Charlemagne: The Warrior King Who Reinvented Europe

On Christmas Day in the year 800, in the old basilica of Saint Peter in Rome, a tall Frankish king knelt in prayer and the Pope stepped forward and placed a crown upon his head, hailing him as emperor. With that single gesture, a title that had effectively died in western Europe more than three centuries earlier — Roman emperor — came roaring back to life. The man wearing the crown was Charles the Great, known to history by the French form of his name: Charlemagne. For the next thousand years and more, kings and conquerors across Europe would measure themselves against him.

Charlemagne was the grandson of Charles Martel, the commander whose Franks had held the line near Tours a couple of generations earlier. The family had risen steadily, and Charlemagne’s father had pushed aside the last of the old Merovingian figureheads to take the Frankish crown outright. When Charlemagne came to power in 768 — at first sharing it uneasily with a brother who conveniently died soon after — he inherited a strong but limited realm. By the time he died, he ruled an empire that stretched across most of western and central Europe, from the Pyrenees to the edge of the Slavic lands.

Statue of Charlemagne — Charlemagne built the largest European empire since the fall of Rome.

He was, above all, a warrior king, and he spent the greater part of his long reign on campaign. Year after year the Frankish armies marched out, and the list of his conquests is formidable. He destroyed the kingdom of the Lombards in northern Italy and took their crown for himself. He waged a brutal, decades-long war against the pagan Saxons to his north-east, a grinding conflict marked by forced conversions to Christianity and at least one notorious massacre. He pushed the frontier south across the Pyrenees and east against the Avars, seizing their vast hoarded treasure. Few rulers in European history have expanded their territory so dramatically by sheer force of arms.

But conquest alone is not why Charlemagne is remembered. Plenty of warlords have carved out empires that crumbled the moment they died. What set Charlemagne apart was that he genuinely tried to govern, to civilise, and to bind his sprawling territories together into something more than a collection of conquered lands. He divided his empire into administrative districts and sent out trusted officials, including roving inspectors who travelled the realm in pairs to check that his counts were not abusing their power. It was a serious, if imperfect, attempt to impose order on a chaotic age.

A medieval imperial throne — Charlemagne tried not merely to conquer but to govern, binding his lands into a single realm.

Perhaps his most lasting achievement was something quieter than war: a revival of learning that historians call the Carolingian Renaissance. The centuries after Rome’s fall had seen a steep decline in literacy and scholarship in the West, and Charlemagne — who, famously, could read but struggled all his life to write — was determined to reverse it. He gathered the finest scholars of the age to his court, most notably the English monk Alcuin of York, and set them to work reforming education, copying and preserving ancient texts, and standardising the way Latin was written and the church conducted its business.

An illuminated manuscript — The scholars Charlemagne gathered copied and preserved countless ancient texts that might otherwise have been lost.

We owe an extraordinary debt to that effort. A great many classical works survive today only because Carolingian monks took the trouble to copy them out in the scriptoria of Charlemagne’s empire. The clear, elegant handwriting his scholars developed, known as Carolingian minuscule, was so legible and beautiful that centuries later Renaissance humanists revived it, and it became the basis for the lower-case letters you are reading on this very page. Few rulers can claim to have shaped the alphabet itself.

Then there is the imperial coronation of 800, an event whose meaning historians have chewed over ever since. Charlemagne’s own biographer claimed the king was actually annoyed at being crowned by surprise, and would not have entered the church that day had he known what the Pope intended. Whether that is true or clever spin is impossible to say. What is clear is that the act sent shockwaves across the medieval world. It revived the idea of a Christian Roman empire in the West, it bound the fortunes of kings and popes ever more tightly together, and it deeply offended the genuine Roman emperor still reigning in Constantinople, who regarded the whole thing as an insulting usurpation.

A medieval cathedral — Charlemagne’s great chapel at his capital became his burial place and a site of pilgrimage for centuries.

For all his greatness, though, Charlemagne could not defeat the oldest enemy of every empire: the problem of what comes next. He built his realm around his own towering personality and energy, and he had only one surviving legitimate son to inherit it. That son held things together, but the next generation did not. Following the Frankish custom of dividing inheritance among heirs, the empire was split among Charlemagne’s grandsons, and the settlement they reached in 843 carved the great realm into pieces. The western portion of that division would, over the centuries, grow into the kingdom of France; the eastern portion would eventually become Germany. In a very real sense, the political map of modern Europe was first sketched by the quarrels of Charlemagne’s grandsons.

So Charlemagne stands at a hinge of history — the last great echo of the ancient world and the first great figure of the medieval one. He gave Europe a model of Christian kingship, a revival of learning, and even the shape of its future borders. In the next instalment we’ll leap forward several centuries to a single muddy afternoon in 1214, when a French king’s victory in battle did something remarkable: it began to turn a loose feudal patchwork into a nation.