Charlemagne

Charlemagne, called Carolus Magnus in Latin and Karl der Große in German, was king of the Franks from 768, king of the Lombards from 774, and emperor in the West from 800 until his death in 814. He was the son of Pepin the Short, the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and Bertrada of Laon. Contemporary narrative sources do not record a precise year of birth; later calculations based on his reported age at death have produced dates in the 740s, which remain uncertain. When Pepin died in 768 the kingdom was partitioned between Charlemagne and his younger brother Carloman. After Carloman died in 771, Charlemagne became sole king. He spent much of the following decades on campaign, extending Frankish authority across large parts of western and central Europe.

His wars included the conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy, a long and often brutal series of campaigns against the Saxons that combined military subjugation with forced conversion to Christianity, operations against the Avars, and expeditions into northern Spain. In 778 a Frankish rearguard was destroyed in the Pyrenees, an episode later transformed in legend as the disaster of Roncevaux. On Christmas Day in 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor in Rome. The coronation asserted a revived western imperial title after centuries in which the imperial name in Roman tradition had been associated with Constantinople. Charlemagne's chancery and seals used formulas presenting him as emperor governing the Roman Empire, while relations with Byzantium remained politically sensitive.

From his palace at Aachen he issued capitularies, sought to reform ecclesiastical discipline and liturgical practice, and encouraged a revival of Latin learning later termed the Carolingian Renaissance. Scholars such as Alcuin of York were drawn to the court; monastic and cathedral schools, corrected biblical and liturgical texts, and a more uniform Caroline minuscule script were among the cultural results. He legislated on oaths, weights, coinage, and the duties of counts and missi dominici who toured the realm in his name. His religious policy bound royal power to the Frankish church and to cooperation with the papacy, even as he retained strong control over episcopal appointments and church property within his lands.

Charlemagne married several times. His union with the Lombard princess often called Desiderata was brief and ended in repudiation; Hildegard of Vinzgau was the wife with whom he had several children who mattered for the succession, including Charles the Younger, Pepin of Italy, and Louis, later known as Louis the Pious. Later wives included Fastrada and Luitgard. He also had children by concubines. Many daughters remained at court. In 813 he associated Louis in the imperial title at Aachen. Charlemagne died at Aachen on 28 January 814 and was buried in the Palatine Chapel he had built there, a structure later incorporated into Aachen Cathedral.

The empire did not remain united. After Louis the Pious, partitions among grandsons, notably the Treaty of Verdun in 843, divided Carolingian territories in ways that later tradition linked to the emergence of France, Germany, and a middle kingdom. Medieval literature and imperial ideology made Charlemagne a model of Christian kingship. In 1165 Antipope Paschal III, at the instance of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, declared him a saint, an act the Catholic Church did not accept as a valid canonization. A local cult as Blessed Charlemagne nevertheless continued, especially at Aachen, where his feast has been observed on 28 January. His historical reputation rests on territorial consolidation, alliance of throne and altar, and the educational and administrative efforts of his court, as well as on the violence of the Saxon wars and the limits of early medieval government.