Chapter 5
In This Chapter
● Defending the papacy and reaping rewards
● Creating and ruling the Holy Roman Empire
● Instigating the Middle Ages
A leading Frankish family, the Carolingians, emerged during the seventh century and gained the upper hand in parts of what is modern-day Germany (see Chapter 4). But their power trip didn’t stop there, by the middle of the eighth century, the Carolingians went from dominating a single area to taking control of the whole Frankish kingdom and then developing an empire that reunited Europe for the first time since the fall of Rome.
Much of this tremendous achievement comes down to one man - Charles the Great (who lived from 742 to 814), literally ‘Charles Magnus’ or Charlemagne as he would become known. In this chapter, I examine Charlemagne’s early successes, dissect his relationship with the papacy and explore his lingering impact on Europe for generations to come.
Growing into Greatness:
Charles's Early Years
Charles was born in 742 in Liege (a town in modern-day Belgium) and was the eldest son of the Frankish king Pippin III (see Chapter 4). When his father died in 768, Charles succeeded him and jointly ruled the kingdom with his younger brother Carloman. As is typical of these dual-ruling situations, Charles and his brother didn’t get along, and sharing power proved to be problematic. War seemed inevitable between the brothers until Carloman suddenly died in 771.
Tall stories?
Although little is known about what Charles looked like, a physical description by contemporary writer Einhard (c.774—840) emphasises the king's height and bulk. Now, medieval chroniclers typically describe great leaders as being tall and often most likely over-egg things, because in general people were slightly shorter in the Middle Ages.
In this case, however, the larger than life qualities turn out to be true. In 1861, scientists opened Charles's tomb and using the bones within, reconstructed his skeleton. They found that he would have measured about 190 centimetres (6 feet, 3 inches) - tall for the period and exactly the height that Einhard quoted.
Even at the time, many considered Carloman’s death suspicious, but all sources point to natural causes, with an unstoppable nosebleed (probably as the result of an internal haemorrhage) most commonly cited as the reason. Whatever the cause of his brother’s death, Charles became the sole ruler of the Franks at the age of 29.
Laying into the Lombards
Like his father Pippin III, Charles was responsible, as Frankish king, for defending the papacy and its interests. Soon after he became the sole ruler, the new pope, Hadrian I, put this duty to the test. Hadrian needed help reclaiming lands that had been taken by Desiderius, king of the Lombards (see Chapter 4). After Charles held an unsuccessful conference with Desiderius late in 772 (during which Desiderius denied all charges and refused to give back the lands), Charles decided to side with Hadrian and go to war.
In 773, Charles crossed the Alps and laid siege to the Italian city of Pavia, which was controlled by the Lombards. Desiderius fled to Constantinople to seek the help of the Byzantine emperor, and the Lombard resistance petered out. By 774, Pavia had surrendered, and the pope granted Charles a large amount of new land, including Tuscany, Venice and the island of Corsica. Hadrian also gave Charles the title of patrician, an old Latin term from the Roman Empire that indicated military governorship of an area.
Suffering a small setback in Spain
After his campaign in Italy, Charles’s next rescue act involved campaigning in what is now Spain. About two thirds of the country was under the control of various Muslim leaders whose predecessors had conquered the territory during the seventh century (see Chapter 7 for the full story). These leaders were now coming under threat from a man called Abd ar-Raham I, the emir (governor) of Cordoba.
The various Muslim leaders appealed to Charles for help. He enthusiastically agreed, seeing a good opportunity to develop his profile as a Christian monarch and potentially take back lands from heathens. Charles’s agreement to help the Muslim leaders was motivated mostly by the idea of promoting his own image. If he could potentially take back European lands from those Muslim leaders, he could do so in the name of the Catholic Church. It was an astute political move that bore similarities to the motivation of many knights of the First Crusade in 1097 (see Chapter 12). It also has a resonance to some more recent conflicts and invasions, such as the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq in 2003.
So, in 778, Charles led an army across the Pyrenees into Spain. For the first time in Charles’s career, the campaign didn’t go well. Charles’s army went as far as Zaragoza where he was forced into retreat. As he travelled through the Roncevaux pass in the Pyrenees on his return, a Basque army attacked his rearguard, destroying and stealing his baggage train. This setback was the only real failure of Charles’s entire reign.
Interestingly, this relatively chastening defeat inspired the earliest known work of French literature. The Song of Roland takes the form of an epic poem of some 4,000 lines and provides a fictionalised account of the campaign and the defeat and slaughter at Roncevaux.
In the poem, the character Roland is represented as Charles’s right-hand man who leads a heroic last stand against the Basques. The poem was first written down in the eleventh century but is likely to have been composed much earlier. It became hugely popular towards the end of the ninth century and remained so throughout the Middle Ages, kick-starting a whole literary genre of epic poems telling of heroic deeds, known as chanson de geste. This genre remained popular all the way through to the Renaissance.
Wrestling with the Saxons
During the years that Charles spent abroad, he also worked to solve problems within and just beyond his original kingdom. Throughout the late eighth century, he fought a number of campaigns against the Saxons who bordered his territory. All the campaigns were fought in the name of the Catholic Church, and many conquered Saxons were baptised and converted to Christianity. All told, Charles was at war against the Saxons for almost 35 years.
Charles's leadership secrets
Throughout his life, Charles was almost constantly at war - winning territory, expanding his kingdom and then defending it from internal and external attack. He was successful at war for several reasons:
● All in the family: As soon as they were of age, Charles appointed his sons to positions of authority within his territory. His two sons Pippin and Louis were named, respectively, king of Italy and king of Aquitaine (a territory now in southern France). They were well placed to deal with any threats to the territory and were trusted by Charles to follow his orders without question.
● Powerful protectors - on horseback:
Charles's elite bodyguard, known as the Scara, travelled with him at all times. They took the form of a cavalry unit, which was especially useful during difficult missions that required greater mobility. Using cavalry in this way was unusual at the time and often gave Charles a significant advantage over most of his adversaries on the borders of the Frankish kingdom who predominantly used slower-moving infantry.
● A diplomat and a warrior: Although Charles fought many wars, they always served a wider purpose and were, generally, last resorts. He was happy to use diplomacy when appropriate, but if that failed, he would resort to warfare. This combination of negotiation and military prowess made him both respected and feared, and also tied the fortunes of the papacy to him, which eventually resulted in his coronation as emperor by the Pope, leading to the formation of the Holy Roman Empire (see the later section 'Becoming Emperor: Charles to Charlemagne').
The chronicler Einhard gives some (typically biased) reasons for the lengthy war:
As to the Saxon war, no war ever undertaken by the Franks was waged with such persistence and bitterness, or cost so much labour, because the Saxons, like almost all Germans, were a ferocious folk, given over to devil-worship, hostile to our Faith, and they did not consider it dishonourable to transgress and violate all law - be it human or divine.
Extending his reach
During the 780s, Charles went even farther, campaigning against the Avars, an Asian people who had invaded Hungary, and crossing the Elbe river to take on the Slavs, the people that bordered his kingdom. Although these territories never fully came under Charles’s control, he made significant territorial gains and saw huge numbers of people convert to Christianity.
As Figure 5-1 shows, around this time Charles’s empire spanned a large amount of Western Europe, by far the biggest single holding since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Figure 5-1: The extent of Charle's empire
Becoming Emperor: Charles to Charlemagne
By the end of the eighth century, Charles was already ruling over and fighting to protect a land empire, when a series of circumstances finally led to Pope Leo III officially crowning him emperor in 800.
In 799, Pope Leo was in a bit of trouble. He’d become increasingly unpopular in the city of Rome due to his preference for Charles as a protector instead of various Roman nobles. Eventually a group tried to seize the pope with the intention of mutilating him by putting out his eyes and cutting out his tongue!
Understandably, Leo fled to Charles at Paderborn (in modern-day central Germany) for protection. In November 800, Charles marched into Italy and held a council on 1 December where he forced the Romans to accept Leo as their pope.
Gaining a crown
When Charles attended mass on Christmas day 800, Leo approached him while he was praying and placed a crown on his head, calling him Imperator Romanorum - emperor of the Romans, the first such emperor since Romulus Augustulus in the year 475, more than 300 years earlier. At the time this act appeared to be a surprise to Charles (or Charlemagne as he was known following his coronation), but most historians now believe that he and Leo had been planning it for some time.
Charlemagne’s coronation was a momentous event, not so much for what it led to but what it signified. Leo offered no information as to whether Charlemagne was just emperor over the city of Rome - or over all the territory that used to be a part of the Roman Empire. For his part, Charlemagne definitely interpreted his crown as being given the power by God’s representative on earth to rule all the territory that he had spent the last 30 years adding to his kingdom.
Historians have spent years arguing over whether Charlemagne was a Roman Emperor in the same vein as the emperors of the original Roman Empire, like Augustus, Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius (see The Romans For Dummies) - he wasn’t really. These original emperors had been absolute rulers with godlike status who lived in fabulous, billionaire-style luxury. This wasn’t really the case with Charlemagne. Although his empire had a big geographical span, he had created it out of a political alliance with the Church and he himself was a very different kind of figure to his ancient Roman forebears.
The world had changed significantly from the days of the original Roman emperors. But whatever the differences, Charlemagne can undoubtedly be called the first Holy Roman Emperor.
Defining the Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire came into being with Charlemagne and carried on in various forms for more than a thousand years, until the last emperor Francis II (who abdicated in 1806). By Francis II’s time, the term ‘emperor’ had effectively become a ceremonial title that signified very little in terms of actual territory.
Throughout the period of the Holy Roman Empire, the territory within fluctuated hugely, although its core was always rooted in Central Europe and modern-day Germany. Under Charlemagne the empire was at its largest and most powerful, spanning territory that included modern-day France, Belgium and Germany with parts of Italy and the island of Corsica.
Although the Holy Roman Empire seems to be a title conjured out of nowhere, you can break the phrase down to understand its meaning:
● Holy: The pope gave Charlemagne his title; therefore it came directly from God. Charlemagne was also the military protector of the papacy and, if you like, God’s general.
● Roman: Rome wasn’t a territory technically under Charlemagne’s control, and few subsequent Holy Roman Emperors controlled it, but Charlemagne was crowned in the city. Also, all the territory under his control had been part of the Roman Empire at its original height.
● Empire: Charlemagne’s territory was international, giving him control over a large number of kingdoms - thus, an empire.
Many people have argued that the Holy Roman Empire was really none of those things! However, from the thirteenth century onwards the title came into common use and historians have always referred to it as such. If you think about it in the terms I set out above, the name does kind of make sense!
By making Charlemagne an emperor, Pope Leo III set a huge precedent, suggesting that the person holding the title King of the Franks or the Papal protector also deserved the title of emperor.
However, Leo also set another rather more long-standing precedent - that the title of emperor was in the power of the papacy to give. Emperors didn’t make themselves; they were made by the Church. This precedent was one that caused huge ructions throughout the Middle Ages, igniting continual squabbles between popes and would-be emperors (see Chapter 13 for more details). I wonder if Leo realised the trouble he would cause?
Bickering with the Byzantines
Charlemagne’s wasn’t the only empire, however; to the east, the Byzantines ruled from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Unsurprisingly the Byzantines refused to accept Charlemagne as an emperor, regarding him as a usurper. Although Charlemagne was very unlikely to try and unify the whole Roman Empire by attacking the Byzantines, he did control territories in Italy and the Adriatic, areas that the Byzantines also desired to control. The relationship between the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire continued to be one of mutual distrust.
We are family
Charlemagne was very keen on using his sons as a way of stabilising his control over territory. In addition, he had a very interesting way of dealing with the female members of his family. He had at least ten wives and concubines during his lifetime and through them he produced around 20 children, the vast majority illegitimate.
He treated his daughters in what was (even for the time) a rather unusual way. He forced them to stay at his court and forbade them to marry. His reasoning was that any marriage outside the family would create new branches of aristocrats that threatened revolt or challenge to his sons. As a consequence, he allowed his daughters to take lovers and took care of any children produced from them. The arrangement was both liberated and highly restrictive.
Official contact between the two courts continued because the Byzantines still held some territory in northern Italy. But then in 804 the people of Venice chose to break away from Byzantine control and submit to Pippin (Charlemagne’s son, who he had made king of Italy). A series of military engagements followed with Byzantine fleets raiding the Italian coast. Finally, by 810, the Venetians had had enough and asked to return to Byzantine control.
Pippin agreed to this change and the Byzantines transferred control of the Istrian peninsula (the western coast of modern-day Croatia) to him as compensation. The Byzantine emperor, Michael I, recognised Charlemagne as an emperor as part of the deal.
Living and Ruling as Emperor
Being emperor didn’t make a huge difference to Charlemagne, but the situation did a lot to reinforce the position of Leo III (see the earlier section ‘Becoming Emperor: Charles to Charlemagne’). For the remaining 14 years of his life after gaining his crown, Charlemagne continued to rule as he always had. Interestingly, since becoming sole king of the Franks, Charlemagne had run his territory much in the style of an old Roman Emperor; ruling from afar and almost constantly engaged in campaigns to strengthen and defend its borders. This was very different to any other ruler at the time.
Although Charlemagne continued to spend a great deal of time away on campaigns, he also continued to spend every winter in the town of Aachen (in the northwest of modern-day Germany, close to the Belgian border). This town quickly became the centre of his empire and the base of his court.
Unlike Roman Emperors, Charlemagne was not a prodigious builder, but he did construct a building known as the Palatine Chapel in Aachen. Originally this building was the private chapel attached to his own palace, but it later became Aachen Cathedral and was the site at which all future German kings were crowned. Charlemagne was buried there after he died in 814, and you can still visit Aachen Cathedral today.
Making reforms
Throughout his reign, Charlemagne attempted to closely manage his empire by installing practices that were common throughout, rather than leaving local dukes and barons that swore allegiance to him to administer it. He was far more successful in doing so than any of his successors.
Thinking economically
Amongst Charlemagne’s greatest achievements during his reign were the economic changes that he made, creating an entirely new economic system for Europe in the process.
Until the time of Charlemagne, the whole of Europe used the ‘sou’, the nickname for the solidus, the gold coin introduced by the Roman Emperor Diocletian around 500 years earlier. The problem with the sou was that following the collapse of the original empire, the availability of gold had declined rapidly. Thus, a sou in the year 800 was made with less gold than it had been in the centuries before and was worth much less.
As a consequence, ordinary people traded with localised coinage produced in their town or area. This practice, however, made any commerce outside a person’s own town very difficult, because prices and coinage values differed hugely depending on where you were in Europe.
Charlemagne’s solution was to introduce a brand new currency: the livre carolinienne, or Carolingian Pound. This new unit of currency was minted from silver, which was much more widely available, and a Carolingian Pound was worth around 20 old sous. Charlemagne immediately began to issue smaller denominations of this currency, known as deniers, that had his image and titles branded on them.
Charlemagne developed this new coinage in partnership with King Offa of Mercia (the Anglo-Saxon King in England; see Chapter 3) and accordingly the new coinage became international across Europe; if you like, a first real attempt at the Euro!
Charlemagne also introduced a new accounting system in his empire and forced everyone to adopt it. He also banned money-lending, which had a very negative impact on Jewish communities around Europe. The majority of moneylenders in Medieval Europe were Jewish because their faith allowed them to carry out the practice, unlike Christianity which classed money lending or usury as a sin. As a result, Jewish communities throughout the Holy Roman Empire were harshly affected by the reforms.
Education, education, education!
Having established his court at Aachen, Charlemagne encouraged the study of the liberal arts and took tuition himself from men such as Einhard in subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric and theology. He also encouraged his family to be educated and take part in artistic pursuits. Aachen also became a beacon for huge numbers of artists, writers and intellectuals who travelled to the town in hope of securing Charlemagne’s patronage and approval.
Charlemagne’s conquests also extended a great deal of educational reform across Europe. As territory was added to his empire, he ensured that monastic centres were set up. As I note in Chapter 2, monasteries had many functions beyond the religious, in particular providing education to the poor and working as scriptoria, centres where classical texts were copied and reproduced. Indeed, many of the surviving works of classical Latin by writers such as Cicero, Tacitus and Pliny exist because of the work of Carolingian scholars in scriptorias.
Not getting it 'write'
Despite devoting a great deal of time to educational reform and his own studies, Einhard notes that Charlemagne took up the idea of writing only late in his life and never really mastered it.
Because Einhard doesn't really mention the Emperor's reading ability, some people have suggested that Charlemagne may have died completely illiterate. True or not, the fact that such a rich, powerful and well-born young Frank as Charlemagne had not been brought up to be literate suggests how low levels of literacy were at the time in Northern Europe. To be illiterate wasn't a stigma at the time though, and very many well-born people would've been illiterate or at least unable to write. A clear distinction existed at the time as reading could be a necessary skill for the wealthy, but any writing or note taking could be done by servants.
Finding things grim up north
Although Charlemagne continued to campaign during the last years of his life, his most significant military engagements were with the Danes who lived in Jutland (part of modern-day Denmark). The Danes were a non-Christian race about whom Charlemagne would have known little.
During Charlemagne’s rule, the Danes were led by a man called Godfred. In 808, Godfred built a huge earthwork rampart across the isthmus of Schleswig. Known as the Danevirke, this structure prevented any land army from crossing into the Jutland peninsular and allowed Godfred and his fearsome warriors to raid with impunity.
Godfred led a series of piratical raids into Charlemagne’s territory, ravaging many of the towns of Frisia, in modern-day northern Germany. For a time Godfred appeared to be threatening to take things further, but in 811 he was murdered, probably by an assassin working on Charlemagne’s orders. Power passed to Godfred’s nephew, Hemming, who signed a peace treaty with Charlemagne.
Although the impact on Charlemagne’s territory wasn’t massive, Godfred’s attacks were one of the first examples of Danes and other Scandinavians raiding far from home. These raiders eventually became known as the Vikings. Read more about them in Chapter 8.
Passing On: Charlemagne's Legacy
Charlemagne never intended to nominate a single successor. Soon after becoming emperor in 806, he made plans to divide his empire into three kingdoms, ruled by his sons Charles the Younger, Pippin and Louis, none of whom would be senior to another or receive the title of emperor.
Unfortunately for Charlemagne, this shared family dynasty was never to be. By 811, both Charles and Pippin had died. So in 813, knowing his time was short, Charlemagne granted Louis (then the King of Aquitaine) a half-share in the current empire and made him co-emperor.
Louis returned to Aquitaine from Aachen, but not for long. After spending the autumn hunting, Charlemagne came to Aachen for the New Year but in January fell ill with pleurisy. On 28 January, 814, he died aged 61, a ripe old age for the time. He was buried in state in Aachen Cathedral and succeeded as emperor by Louis.
Charlemagne’s life was an interesting and dynamic period of history, but his achievements far outweigh what even he can have imagined. Although his empire soon broke up, aspects of his reign survived for much longer:
● The beginnings of France and Germany: By expanding the Frankish kingdoms into an empire, he gave separate identities to the lands now thought of as France and Germany. Ruled by two of his sons, these areas effectively became separate monarchies, which was the first step on the road to medieval France and medieval Germany (see Chapter 6).
● The idea of Europe: By creating an empire and ruling it as a homogenised state, Charlemagne gave a common identity to people living in Northwestern Europe that they hadn’t previously possessed. Linguistic barriers were broken down as a result.
● The practice of medieval trade: Charlemagne’s economic reforms outlived him by hundreds of years. The coinage and trade regulations he established helped break down barriers in the new Europe and contributed to a more geographically unified identity.
● The spread of Christianity: Charlemagne’s conquests and (sometimes forced) conversions led to the Catholic Church growing in power and influence, extending the reach of the papacy ever further.
In short, Charlemagne effectively created the Middle Ages!