Medieval France
(ca. 770–840). Frankish scholar and biographer. The author of the 9th-century Vita Caroli, the first known western biography of a secular leader since late antiquity, was born to noble parents in the Main Valley. As a boy, Einhard was educated at the monastery of Fulda and soon after 791 went to the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle, headed by Alcuin. He became a close friend of Charlemagne (r. 768–814) as well as his adviser, official representative, and probably the supervisor of the building program at Aix.
After Charlemagne’s death in 814, Einhard remained at the court of Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), as adviser to Louis’s eldest son, Lothair I (d. 855). In 830, he retired with his wife, Imma, to a monastery founded by him on lands granted by Louis. The area became known as Seligenstadt (City of the Saints) after the church there that Einhard had dedicated to SS.Marcellinus and Peter and in which he placed relics of the two saints acquired by nefarious means. He died March 14, 840.
Einhard’s extant writings include seventy letters, the treatise Historia translationis BB. Christi martyrum Marcellini et Petri, the short Quaestio de adoranda cruce, and the Vita Caroli (ca. 829–36).
The biography is based on Einhard’s personal knowledge of Charlemagne and events at Aix between his arrival there and 814, as well as on written sources and likely the eyewitness accounts of older members of the court for the years before ca. 791. Composed in an excellent Latin, the Vita shows the influence of various classical writers, above all of Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum, particularly the life of Augustus. Like many Carolingian authors, however, Einhard did not borrow mindlessly from his sources but selected and manipulated his material to accord with what he wanted to say.
Celia Chazelle
[See also: BIOGRAPHY; CHARLEMAGNE]
Einhard. Einhard: Vita Caroli Magni. The Life of Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972.
Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Einhard and Notker the Stammerer: Two Lives of Charlemagne. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Beumann, Helmut. Ideengeschichtliche Studien zu Einhard und anderen Geschichtsschreibern des früheren Mittelalters. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969.
Fleckenstein, Josef. “Einhard, seine Gründung und sein Vermächtnis in Seligenstadt.” In Das Einhardkreuz: Vortraege und Studien der Muensteraner Diskussion zum arcus Einhardi, ed. Karl Hauck. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1974, pp. 96–121.
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