Charlemagne

By the eighth century the Frankish kings of the Merovingian dynasty had become the emptiest rulers in Europe. They kept their long hair, their titles and their palaces, but the work of government had slipped into the hands of an official called the mayor of the palace. The most formidable of these mayors was Charles Martel — Charles the Hammer — who commanded Frankish armies for decades and who, in 732, turned back an Umayyad force near Poitiers in a battle later generations treated as one of the most decisive in European history. Modern historians are more cautious than the chroniclers were, and some call it a raid rather than an invasion. Either way, Martel's reputation was made. He held a realm in everything but name.

His son, Pepin the Short, took the last step. In 751 he set aside the final Merovingian king, packed him off to a monastery and had himself raised to the kingship of the Franks — but not before checking that the pope saw no objection to the man who held the power also holding the title. A few years later Pope Stephen II travelled north in person and anointed him. That anointing mattered enormously: it made the new Carolingian dynasty not merely successful but sacred, borrowing the oil and ceremony of the Old Testament kings, and it tied the Frankish crown to Rome by a bond neither side would forget. Pepin repaid the debt in the only currency that counted. He marched into Italy against the Lombards for the papacy and handed the recovered territory to the pope rather than keeping it, laying the foundation of the Papal States. It was the first alliance of its kind between a northern king and the bishop of Rome, and it set the pattern for almost everything his son would do.

That son was born around the middle of the eighth century — the exact year is disputed — and history knows him as Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne. When Pepin died in 768 the realm was divided between Charles and his younger brother Carloman, and for three uncomfortable years the two circled one another, dividing loyalties and quarrelling over campaigns. Then, in 771, Carloman died young. Charles moved at once to take the whole inheritance, and Carloman's widow fled with her children to the Lombards in Italy. At a stroke the new king held the largest and best-armed kingdom in western Europe. He was in his twenties, restlessly energetic, and — as his biographer Einhard later recorded — a tall man with a long nose and a high voice who loved riding, hunting and swimming. He would spend the next forty-five years in the saddle.

Charles began where his father had left off: in Italy. The Lombard king Desiderius was sheltering Carloman's widow and pressing on papal lands, and when the pope appealed for help Charles crossed the Alps. In 774, after a long siege of Pavia, he did what no Frankish king had done before: he took the Lombard crown himself. He did not merely defeat the Lombards, he chose to annex their kingdom and rule it in person, and from then on he signed himself king of the Franks and of the Lombards. Four years later, a very different expedition went badly wrong. Charles led an army into Spain, achieved little, and on the way home, in the narrow pass of Roncevaux, his rearguard was cut to pieces by Basque fighters. It was the worst single reverse of his reign — and three centuries later that small, humiliating ambush was transformed by poets into "The Song of Roland", the great epic of French literature, in which a handful of Christian knights die gloriously against overwhelming odds. Few defeats in history have ended up more famous than the victories around them.

The longest and darkest chapter was Saxony. The Saxons of the north were not a state but a loose group of peoples, pagan, decentralised and impossible to pin down. Charles fought them, on and off, for some thirty years. Each campaign followed the same pattern: an army marched in, hostages were taken, oaths were sworn, baptisms were performed, and within a year or two the region rose again. Charles's answer was to raise the price. He destroyed the Saxons' sacred sites, deported whole communities, and issued brutal decrees making refusal of baptism a capital offence. At Verden in 782 the Frankish chronicles record the execution of thousands of Saxon prisoners in a single day; historians dispute the figure and even the nature of the killing, but no one doubts that something appalling happened there. To subjugate Saxony took a generation, and the Saxon leader Widukind was finally baptised with Charles himself as godfather. In the east, meanwhile, Frankish armies broke the Avars in the 790s and carried off the treasure of their stronghold — by far the greatest haul of plunder of the reign.

Then came the strangest day of his life. Pope Leo III, accused by his Roman enemies of serious crimes and physically attacked in the street, fled north to Charles for protection. Charles escorted him back to Rome and presided over the hearings that cleared him. On Christmas Day 800, in St Peter's, Leo placed a crown on the king's head and the Romans acclaimed him emperor. It was the first imperial coronation in the West for well over three centuries — the western empire had ended in 476 — and it announced, in a single ceremony, that the Roman order had a new heir. Einhard later claimed that Charles said he would never have entered the church that day had he known what the pope intended. Historians argue endlessly about whether that reluctance was genuine, diplomatic, or invented after the fact. What is certain is that the emperors in Constantinople were furious — in their eyes there was one Roman emperor and he was theirs — and only after years of negotiation did they grudgingly recognise the title.

An empire won on horseback still has to be governed, and this is where Charlemagne was at his most original. His realm now stretched from the Pyrenees to beyond the Elbe and down into central Italy, a territory no western ruler had held for centuries, and he had no bureaucracy of the Roman kind to run it. Instead he divided the land among counts who held local power in his name, and then — because he did not trust them — sent out the missi dominici, the lord's envoys: pairs of inspectors, one layman and one churchman, who travelled the provinces hearing complaints, checking accounts and reporting straight back to him. To consolidate all this, he issued written orders known as capitularies, covering everything from military service and weights and measures to how monasteries should be run and what priests were expected to know. The clergy were not simply a spiritual body in this system; they were the administrative class, because they were the people who could read. Charles governed, to an unusual degree for his age, on paper.

That is why the schools mattered so much. He gathered the finest minds he could find at his court — above all Alcuin of York, an English scholar recruited to run the palace school, along with scholars from Italy, Spain and Ireland — and set them to a programme of repair. Standards of literacy among the clergy were deliberately raised, cathedral and monastery schools were promoted, and monks were put to copying the surviving texts of the ancient world. A great many classical works reach us today only because a Carolingian monk copied them into a manuscript in these decades. The scribes also developed a beautifully clear script, Carolingian minuscule, with separate words and lower-case letters — so legible that Renaissance humanists later mistook it for Roman writing and modelled their own hands on it, which is why it stands behind the printed letters you are reading now. Charles himself, Einhard reports, learned to read but never mastered writing, having begun far too late. His capital at Aachen, with its octagonal chapel, became the fixed centre of a court famous for its learning and its public piety.

He died at Aachen in 814 and was succeeded by his one surviving legitimate son, Louis the Pious. Louis inherited the whole empire; his sons tore it apart. After years of civil war, the Treaty of Verdun in 843 split the inheritance three ways, and two of those portions — a western kingdom and an eastern one — are the distant ancestors of France and Germany. The empire lasted barely a generation; the idea of it lasted twelve hundred years. Later rulers reached for his memory again and again: the Holy Roman Empire looked back to him as its founder, Napoleon invoked him, and both France and Germany have claimed him. Since 1950 Aachen has awarded the Charlemagne Prize for work towards European unity, and he is often called the father of Europe. But the schools and the manuscripts sit uncomfortably beside Verden and the Saxon decrees, and any honest account has to hold both in view: the ruler who saved the books, and the ruler who destroyed a people to make them pray in the right way.