Charlemagne and His Reign

Charles the Great — Carolus Magnus in Latin, Charlemagne in French — is the most famous ruler of the early Middle Ages and one of the most consequential in European history. He was king of the Franks from 768 and Roman Emperor from 800 until his death in 814. In the forty-six years of his reign he added Lombard Italy, Saxon Germany, the Spanish March, and the Avar lands to the Frankish realm; forged an unprecedented alliance with the papacy; gathered at his court the scholars who would produce the Carolingian Renaissance; and laid the foundations of a Christian empire in the West that would, in different forms, last for a thousand years. To understand the Carolingian Empire, one must begin with Charlemagne himself.

Early life and the road to kingship

Charlemagne was born on 2 April 747 or 748, the elder son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon. He grew up in a court that was, by Merovingian standards, austere and practical. Pepin had deposed the last Merovingian king Childeric III in 751, with the consent of the pope and a Frankish assembly, and had been anointed at Saint-Denis by the priest in 754. The Carolingian dynasty was still new and its legitimacy had to be defended in every generation.

When Pepin died in 768, the Frankish kingdom was divided, as was the custom, between his two sons. Charlemagne received the outer, more warlike parts of the realm: Austrasia, the heart of the old Frankish homeland in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, together with Neustria. His brother Carloman received the more Romanized south: Burgundy, Provence, and the Austrasian and Alemannic peripheries. The division was uneasy. Carloman died in 771, and Charlemagne, with the consent of the Frankish magnates, took the whole kingdom for himself, setting aside Carloman’s young sons.

The early years of the joint reign had already given a hint of Charlemagne’s energy. In 769 he led an expedition to southern Gaul to suppress a rebellion by the duke of Aquitaine, and he fought his first Italian campaign in the same year. The pattern of constant campaigning, set in the 760s, would continue for the next four decades.

The conquest of Lombard Italy

Charlemagne’s first major war outside Gaul was the conquest of the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy. The Lombard king Desiderius had married his daughter to Carloman in 770, and when Carloman died the Lombard king tried to install his grandsons on the Frankish throne. The pope, Adrian I, was also at odds with Desiderius over papal territory. In 772, both Adrian and Charlemagne had reason to move against the Lombards.

Charlemagne crossed the Alps in 773, took Verona by assault on the way south, and laid siege to Desiderius’s capital of Pavia. The siege lasted almost a year. Pavia fell in June 774, Desiderius was sent into a monastery, and Charlemagne assumed the iron crown of Lombardy. The campaign was decisive: it ended Lombard independence, placed Frankish garrisons in the Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, and gave Charlemagne a permanent Italian frontier with the Byzantine Empire.

The Italian campaign of 773–774 also established a model that would shape Charlemagne’s rule: close cooperation with the papacy. Charlemagne confirmed his father Pepin’s donation to the Church, and Pope Adrian in turn recognized Charlemagne as patrician of the Romans, an honor that gave him a formal role in Roman civic life. The alliance was deepened in 781, when Charlemagne sent his son Pepin to Italy as a sub-king, and in 787, when the pope baptized Charlemagne’s younger son Louis. By 799, when Pope Leo III fled to the Frankish court at Paderborn, the relationship between pope and emperor was so close that Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard could call the pope “the chief priest” of the Franks.

The Saxon wars

The longest, bloodiest, and most ideologically charged of Charlemagne’s wars was the conquest of Saxony. The Saxons were a confederation of pagan peoples who lived between the Rhine and the Elbe, in the forests and heaths of what is now northern Germany. They raided Frankish churches and monasteries, and they refused to accept Christian baptism. Charlemagne’s first Saxon campaign in 772 began a war that would last, in repeated outbreaks, until 804.

The Frankish response combined military conquest, mass deportation, and religious coercion on a scale without parallel in the early Middle Ages. In 772 Charlemagne felled the sacred tree of Irminsul, the Saxon cult object, near modern Paderborn. In 777 he convened a great assembly at Paderborn — the very place where Saxons would later be baptized — at which Saxon leaders did homage and accepted Christian baptism. In 782 the Saxons revolted under their leader Widukind, and Charlemagne responded with the massacre of Verden, in which 4,500 Saxons who had accepted baptism and then relapsed were executed in a single day.

The war produced the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (c. 782–785), a code of Saxon law that made refusal of baptism, return to paganism, and destruction of churches capital crimes. It was the harshest law in early medieval Europe. Yet it also created a Christian Saxony, ruled by Frankish counts and bishops, that would become one of the most loyal regions of the East Frankish kingdom. Widukind himself submitted and was baptized in 785. By 804, when the last Saxon revolt was crushed and thousands of Saxon families were resettled into Frankish lands and vice versa, Saxony was at peace and Christian. The conversion had cost perhaps a generation, but the result was permanent.

The Spanish March and the campaign of 778

Across the Pyrenees, the Frankish realm met the Muslim emirate of Córdoba. The borderlands had been contested for generations, with intermittent cooperation between local Christian lords and the emirs. In 777, the Muslim governor of Barcelona, Sulayman al-Arabi, appealed to Charlemagne for help against the emir. Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees in 778 with a large army, only to find that Sulayman had already been defeated. On the way home, the Frankish rearguard was ambushed at Roncesvalles on 15 August 778, and the Breton march count Roland was killed.

The disaster of Roncesvalles is the historical kernel of the Chanson de Roland, one of the great epic poems of the Middle Ages. The historical reality was less glamorous. Charlemagne returned north and abandoned direct intervention in Spain for almost two decades. His son Louis the Pious, however, established the Spanish March in the 790s and turned the border war into a long, slow Frankish advance. By 820 the Carolingians held Barcelona and the Catalan counties, and the region would remain Christian and Frankish for the rest of the Middle Ages.

The Avar campaigns and the Slavic frontier

In the 790s Charlemagne’s armies turned east against the Avars, a steppe people whose khaganate controlled the Pannonian basin, modern Hungary, and the lower Danube. The Avar Ring, the great ring-fortress of the khaganate, was captured in 796 after a long siege. The Avar treasury, accumulated over two centuries of tribute from the surrounding peoples, was so vast that Einhard reports the Franks filled fifteen wagon trains. The khaganate disappeared within a generation, and the Pannonian basin was organized as a Frankish march, with Christian missionaries establishing themselves along the Danube.

Beyond the Avar lands, the Slavic peoples of the middle Elbe were brought into the Frankish orbit. Some, like the Obotrites, became firm allies. Others, like the Sorbs and the Wiltzi, remained tributary but restless. The eastern frontier established under Charlemagne would define the borders of Germany for centuries.

The imperial coronation

On Christmas Day in the year 800, Charlemagne entered old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on his head and the Roman people acclaimed him “great and pacific Emperor of the Romans.” The coronation was the symbolic climax of his reign. It revived the title of Roman Emperor, dormant in the West since 476, and bound the Carolingian monarchy to the Roman Church in a way that would shape European politics for centuries.

Einhard famously reports that Charlemagne would not have entered the church that day had he known what was about to happen, and that he would never have agreed to the ceremony had it not been for the pope’s initiative. Modern historians generally treat this as diplomatic fiction: the coronation had been prepared in advance, and Charlemagne had spent the previous year settling the affairs of Rome, escorting the pope back to the city, and presiding over a synod that cleared Leo of the charges against him. Whatever the immediate choreography, the result was permanent. Charlemagne ruled as emperor for the last fourteen years of his life, and his son Louis the Pious inherited the title as naturally as the crown.

Government and daily rule

Charlemagne was, by all accounts, a tireless ruler. Einhard reports that he worked from early morning until late at night, with a short break for bathing and a single substantial meal a day. He spoke Frankish, the language of his childhood, and understood Latin, though he never learned to write it. He added some Greek, and the surviving fragments of his language textbook, the so-called Codex Carolinus, show him working through the words of the months and the wind names with patient care.

He governed through a network of counts, bishops, and royal envoys. The missi dominici, the king’s representatives who rode in pairs through the realm twice a year, reported abuses, heard complaints, and enforced the long series of royal instructions called capitularies. These capitularies, more than two hundred of which survive, regulated everything from coinage and weights to the conduct of bishops, the tithe, the military levy, and the schooling of the poor. They were not, in the modern sense, a legal code; they were royal instructions, issued in the form of letters to the missi and the counts, and they had to be repeated and adapted to local circumstances. Yet they gave the empire a real measure of central government, and they are the closest thing the early Middle Ages had to a uniform national legislation.

Charlemagne also took a personal interest in education, liturgy, and the Christianization of his realm. He ordered the creation of schools in every monastery and bishopric, the correction of the Latin Bible, the standardization of the liturgy, and the preaching of the Gospel in the vernacular. He was present at councils, synods, and ecclesiastical assemblies; he corresponded with scholars and theologians across Europe; and he presided over the slow, deliberate construction of a Christian culture that the Carolingian Renaissance would bring to maturity in the years around 800.

Charlemagne the man

The descriptions of Charlemagne that survive — Einhard’s biography, the portraits of Einhard, Notker the Stammerer, and the monk of Saint-Gall — paint a striking picture of a tall, heavy, vigorous man. He stood about six feet tall, had a round head, fair hair, a thick neck, and bright, lively eyes. He dressed in the Frankish fashion: linen shirt, woolen hose, a leather jerkin, a cloak fastened at the shoulder with a brooch. In cold weather he wore an otter-skin vest. He loved swimming, riding, hunting, and feasting. He ate lightly, drank wine in moderation, and disliked drunkenness, though his son Louis would later suffer from it.

He was a careful, deliberate ruler, with a strong sense of the limits of his power. He tolerated the Jews of his realm, who were economically useful and politically quiet. He treated the conquered Saxons firmly but incorporated them into the empire, rather than destroying them. He corresponded with Harun al-Rashid of Baghdad and sent an embassy to the Byzantine court. He brought to his court scholars of every background — Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Lombard — and listened to them with patience.

The end of the reign

Charlemagne died on 28 January 814 at Aachen, after a short illness. He was buried in the palatine chapel he had built there, and his son Louis was crowned emperor at Reims within weeks. The empire he left behind was the largest, most populous, and best-governed state the Latin West had seen in three hundred years. It would not long survive him. Yet the title, the institutions, and the cultural inheritance he had created would shape Europe for a millennium to come.