His secretary and biographer, a man named Einhard who knew him personally, records a small domestic detail about the most powerful ruler in western Europe.
He kept writing tablets under his pillow, so that in idle moments, and when he could not sleep, he could practise forming letters. He had begun too late, Einhard says, and he never got far with it.
That is worth holding onto, because the man was not illiterate in the modern sense. He could read. He spoke Latin fluently and understood some Greek. He listened to books being read aloud at meals, took a serious interest in theology, and collected scholars from four countries. What he could not do was the physical craft of writing, which in his world was a trade practised by clerks, not a skill a nobleman was expected to have.
It is also worth treating with care, because Einhard modelled his biography closely on a Roman life of Augustus, borrowing its structure and in places its phrasing. The tablets may be true. They are also exactly the sort of humanising touch the model called for.
The Franks had ruled northern Gaul since the fifth century under a dynasty descended from a semi legendary ancestor. By the seventh century those kings had become largely ceremonial, and real power lay with a hereditary official whose title translates roughly as mayor of the palace.
One of these mayors, Charles Martel, made his reputation defeating a Muslim raiding force in central France in 732 and, more importantly, spent twenty years subduing the Frankish aristocracy and seizing church land to pay his followers. His son wanted the crown itself, and went about getting it in a way that set a precedent for the next seven hundred years.
He sent to the pope and asked, in effect, whether it was right that a man with no power should be called king while the man with the power was not. The answer came back that it was better for the one with the power to be called king. The last Merovingian was tonsured and put in a monastery, and Pepin was anointed with holy oil, a ceremony borrowed from the Old Testament and new to Frankish kingship.
The bargain underneath was explicit. The papacy needed a protector against the Lombards in Italy, since the eastern emperor was no longer able to provide one. It got Frankish armies, and the Frankish kings got the only institution in the west that could confer legitimacy. Both halves of that trade shaped European politics until the Reformation.
Pepin’s son Charles, later called the Great, ruled from 768 to 814 and spent most of it at war.
He took the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy and made himself its king. He annexed Bavaria. He destroyed the Avar state in the middle Danube and captured a treasury so large that its distribution is said to have disturbed prices. He pushed a frontier zone across the Pyrenees, and lost a rearguard in a mountain pass in 778 to Basque raiders, an obscure skirmish that three centuries later became the greatest poem in Old French.
The long war was in Saxony, and it lasted more than thirty years. The Saxons were pagan, decentralised, and impossible to defeat conclusively because there was no central authority to surrender. The campaign became one of forced conversion backed by capital punishment: a surviving legal text prescribes death for refusing baptism, for eating meat in Lent, and for cremating the dead in the pagan manner.
In 782, after a revolt, the sources record the execution of forty five hundred Saxon prisoners in a single day at Verden. The number may be a copying error and has been argued over for two centuries, partly because the episode was seized on by nineteenth and twentieth century German nationalists for their own purposes. What is not disputed is that mass deportations were used, that whole populations were moved, and that Saxony was converted by force over a generation.
This is the same reign as the school reform, the corrected Bibles and the beautiful new handwriting described two chapters ago. Both things are the same programme. A single Christian people, correctly worshipping, under one ruler, is what he was building, and the schools and the executions were both instruments of it.
On Christmas Day in 800, in Saint Peter’s in Rome, the pope placed a crown on his head and the assembled Romans acclaimed him emperor.
Einhard reports that he said afterwards he would not have entered the church that day had he known what the pope intended. Nobody believes this literally. It is either a diplomatic posture aimed at Constantinople, where there was a legitimate Roman emperor who took a dim view of the whole business, or Einhard’s way of presenting his master as modest, or both.
What the coronation did was create a problem that outlasted everyone involved. If a pope can make an emperor, can he unmake one? The Frankish view was that the pope had performed a ceremony recognising a fact. The papal view, increasingly, was that the empire was in the church’s gift. Chapter fourteen is entirely about the consequences.
It also created a permanent diplomatic irritation with the east. There was already a Roman emperor, in Constantinople, in unbroken succession. Two emperors of the Romans is one too many, and the eastern court did not recognise the western title for over a decade and never really accepted its equality.
Here is the thing most easily missed. This empire had no salaried civil service, no regular taxation of the Roman kind, no standing army, and a capital that was really just the king’s favourite residence.
It ran on land and oaths. Territory was administered by counts, who were aristocrats granted the use of estates and the right to a share of local dues in exchange for raising troops, holding courts and enforcing the king’s orders. Free men swore personal loyalty to the king. Bishops and abbots were royal appointees with the same duties, which is why control of church appointments mattered so much.
Two devices held it together. Written instructions called capitularies were issued to the counts, covering everything from military obligation to weights and measures to how monasteries should be run, and many survive. And pairs of inspectors, one lay and one clerical, were sent out on circuit to hear complaints against the counts and report back. It is a serious attempt at supervision without a bureaucracy, and it worked while a formidable king was behind it.
There was also a deliberate attempt to fix the money, and it worked better than most of the rest. Gold coinage had become unusable in the west because there was almost no gold coming in, so the reform went to silver: a standard penny of controlled weight, struck at licensed mints, with a fixed relationship to a pound and a shilling of account. That system of twelve and twenty outlived the empire by a thousand years and was still the arithmetic of British money until 1971.
The other durable piece of machinery was the parish. Dividing the countryside into territorial units each with a church, a priest and a defined population owing a tenth of its produce gave rural Europe its first administrative grid since the Roman land survey. Kings would use it for centuries afterwards to count people, raise taxes and publish orders, and in much of Europe the parish boundaries drawn in this period were still the working local units in the nineteenth century.
The weakness is obvious in retrospect. Land granted for service becomes land held by a family. An aristocracy whose power comes from local estates does not need a distant king once the king is not personally terrifying. The empire’s cohesion depended on the ruler being able to campaign every year and turn up unannounced, and that is not a quality that inherits.
It also inherited badly for a simpler reason: Frankish custom divided a kingdom among sons.
Charles was lucky. His surviving son took the whole thing in 814. That son’s three sons fought a civil war, and in 843 at Verdun they partitioned the empire into three: a western kingdom, an eastern kingdom, and a long strip running from the North Sea down through Burgundy into Italy joining them.
The western kingdom is recognisably the ancestor of France. The eastern is recognisably the ancestor of Germany. The middle strip had no natural coherence, was divided again, and disintegrated, and its northern portion, Lotharingia, is the ground that France and Germany fought over from the tenth century to the twentieth.
Meanwhile the empire was being attacked from three directions at once: Vikings up every navigable river in the west, Magyar horsemen from the Hungarian plain, and Muslim raiders in the Mediterranean. A political structure that depended on the king arriving in person could not answer simultaneous attacks at a hundred points. Defence devolved to whoever had a fortified place nearby, and the people with fortified places became more important than the king. That process, over the following century, is what produced the arrangements described in chapter thirteen.
By 888 the empire had broken into pieces under rulers who were mostly not descended from Charles at all. The imperial title survived, was picked up in the tenth century by German kings, and continued in various forms until Napoleon abolished it in 1806, by which point it had famously been described as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Firm: the documents. This reign generated capitularies, charters, letters, council records and coinage in quantity, and a great deal of it survives. We know more about Frankish administration than about most of the following two centuries.
Soft: the man. Einhard is our main portrait and he is writing panegyric on a classical model. The physical description, the personal habits, the modesty at the coronation should all be read as literature with a factual basis of unknown depth.
Soft: Verden. The figure of forty five hundred rests on manuscripts that could be transmitting a corrupted word, and the episode’s modern fame owes a great deal to people using it in nineteenth and twentieth century arguments about German identity.
Contested: the significance of 732. It was long taught as the battle that saved Christian Europe. Most current specialists regard the force involved as a large raiding party rather than an army of conquest, and note that Muslim expansion in that direction had already reached its practical limit. Its importance was mainly that it made the family that later took the crown.
Contested: whether any of this counts as a European moment. Some Carolingian writers do use the word Europe about the realm, and the modern European project has made a good deal of that, awarding a prize in his name. Against it: the empire covered a fraction of the continent, excluded Britain, Spain, Scandinavia and everything east of the Elbe, and its own writers used the term rarely and loosely. What it genuinely established was narrower and real enough: a Latin, Catholic, Frankish core in which kings were made by anointing and the church was a department of government.