Who Was Charlemagne Before He Became Emperor?

Before becoming emperor in 800, Charles the Great was king of the Franks from 768, the conqueror of Lombard Italy and Saxon Germany, the protector of the papacy, and the most powerful ruler in the Latin West. He had already reigned as king for almost thirty-two years when Pope Leo III crowned him emperor on Christmas Day. The imperial title added a new dignity to a Frankish kingship that was already, in substance, imperial in its reach.

Birth and childhood

Charlemagne was born on 2 April 747 or 748, the elder son of Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had been mayor of the palace under the Merovingian kings and had won the Battle of Tours against the forces of al-Andalus in 732. His father, Pepin, had deposed the last Merovingian king in 751 and had been anointed with the holy oil at Saint-Denis by the priest in 754, an act that gave the new Carolingian dynasty a sacred legitimacy the Merovingians had not enjoyed.

Charlemagne grew up at the Frankish court, probably at Quierzy or Compiègne, and was educated in the Latin and Frankish traditions. He learned to read Latin, though he never learned to write well, and he studied the liberal arts, the Bible, and the Latin classics with the Frankish and Italian scholars who taught the royal children. He also learned the skills of a warrior-king: riding, hunting, swordsmanship, and the command of armies. He was taught to govern with the same mixture of firmness and consultation that his father and grandfather had practiced.

Joint king, 768–771

When Pepin the Short died on 24 September 768, the Frankish kingdom was divided between his two sons, as was the custom. Charlemagne received the outer, more warlike parts of the realm: Austrasia, Neustria, and the Aquitanian lands of the south-west. His brother Carloman received the more Romanized south and east: Burgundy, Provence, and the Austrasian and Alemannic peripheries.

The joint reign was difficult. Carloman’s mother Bertrada seems to have favored Charlemagne, and Charlemagne’s chief supporters, including the Austrasian and Neustrian magnates, were unhappy with the partition. The brothers were not personally close, and the divisions of the realm made joint action difficult. In 770, Carloman married a daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, an alliance that was directed against Charlemagne. The alliance collapsed when Charlemagne himself married Desiderius’s daughter, repudiated her a year later, and invaded Italy. Carloman died suddenly in December 771, and Charlemagne, with the consent of the Frankish magnates and the rejection of Carloman’s widow, took the whole kingdom for himself.

King of the Lombards, 774

Charlemagne’s first major war as sole king was the conquest of Lombard Italy. The Lombard king Desiderius had been threatening the pope, who appealed to the Frankish king for help. In 773, Charlemagne crossed the Alps with a large army, took Verona 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 the Lombards.

The conquest gave Charlemagne control of northern Italy. He confirmed his father Pepin’s donation to the pope, returned to Pavia in 776 to suppress a Lombard revolt, and spent most of the early 780s organizing the new Italian kingdom. He appointed his son Pepin as sub-king of Italy in 781, with the pope’s blessing, and he reorganized the Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento as Frankish marches. By 790, Italy was a permanent part of the Frankish realm, and Charlemagne was, in effect, ruler of the Italian peninsula.

The Saxon wars, 772–804

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

The war was a mixture of military conquest, mass deportation, and religious coercion. Charlemagne advanced into Saxony year after year, felling the sacred tree of Irminsul, baptizing the survivors, and codifying the laws of the new Christian land in the harsh Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae. The Saxon leader Widukind submitted and was baptized in 785, and the last Saxon revolt was crushed in 804. By that time, Saxony had been Christianized and incorporated into the Frankish realm. The conversion was permanent, and the descendants of the Saxons became the core of medieval Germany.

The Spanish March and the eastern frontier

In 778 Charlemagne led an expedition into Spain to assist a Muslim rebel against the emir of Córdoba. The expedition was unsuccessful, and on the way home the Frankish rearguard was ambushed at Roncesvalles on 15 August 778. The disaster, in which the Breton march count Roland was killed, was the historical kernel of the Chanson de Roland. The Spanish frontier was not finally settled until the 790s, when Charlemagne’s son Louis established the Spanish March and began a long, slow Frankish advance that culminated in the capture of Barcelona in 801.

On the eastern frontier, Charlemagne’s armies campaigned against the Avars, a steppe people whose khaganate controlled the Pannonian basin. The Avar Ring, the great fortress of the khaganate, was captured in 796, and the Avar treasury was so vast that it took fifteen wagons to haul it back to the Frankish realm. The Slavic peoples beyond the Elbe were brought into the Frankish orbit as tributary peoples, and Christian missionaries fanned out into the new frontier.

The patrician of the Romans

Charlemagne’s relationship with the papacy had been close since the days of his father. In 774, when he conquered the Lombard kingdom, he had been made patrician of the Romans, an honor that gave him a formal role in Roman civic life and a special responsibility for the protection of the Roman Church. He returned to Italy repeatedly, and his son Pepin, as sub-king, ruled the peninsula as a Frankish official.

In 799, the pope, Leo III, was attacked by Roman rivals and fled north to the Frankish court at Paderborn. Charlemagne received the pope with the highest honors and spent the autumn of 800 in Rome, presiding over a synod that cleared Leo of the charges against him. 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. On Christmas Day 800, Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor in old St. Peter’s Basilica, and the king became, in law, the political heir of the ancient Roman emperors.

King, emperor, and Christian

The Charlemagne who became emperor in 800 was, in every meaningful sense, already the ruler of the Latin West. He had conquered or absorbed Italy, Saxony, the Spanish March, Bavaria, and the Avar lands. He had reformed the liturgy, the Bible, the schools, and the coinage. He had forged an unprecedented alliance with the papacy. He had built a palace at Aachen, gathered a circle of scholars, and presided over the early stages of the Carolingian Renaissance. The imperial title added a new dimension to a rule that was already the most powerful in the West, and it established a model of Christian empire that would shape European political thought for centuries.