Ravenna, was an octagonal building with a two-story ambulatory, surrounded by an atrium and a series of monastic buildings. Its marble columns, its bronze railings, its gilded grilles, and its mosaics were the most splendid interior in the Latin West.

The court that gathered at Aachen was equally ambitious. Charlemagne brought to his palace scholars from every part of the British Isles and the Continent. The court included Alcuin of York, Theodulf of Orléans, Paul the Deacon, Paulinus of Aquileia, Peter of Pisa, Benedict of Aniane, the Irishman Dicuil, and Einhard, the Frank who would write the king’s biography. The court was also the meeting place of the great men of the empire: the archchaplain, the archchancellor, the counts palatine, the chamberlain, the seneschal, and the marshal. The household, organized on the model of a great Frankish aristocratic household, was the prototype of the imperial households of the Ottonian, Salian, and Hohenstaufen dynasties.

Foreign relations

The Carolingian court maintained active diplomatic relations with the great powers of the age. The Byzantine emperors were the principal rivals. The two empires had long contested the control of Italy and the southern Balkans, and the coronation of 800 made the rivalry explicit. The exchange of embassies between Charlemagne and the empress Irene in 802 was a particularly delicate moment, since the two rulers were negotiating the recognition of the imperial title.

The Abbasid caliphs, who ruled the Islamic world from Baghdad, were the other great power. Charlemagne exchanged embassies with Harun al-Rashid in 797 and 802, and the caliph sent the Frankish king an elephant named Abul-Abbas, a water clock, a set of silks, and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The relations were cordial, and the Frankish and Abbasid courts even discussed the possibility of a joint operation to recover Jerusalem from the Aghlabids of North Africa. The project came to nothing, but the fact that it was discussed at all shows the scope of the Carolingian diplomatic imagination.

The Anglo-Saxons of England were another set of important interlocutors. The English kings, especially Offa of Mercia, were impressed by the Carolingians and imitated their coinage, their law codes, and their diplomatic forms. Alcuin of York, who joined the Frankish court in 782, was the most famous of the many Anglo-Saxon scholars and churchmen who worked for the Carolingians. The reverse traffic, from the Continent to England, was equally important. The Benedictine reform of the English monasteries, led by Dunstan and his followers in the late tenth century, was a direct imitation of the Carolingian monasticism of the ninth.

The Scandinavian peoples, finally, were a constant presence on the northern frontier. The Danes, the Norwegians, and the Swedes were at once trading partners, raiders, and potential converts. Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious dealt carefully with the Danish king Harald Klak, who accepted baptism in 826 with Louis as his sponsor. The attempt to Christianize Denmark failed in the end, but it laid the foundations for the Danish Church of the tenth century.

The kingdom after Charlemagne

The empire that Charlemagne left to his son in 814 was, in many ways, the most powerful state the Latin West had seen. Its revenues were gathered by a network of counts, its laws were issued in the chancery, its liturgy was celebrated in a uniform rite, and its coinage was struck in hundreds of mints. Yet the empire was also fragile. Its unity depended on the king’s person; its institutions were thin on the ground; and the system of partition that distributed the realm among the king’s heirs was built into the dynasty’s inheritance law. The generations after Charlemagne would test these weaknesses, and they would discover how rapidly the inheritance of a great king could be exhausted.

Government of the empire

The Carolingian Empire was a personal monarchy. There was no permanent capital in the modern sense; the court moved between royal estates such as Aachen, Thionville, Ingelheim, and Attigny, transporting the chancery, the chapel, the treasury, and the household of perhaps a hundred officials. Yet the government was neither primitive nor improvised. It was based on a sophisticated mixture of written law, royal inspection, and ecclesiastical oversight, all of it directed from the king’s chapel and chancery.

The basic unit of administration was the county, ruled by a count appointed by the king. Counts held courts, raised troops, collected royal revenues, and enforced the king’s capitularies — the long, discursive sets of instructions that survive in more than two hundred examples. Above the counts stood the missi dominici, the “envoys of the lord king,” pairs of lay and clerical inspectors who rode circuits of the realm twice a year, holding public courts, hearing complaints, and reporting back to the king. The missi dominici were the empire’s nervous system: they tied the king to the localities and made royal government possible in an age of poor roads and slow communications.

The Church was woven into the same structure. Bishops, like counts, were royal officials, charged with preaching, baptizing, judging, and reporting. The council system, revived under Charlemagne and intensified under his son, became a parallel government that issued its own legislation and disciplined its own members. Monasteries, reformed under the Benedictine Rule, kept schools, copied books, and provided the literate personnel on which the whole system depended.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Around the year 780, Charlemagne gathered at his court the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York, the Italian grammarian Peter of Pisa, the Visigothic theologian Theodulf, the Lombard historian Paul the Deacon, and others. The result was the Carolingian Renaissance, a renewal of Latin literacy, classical learning, Christian theology, and the visual arts that has a fair claim to be the most important cultural event between the collapse of Roman culture and the rise of the scholasticism of the twelfth century.

The renaissance was not a revival of classical paganism; it was a Christian humanism that used the Latin classics, both Christian and pagan, as a tool for understanding the Bible, reforming the liturgy, and training the clergy. Alcuin’s scriptorium at Tours produced the Carolingian minuscule, the clear, legible hand from which most modern lowercase letters descend. The court school at Aachen became a model for cathedral and monastic schools across the empire. Scholars produced correct editions of the Bible, written commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels, new hymns, new sacramentaries, and a corrected liturgy that would remain in use for centuries. In art, the Carolingian and Ottonian courts produced illuminated manuscripts, palace chapels, and metalwork of a refinement unseen in the West for three hundred years.

The empire at its height

By the second decade of the ninth century, the Carolingian Empire contained perhaps twenty-five million people, ruled an area greater than modern France and Germany combined, and enjoyed a degree of internal peace unknown in the West since the Antonines. Einhard, writing in the 820s, could compare Charlemagne’s reign to the great empires of the Old Testament. Contemporary chronicles record the wonder of foreign visitors: the Byzantine emperor Michael I sent an embassy in 811 to discuss the implications of an imperial title in the West; the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid exchanged gifts with Charlemagne and granted him custody of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; the king of the Anglo-Saxons, Offa, struck coins that mimicked the Carolingian denarius. For a generation, the Carolingian Empire was the western world’s center of gravity.

Charlemagne’s successors and the Treaty of Verdun

Charlemagne died in 814 and was succeeded by his only surviving son, Louis the Pious. Louis was a conscientious, devout ruler who tried to govern the empire in close partnership with the Church and to divide it, at his death, among his three surviving sons. The result was catastrophe. Louis’s second marriage to Judith of Bavaria produced a fourth son, Charles the Bald, and re-opened the question of partition that Louis had thought settled. From 830 to 840 the empire was convulsed by civil war as Louis’s sons fought their father and one another. The war ended only with Louis’s death in 840, and it was settled not on the battlefield but at the negotiating table.

The Treaty of Verdun of 843 divided the empire among Louis’s three sons: Lothair I received the middle kingdom, a long strip from the Low Countries through Lorraine, Burgundy, and Provence into Italy, together with the imperial title; Louis the German received the East Frankish lands beyond the Rhine; Charles the Bald received the West Frankish lands, broadly the future France. The treaty is one of the foundational events of European history. The division it enacted proved more durable than any of the partitions that had preceded it, and from it historians later derived the names of the three regions that became modern France, Germany, and the Low Countries.

Fragmentation and the rise of new powers

The Treaty of Verdun was the beginning, not the end, of the empire’s fragmentation. In 855, Lothair I’s kingdom was divided among his three sons. In 870, the Treaty of Meerssen redrew the middle boundary between Charles the Bald and Louis the German, mostly to the detriment of Lothair’s son. In 887, the last East Frankish Carolingian of the direct line, Charles the Fat, was deposed, and the East Frankish kingdom passed to a non-Carolingian, Arnulf of Carinthia. By 911, the East Frankish throne had passed entirely out of Carolingian hands. In 987, the last West Frankish Carolingian king, Louis V, died, and Hugh Capet, count of Paris, was elected in his place.

The new kingdoms that emerged from the empire’s corpse — France, Germany, Burgundy, and Italy — were not as strong as the empire that had contained them. They were also under constant attack from new enemies. The Vikings sailed up the Seine, the Loire, the Rhine, and the Thames, sacked monasteries, and extracted tribute. The Magyars swept across the plains of Hungary into Bavaria, Saxony, and northern Italy. The Saracens established bases in Provence and raided deep into the Alps. The tenth century, sometimes called the saeculum obscurum, was the empire’s long aftershock.

The legacy of the Carolingian Empire

Even in collapse, the Carolingian Empire left a permanent mark on the European imagination. The title of Roman Emperor, dormant in the West, was passed on to the Ottonian dynasty in 962 and from them to the Salian, Hohenstaufen, and Habsburg dynasties. It survived, in theory, until 1806. The idea of a Christian emperor ruling a Christian people in defense of the Roman Church has shaped European political thought from the Middle Ages to the modern period.

The Carolingian Renaissance gave the Latin West a standard written Latin, a corrected Bible, a working school system, and a renewed visual culture on which the insular and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the British Isles and the Ottonian Renaissance of the tenth century could build. The partition of Verdun established the rough outlines of France and Germany as distinct political units. The alliance of crown and Church, forged in 754 and renewed in 800, became the structural model for medieval kingship. The system of counties, missi, and capitularies remained the template for royal government for centuries.

The Carolingian Empire was, in short, the hinge on which late antiquity turned into the Middle Ages. Its collapse did not destroy what it had built. It set the stage for the world that came after.

Carolingian myth and the making of Europe

The Carolingians did not need later generations to idealize them. Already in their own time, the court poets were turning Charlemagne into a legendary figure, and within a generation of his death he was being remembered as a sage king on a par with Solomon and Augustus. The court biographer Einhard, who had known Charlemagne personally, set the tone: his Vita Karoli Magni borrowed the structure of Suetonius’s imperial biographies, and the kings of the Ottonian and Salian dynasties read the work as a handbook of Christian rulership. The legend of Charlemagne was used by later medieval kings in their political battles with the papacy, and it was used by the papacy in its own claims to universal authority. Charlemagne became the patron saint of France, the model of the Christian emperor, the hero of the chansons de geste, and the very emblem of the Christian West.

The translation of the relics of Charlemagne from the palace chapel at Aachen to the cathedral in 1165, by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, was the moment when the legend became a cult. Charlemagne was canonized, his feast was entered in the liturgical calendar, and Aachen became a great pilgrimage center. The legend persisted through the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. French kings claimed the Carolingians as their ancestors, the Holy Roman Emperors claimed them as the founders of their title, and the papacy claimed them as the defenders of the Roman Church. Even the Protestant reformers, who had no use for saints, treated Charlemagne as a model of godly rule.

The political consequences of the legend were considerable. The Holy Roman Empire claimed the Carolingian title, and so did the Kingdom of France. The two claims collided in the medieval contest between empire and papacy, in the wars of Louis XIV, in the Napoleonic reconstruction of the map of Europe, and in the political theory of the modern state. The legacy of the Carolingian Empire, in this sense, is not a thing of the past. It is a part of the working memory of European politics.

Carolingian institutions in the successor kingdoms

Many of the institutions of the Carolingian state survived in the successor kingdoms, even when the dynasty itself did not. The county, the episcopal see, the archiepiscopal province, the march, and the royal chapel all became part of the institutional landscape of the High Middle Ages. The Carolingian capitulary form was imitated by the Ottonians, the Capetians, the Anglo-Saxons, and even the Normans of England and Sicily. The chancery, the chancery style, the use of seals, the form of the diploma, and the use of the anathema and the dating clause were all developed in the Carolingian period and became part of the diplomatic tradition of medieval Europe.

The Church, in the same way, was shaped by the Carolingian achievement. The parish system, the diocesan structure, the monastic reform, the liturgy, the canon law, the theology, and the schools of the Latin West were all in some sense Carolingian creations. The Roman rite, which was standardized under Charlemagne and his successors, became the rite of the Latin Church. The Benedictine Rule, which was imposed as the universal rule for western monks by the council of Aachen in 817, became the rule of western monasticism. The Roman Curia, the papal chancery, and the papal diplomatic forms were all developed in the context of the Carolingian alliance.

The cultural inheritance, finally, is the most lasting of all. The Carolingian minuscule became the basis of the modern Latin alphabet. The corrected Bible became the Bible of the Latin Middle Ages. The commentaries of Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, Walafrid Strabo, and their successors became the standard works of medieval theology. The hymns, the sacramentaries, and the liturgical books of the ninth century were still in use in the fifteenth. The schools of the Carolingian Renaissance were the ancestors of the cathedral schools, and the cathedral schools were the ancestors of the universities. The Carolingian achievement is, in a real sense, the foundation of medieval Latin civilization.

Why the Carolingian Empire matters

The Carolingian Empire matters because it is the bridge between the ancient world and the medieval world. Before Charlemagne, the Latin West was a collection of kingdoms and peoples, each with its own law, its own church, its own dialect, and its own institutions. After Charlemagne, there was a single Christian empire, with a single liturgy, a single Bible, a single school system, a single coinage, and a single chancery style. The collapse of the empire did not undo this work. It fragmented the political unity, but the cultural, religious, and institutional unity survived.

The Carolingian Empire also matters because it set the pattern for the medieval political imagination. The model of a Christian emperor ruling a Christian people, the alliance of throne and altar, the tension between empire and papacy, the contest between universal and particular jurisdictions — all of these are Carolingian creations. They were developed in the centuries after Charlemagne, but their origins are in the ninth century. Even the nation-states of modern Europe are, in a sense, heirs of the Carolingian past. France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and northern Italy are all in some sense products of the partition of Verdun.

Finally, the Carolingian Empire matters because it is one of the great experiments in the history of government. The attempt to rule a continental empire by a system of counties, missi, and capitularies, supported by a literate Church and a standardized liturgy, was a model of administration that the modern world has only partly equaled. The capitulary collections are still read by historians of law, the Capitulare de villis is still cited by economic historians, the missi are still cited by students of public administration, and the Carolingian Renaissance is still cited by historians of education. The empire of Charlemagne was, in short, a great success, and the work of studying it continues.

Exploring the Carolingian Empire in depth

The articles below explore the central topics of the Carolingian Empire in detail. They cover the reign of Charlemagne, the cultural flowering of the ninth century, the partition of Verdun, and the long, fragmented twilight of the dynasty.