(742–814). The Frankish king and later emperor who gave his name to the Carolingian empire was born to Pepin III the Short and Bertrada in 742. In accordance with Frankish custom, on Pepin’s death in 768 his realm was divided between his legitimate male offspring, Charles and his younger brother, Carloman. Carloman received the central provinces of the kingdom; Charles’s territories, including Thuringia, Frisia, parts of Alemannia, Austrasia, and Neustria, encircled those of his brother. The brothers did not get along, but Carloman died in 771 and Charles took over his lands, setting aside his brother’s two sons. From then until his own death in 814, Charles was the sole ruler of the Franks. At its peak, the realm, which with his imperial coronation in 800 came to be regarded as the Christian-Roman empire in the West, comprised portions of modern East Europe and most of the western area of the Continent. Charles’s achievements as king and emperor—his extension of the lands under his rule, his efforts to protect and reform the church, and his fostering of a cultural and intellectual revival—inspired western monarchs throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. They justly earned him the name of Charlemagne (Lat. Carolus Magnus), or Charles the Great.
For thirty years after Carloman’s death, Charlemagne expanded the frontiers of his realm and strengthened his hold on the conquered regions. In 774, he conquered Lombardy and took the title king of the Lombards. He subdued Bavaria, though not decisively, in 787; during the 790s, efforts to protect the Carolingians against Muslim incursions led to the annexation of the territory along the Pyrénées that became the Spanish March. Further cam-paigns in the 790s crushed the Avars, while from 772 to 804 Charlemagne strove to conquer the Saxons on the eastern boundaries of his realm. The long-term struggle against the Saxons provoked the Carolingians to try a variety of strategies to win control, including forced baptisms, mass executions and deportations, and settlement of Franks in the area.
The large area under Charlemagne’s authority was tied socially to the royal power through the system of benefices, lifetime grants to nobles of lands in different parts of the realm in return for oaths of vassalage and services to the monarch, particularly military service. As under earlier Frankish kings, administration still operated primarily at the local level. The main instrument of local government during Charlemagne’s reign was the count, who within his county exercised the absolute power of the royal ban on the king’s behalf. But local government was linked to the central administration by the annual assemblies of the most powerful aristocrats and by the missi dominici, magnates selected as the king’s representatives who undertook for him regular tours of inspection throughout the kingdom. One method used to instruct the missi in their duties as well as to promulgate new legislation involved documents known as capitularies, which issued from Charlemagne’s court at a rate far surpassing anything seen under earlier Frankish rulers. Legislative authority, however, continued to rest with the king’s oral pronouncement and was based on the royal ban, not on the capitularies.
Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800, in St. Peter’s, Rome. Whether the papal or the Frankish court instigated the move, it is clear that for some years previously Carolingian churchmen, such as Alcuin, had been developing a concept of Charlemagne’s role as the successor to the first Christian emperor, Constantine I, and the leader of a new Christian-Roman empire in the West. The decision to bestow the imperial title on Charles was inspired by such thinking and, in Rome, by the political difficulties of the pope, threatened by hostile factions within Rome that sought his deposition.
The imperial coronation testified not only to Charlemagne’s success at increasing the territory under his authority but also to his work on behalf of the church. Ecclesiastical reform was a major subject of several capitularies issued before 800, among them the Admonitio generalis (789) and the Capitulary of the Council of Frankfurt (794). In addition to the efforts in these documents to regulate the lives of clergy, monks, and female religious, to reform the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to ensure that the clergy knew the basic articles of the Christian faith, and to provide guidelines for the religious conduct of the laity, certain of the capitulary decrees and the very proliferation of such texts testify to a new drive, encouraged by Charlemagne, to make the written word the keystone of his administration. That drive—despite the problems that Charlemagne himself encountered in his own efforts to learn to write, according to his biographer, Einhard—built upon, but vastly exceeded in scope, anything under Charles’s father, Pepin III. The degree to which Charlemagne and his churchmen perceived mastery of written language as the hallmark of his court is manifested in the Libri Carolini, completed in 793. Encompassing 228 pages in the current printed edition, this massive treatise, in which Charlemagne is presented as the one who speaks, denounces the Byzantine empire for its inferiority to the Carolingians on a host of issues; but most fundamentally, it rebukes the eastern government for its failure to understand Scripture, because of the Greeks’ inability to match the Carolingians in their command of the written word.
The importance that Charlemagne and his court attached to the skills relating to written language fueled the artistic and intellectual “renaissance” that occurred during his reign, again beginning even before his imperial coronation. The prose writings and poetry by scholars from all over Europe who joined Charles’s court circle—the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, the Visigoth Theodulf of Orléans (author of the Libri Carolini), the Italians Paul the Deacon and Paulinus of Aquileia, the Frank Einhard, and others—and the creations of Carolingian artists during the same years, show a sophistication, a subtlety in their use of earlier texts and artistic productions, and an innovativeness that scholars are only starting to appreciate fully. The artistic and intellectual achievements that Charlemagne fostered laid the groundwork for the accomplishments in the same areas under his son Louis the Pious (778–840), yet Louis inherited an empire that, in other ways, was showing signs of strain. During the last decade of Charles’s reign, with the end of the wars of conquest and the flow of revenue from them, the Carolingian empire experienced increasing corruption and disaffection among its aristocracy. Charlemagne responded in part by reemphasizing older, Frankish traditions, and thus in accordance with Frankish custom the Divisio regnorum of 806 arranged that after Charles’s death his territories be divided among his legitimate sons, Charles the Younger (d. 811), Pepin (d. 810), and Louis, each of whom he had already appointed to be king of part of the empire. No attempt was made at the time to ensure the empire’s continued unity, nor was a plan set forth for transmission of the imperial title.
By 813, Charles the Younger and Pepin were dead, however, and Louis the Pious received the imperial crown in September of that year. He became sole emperor in the West when Charlemagne died, in January 814.
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