What Did Charlemagne Look Like?

Charlemagne was a tall, heavy, vigorous man about six feet in height, with a round head, fair hair, a thick neck, and large, bright eyes. He dressed in the simple Frankish fashion of his time: a linen shirt, woolen trousers, a leather jerkin, and a cloak fastened at the shoulder with a brooch. In cold weather he wore an otter-skin vest. He shaved, and he was clean-shaven, in the Frankish fashion, rather than bearded like the Anglo-Saxons or the Byzantines. The description is based on the biography written some twenty-five years after his death by his courtier Einhard, who knew him personally and who modeled his portrait on Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars.

Einhard’s description

The portrait in Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni is the most authoritative surviving description of Charlemagne’s appearance, and it is the source on which nearly all later accounts are based. Einhard wrote:

He was large and strong, of great height; he was not, however, excessively tall. The crown of his head was round, his eyes were remarkably large and lively, his nose was somewhat longer than average, his hair was gray but his face was fresh and cheerful. His presence inspired respect, whether he was sitting or standing; his neck was thick and a little short, his belly was prominent, his legs were slender, his feet were small. His voice was clear, but not strong enough for so large a body.

The description is the more interesting because Einhard, who modeled his portrait on Suetonius, was trying to evoke the appearance of the Roman emperors rather than to give a strictly accurate picture. The “round head,” “thick neck,” and “prominent belly” are characteristics Einhard had read of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and the whole passage shows the influence of classical models.

Height, build, and physical habits

Modern historians have generally accepted the substance of Einhard’s description while correcting for the rhetorical conventions. Charlemagne was unusually tall for his time. The average height of an adult male in eighth-century Francia was about 5 feet 5 inches, and a man of 6 feet would have been a head taller than most of his contemporaries. The royal household and the king’s sword-bearers were chosen, Einhard tells us, for their height, and Charlemagne’s tallness was clearly a noted feature.

He was also strong and athletic. Einhard reports that he swam in the warm springs of Aachen “with the greatest of pleasure,” that he hunted on foot or on horseback in the forests around Aachen, and that he could ride a horse without using the stirrups — an unusual skill in a period when most riders were heavily dependent on stirrups. He ate and drank in moderation, despite a naturally heavy build, and he was seldom ill. He had a single substantial meal a day, usually with four courses in addition to the roast, which his doctors had recommended for his health. He drank wine in moderation and disliked drunkenness, especially in bishops and priests.

He dressed simply, in the Frankish fashion rather than the Roman. The Roman nobility of his court sometimes wore the long tunic, the chlamys, and the silk of the Byzantine court, but Charlemagne preferred his Frankish trousers and jerkin. He wore a sword at his side, even at court, and a jeweled sword-belt was part of his everyday dress. In cold weather he wore a cloak of otter-skin and a woolen cap. He usually carried a swordstick or a hunting knife.

He was clean-shaven, in the Frankish manner, with a clean face. He had his hair cut short, but not as short as the contemporary Roman fashion. In his later years his hair was white, and Einhard’s description of “fresh and cheerful” face refers to the king’s looks in old age, when he had been emperor for nearly fifteen years.

Contemporary portraits

Several portraits of Charlemagne are thought to survive from his lifetime, though the attributions are debated. The most famous is the small bronze equestrian statue, now in the Louvre, which was long thought to be a Carolingian original but is now generally thought to be a later work, possibly from the ninth century. The statue shows a tall, dignified rider in a simple tunic, with a sword at his side, riding a powerful horse. The head is too small for the body, in the manner of Carolingian sculpture, and the face is young and idealized.

A more reliable Carolingian portrait is the mosaic in the Lateran palace in Rome, which depicts Charlemagne as a tall, slender figure, dressed in a chlamys and crowned, with a square face, a long nose, and a forked beard. The mosaic has been heavily restored, but the original parts are thought to be Carolingian, and the portrait is one of the few that may be based on a contemporary likeness. A similar face appears in the bronze statue at Metz, which is now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, and on a series of Carolingian coins and seals.

The portraits on the coins and seals show a clean-shaven man with a long face, a prominent nose, and a forked beard — features that have been identified with the famous portrait of Charles the Bald in the Vivian Bible, which shows a similar face in a more elaborate courtly setting. The portraits of Charlemagne himself are rarer and more idealized.

Charlemagne in legend

In the centuries after his death, Charlemagne was remembered in an idealized form. The Chanson de Roland and the later chansons de geste show him as a long-bearded, patriarchal emperor, often seated on a throne, surrounded by his twelve peers. The forked beard became a feature of the legend, and the legend in turn shaped later portraiture. The famous portrait of Charlemagne in the Sacro Catino at Genoa, the bronze head in Metz, and the various painted and stained-glass portraits of the later Middle Ages all show a similar figure: a tall, dignified, bearded emperor with a crown.

The historical Charlemagne, however, was clean-shaven. The forked beard of the legend is a feature of the Carolingian and Ottonian tradition that associated the emperor with the long-bearded kings of the Old Testament.