Charlemagne

I

INTRODUCTION

Charlemagne (742?-814), in Latin Carolus Magnus (Charles the Great), king of the Franks (768-814) and emperor of the Romans (800-814). During his reign, Charlemagne built a kingdom that included almost all of western and central Europe and he presided over a cultural and legal revival that came to be known as the Carolingian Renaissance. His empire did not long survive his death, but its two main territories, East and West Francia, later became the major parts of two important European entities: West Francia became modern-day France, and East Francia became first the Holy Roman Empire and then the modern state of Germany. Charlemagne’s close alliance with the popes, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, also established a precedent for subsequent ties between medieval popes and kings.

II

BACKGROUND AND EARLY LIFE

Charlemagne was born about 742, the elder son of the Frankish leader Pepin the Short. Pepin held the ancestral title of mayor of the palace under the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings. However, in the wake of a long line of increasingly weak Merovingian kings, Pepin abandoned this lesser title and in 751 assumed the kingship of the Franks. In order to legitimate his rule, Pepin sought the support of the pope. In exchange for a promise to protect the pope’s lands in Italy from an invasion, Pope Stephen II officially crowned Pepin in 754. Besides crowning Pepin, the pope anointed both Charlemagne and his younger brother Carloman.

During his father’s reign, Charlemagne accompanied the Frankish army on campaigns to defend the pope against the Lombards, a Germanic people who controlled northern and central Italy, and on missions to conquer the region of Aquitaine in what is now southern France. As a result, Charlemagne learned at an early age the importance of both strong leadership on the battlefield and of close links between secular power and the Roman Catholic Church.

III

KING AND EMPEROR

On Pepin’s death, his kingdom was divided between his two sons. For three years Charlemagne shared rule of the kingdom with his brother, Carloman. After Carloman died suddenly in 771, Charlemagne became sole king of the Franks, and immediately afterward traveled to Rome and assured the pope of his continued support. Charlemagne then began a lengthy series of military campaigns to expand the Frankish kingdom.

A

Campaigns Against the Saxons

Charlemagne’s first move came against Saxony (Sachsen), a region in what is now northwestern Germany. The Saxons, the last non-Christian and independent tribe of central Germany, had long harassed the Franks with raids against their borders. Charlemagne regarded the Saxons as a serious threat to his empire, and he wanted to convert these pagan peoples to Christianity.

Although Charlemagne first invaded Saxony in 772, he did not completely conquer the Saxons until 32 years later. In 782 Charlemagne organized Saxony as a Frankish province and established the Christian Church there, but insurrections broke out regularly. Charlemagne had to conduct several fierce campaigns and capture the Saxon chieftain before he could firmly impose his rule. He introduced Frankish political institutions and forced his new subjects to convert to Christianity. When rebellions again broke out in 792, Charlemagne deported many Saxons, bringing in Franks to replace them. Charlemagne completed the conquest of Saxony in 804.

Using methods similar to those he employed in Saxony, Charlemagne annexed Bavaria and some of the border territories between Germany and the Slavic and Avar countries to the east. Between 791 and 795 he forced the Slavs and Avars to pay him tribute; their lands, which included parts of modern Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia, formed buffer states on the eastern frontier of his empire.

B

Southern Campaigns

During the long years of the Saxon conflict, Charlemagne also extended his domain to the south. In 773 he answered the appeal of Pope Adrian I for assistance against a Lombard invasion of papal territories in central Italy. He defeated and deposed the Lombard king, Desiderius, and became ruler of the kingdom of the Lombards, which made up the northern half of Italy. This conquest had important consequences. It won him the title of patrician of the Romans from Pope Adrian I, as well as a large measure of influence over the pope.

In 778 Charlemagne invaded what is now northern Spain, which was under the control of the Moors, who were Muslims from northern Africa. He was stopped at Saragossa, but in a later campaign he secured Navarre and the part of northern Spain known as the Spanish March. On his return through the Pyrenees in 778, the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army, under his lieutenant Roland, was cut off and massacred by Basques. This event was later immortalized in the medieval epic Song of Roland.

Despite the unprecedented scope of his military successes, it is uncertain that Charlemagne purposely set out to reestablish the Roman Empire in the West. The attempt to revive the empire was more likely the result of the pope’s desire to win independence from the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, emperor in Constantinople, who still claimed Italy as part of his empire. The pope was also motivated by his opposition to certain religious doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church (the dominant church in the Byzantine Empire), particularly the doctrine of iconoclasm, which forbade the worship of images. See Orthodox Church; Iconoclasm.

C

Coronation

In 799 Charlemagne came to the aid of Adrian’s successor, Pope Leo III, who was threatened by a rebellion in Rome. Charlemagne put down the rebellion, and on Christmas Day 800, Leo crowned Charlemagne and anointed him emperor of the Romans. This action revived the imperial tradition of the Western Roman Empire and set a precedent that the emperors’ authority rested on the approval of the pope. Although the imperial title did not confer any new powers on Charlemagne, it did legitimate his rule over central Italy, a fact that the Byzantine emperor acknowledged in 812.

IV

CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE

A

Administrative Reforms

Charlemagne introduced some key governmental innovations into his empire, which became known as the Carolingian Empire. He built on the existing system of seignorialism, whereby kings gave tracts of land to their nobles in exchange for loyalty and service. Charlemagne granted large landholdings called fiefs to many tribal military leaders. In addition, he appointed numerous Frankish aristocrats to the posts of counts (the head of a district called a county) and margraves (the count of a border province). These officials were key to administering the empire. They were kings in miniature, with all of the administrative, judicial, and military authority of the emperor within their respective districts. Each political district had its parallel in a church district, or diocese, headed by a bishop, with similar authority in all matters related to the church. Both counts and bishops were vassals of the emperor, and were overseen by representatives of Charlemagne known as missi dominici, who traveled throughout the empire overseeing economic and legal matters in his name. Every year, both counts and bishops attended a general assembly at Charlemagne’s court at Aachen (in modern Germany), where they would advise the emperor and hear his directives.

B

Economic and Legal Reforms

Charlemagne reorganized the economy of his empire. He standardized tolls and customs dues as well as weights and measures, actions that improved commerce. He also constructed roads and bridges, and even attempted unsuccessfully to dig a canal between the Rhine and Danube. Finally, the first silver coin since the late Roman Empire was minted, the denarius, which bore Charlemagne's portrait.

Charlemagne also instituted important judicial and legal reforms in his empire. He ordered the compilation and codification of the laws of many of the tribes he had conquered, and he incorporated many of these laws into the statutes of his empire. In addition, he revised the existing laws of the Franks and ordered the compilation of canon—or church—laws as well.

C

The Carolingian Renaissance

An equally important achievement of the empire was a cultural revival known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne ordered bishops and abbots to set up schools for the training of monks and other clerics. Much of his motivation for this policy was practical as well as religious; because the training was conducted in Latin, it promoted the standardization of a common written and spoken language in a huge empire of several languages and dialects. The simplified handwriting devised during this period, known as Carolingian miniscule, is the ancestor of the modern printed alphabet. Charlemagne also persuaded Alcuin of York and other renowned scholars of the day to come to his court and establish a new academy and library of pagan and Christian works. These scholars copied and transcribed many classical manuscripts, both from Greek times and from the Roman Empire, and as such played a key role in preserving much of the literary heritage of ancient Rome.

V

DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE

Even before the end of Charlemagne’s reign the empire had stopped expanding. Despite its claim as the successor to the Western Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s realm lacked many of the important institutions that had allowed the old Roman Empire to survive the emperor’s death. Institutions such as a money economy, a strong governmental infrastructure, and a professional civil service were needed to keep the empire from disintegrating. Instead, Charlemagne’s empire was based almost entirely on his own personal ability to hold together a large number of different tribes and ethnic groups. The size of the empire made it difficult to administer, and tribal dissension was a frequent threat. The empire collapsed not long after Charlemagne’s death in 814.

Charlemagne’s sole heir, Louis I, the Pious, ruled until his death in 840. After great dissension among Louis’s heirs, the Treaty of Verdun of 843 divided Charlemagne’s empire among his three grandsons: Charles II, the Bald, received West Francia (roughly modern-day France); Lothair I acquired the title of emperor and an area running from the North Sea through Lotharingia (Lorraine) and Burgundy to northern Italy; Louis II, the German, received East Francia (roughly modern-day Germany). Later, in 870, the Treaty of Mersen divided Lothair’s middle kingdom, with Lotharingia going to East Francia and the rest to West Francia. The Carolingian dynasty ruled in West Francia, or France, until 987; the German branch of the family ruled in East Francia until 911. The title of emperor of the Romans (which would later become Holy Roman emperor) remained in the east, thereafter held exclusively by German kings.

VI

LEGACY OF CHARLEMAGNE

Throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times, Charlemagne has provided the model of the ideal warrior-king and the inspiration for all subsequent empire builders in Europe. In fact, the word for “king” in several modern Slavic languages (król in Polish; král in Czech) is based upon the German name of Charlemagne, Karl. The principal significance of Charlemagne's empire was that it united the Christian lands of western Europe and firmly established the power of the church. Charlemagne ruled as absolute sovereign of the state, as well as head of the church. The conquests of Charlemagne also laid the groundwork for the development of a new political entity, the German state, and for the division of Italy into north and south. In addition, Charlemagne placed his immense power and prestige at the service of Christian doctrine, the teaching of Latin, the copying of books, and the rule of law. Thus the short-lived Carolingian Renaissance brought an end to the period of social and cultural stagnation that had existed in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Charlemagne’s life, held up as a model for later kings, embodied the fusion of Germanic, Roman, and Christian cultures that became the basis of European civilization.