748-814

Charlemagne

The ‘father of Europe’ and ruler of much of France and Germany, Charlemagne made his name as a king but left a legacy as the first Roman emperor since the 5th century

ver 300 years, Europe had fallen into darkness. With the power of the Pope and the once mighty Roman Church beset by enemies, the legacy of the western Roman Empire toppled as steadily and as surely as the Caesars had themselves, stability withdrawing like overstretched legionnaires and knowledge fading away like the crumbling Roman roads that cross-hatched the continent.
Europe needed a strong leader to pull it back from the precipice, and it got a brace of them in the form of the Carolingian dynasty, a family of self-made kings who stabilised their lands by force, expanded their frontiers with terrifying aggression and ensured the primacy of the Christian Church at the point of the sword. Yet, through this crucible of bloody violence emerged a western Europe reforged to survive another 1,000 years.
By the 6th century, most of what is now France, western Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium was inhabited by the Franks, a Germanic tribe split into several small kingdoms that had rushed into the power vacuum left by the fall of Rome. These petty principalities had been united not by their monarch – rulers in name only, the rois fainéants, the ‘do-nothing kings’ of the Merovingian dynasty, had been increasingly sidelined by their own ministers – but by the  Mayor of the Palace, the executive of the royal administration who was half-prime minister and half-Shogun-esque warlord.
Pepin of Herstal had warred his way to stability between 680 CE and his death in 714 CE, bringing the other Frankish lands to heel and taking Christianity to their furthest and most pagan reaches. His son, Charles Martel, was a stronger hand yet. Though Pepin had nominated his grandson as successor, Charles – born out of wedlock and excluded from the court – was having none of it, and took the not-quite-throne by force. Despite not being Pepin’s choice of heir, he more than honoured his father’s vision, expanding the centralised control of the Frank lands and extending his rule further into modern Holland, Denmark and Germany with a formidable standing army and revolutionary use of heavy cavalry, the foundation of Europe’s knights. He defeated the pagan Saxons in the east and halted the advance of the Moors – the North African and Spanish Muslims of the powerful Umayyad Caliphate – who attempted to follow up their conquest of Spain by pushing across the Pyrenees mountains into France. ‘Charles the Hammer’ was even offered high office by the Pope, which he declined, but it was an auspicious omen of his grandson’s own journey that was to come.
Succeeding his father Pepin the Short in 768 CE – who had given up the pretence of being anything other than supreme ruler by forcing the last Merovingian king into a monastery and taking the title of ‘King of the Franks’ – Charlemagne, which means ‘Charles the Great’, shared the zeal of his predecessors. At war for most of his life, Charlemagne took Charles Martel’s fight against the Moors into northern Spain, continued the conquest and conversion of the Saxons and launched new campaigns against the Lombards of northern Italy, the Slavs in Croatia and the Avars in Hungary.
Leading his personal guard, the scara cavalry, into battle with his sword Joyeuse, Charlemagne’s exploits have one armoured foot in myth and the other in fact, with separating the two being a difficult task, but his journey from king to the first Roman emperor since the fall of the Roman Empire has little to do with his legend as a warrior king and everything to do with the insecurity of  the Church.
Pope Leo III succeeded Adrian I on the day of the previous pontiff’s burial, so fearful was he that the Frankish king to whom his predecessor owed his lands and safety would feel a right to interfere in the election of the new pope. Yet, despite his wariness he was quick to bring Rome’s most powerful ally on side; along with the letter that announced his succession, Leo included the keys to St Peter’s Basilica and the Pope’s banner. The not-so subtle message was that he viewed Charlemagne as the defender of the Holy See, and trusted him with Rome’s protection. The Frank was equally magnanimous in return, congratulating the pontiff and sending vast riches, the spoils of his war against the Avars, but not without condition, suggesting that as he happened to be the stalwart defender of Christianity, the pope had a duty to pray for the Frankish armies as they continued their conquest.
Charlemagne would honour his side of this implied bargain, and in return Leo elevated him to an office left vacant since the 5th century.
While Leo engaged in his letter-writing campaign with the monarch to the north-west and used the Avar loot to become a patron of the arts, the family of the late Adrian I launched a conspiracy to remove him from his post and replace him with his nephew Paschal the Primicerius. On 25 April 799 CE, during the procession of The Greater Litanies through the Eternal City, Leo was attacked by armed thugs who stabbed him in the eyes and attempted to tear out his tongue at the root. After dragging him to the church of San Silvestro in Capite and trying to gouge out his eyes again, the bloodied pope was left unconscious as a prisoner at the monastery of St Erasmus. Accused of perjury and fornication by his rivals, the wounded – but amazingly not blinded or voiceless – Leo fled Rome to Spoleto, 126 kilometres (78 miles) north of the city, where under the protection of the Duke of Spoleto he was able to make his way to Charlemagne at Paderborn in Saxony.
That such a loyal servant of the Frankish king could be found so close to Rome, deep within Italy’s central Umbria region, neatly underlines the unbalanced relationship of power between the Franks and the Roman Catholic Church that had initially caused Leo such anxiety. Though the territory had been given to Rome in 776 after the defeat of the Lombards, the king retained the power to choose the Duke, making papal control as meaningless as that of the last Merovingian kings under Charlemagne’s ancestors.
Clearly, the threat of political interference from Charlemagne had been trumped by that of actual bodily harm, and Leo begged for the monarch’s  aid. He had no authority to do so – neither he  nor the conspirators in Rome were subjects of  the Franks, and no law yet existed that would  make bishops subordinate to secular authority. With conflict left in Saxony to pursue, Charlemagne let the matter stew for a year and kept the recovering pontiff as his guest. Finally heading  to Rome in November 800 CE with a sizeable (and no doubt fairly threatening) entourage, Charlemagne summoned a council of the city’s religious authorities and patiently listened to  the accusations put to Leo, before allowing the deposed pontiff to make an impassioned plea  of innocence.
Unsurprisingly, Charlemange took Leo’s side, and ordered the conspirators’ executions, but Leo requested that they instead be exiled, with the unpopular pope perhaps seeing an opportunity to impress with capacity for forgiveness.
Crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ on Christmas Day that same year by the grateful pope, the official report insists that Charlemagne was ambushed like some sort of early-Medieval surprise party. The king’s biographer, the monk Einhard, claimed that his liege had such “aversion [to being crowned Emperor] that he declared he would not have set foot in the church… if he could have foreseen the designs of the pope.”
It’s entirely possible that Charlemagne and Leo came to some agreement during their year together. After all, the idea of grinning priests hiding a bejewelled imperial crown as if it were a birthday cake is too ludicrous to contemplate. Documents from his reign reveal that Charlemagne preferred using the title ‘Charles, the most serene Augustus crowned by God, the great, peaceful Emperor ruling the Roman Empire’ rather than the simpler and more often used ‘Emperor of the Romans’. These aren’t entirely the actions of someone with an aversion to the role, and the king’s apparent humility may have been as expertly stage-managed as Leo’s mercy.
Nonetheless, with his rule over the Frankish lands uncontested and his empire secured through sheer military prowess, Charlemagne no more needed to declare himself Roman emperor than the fearsome Charles Martel needed to be king. The vulnerable pope, however, required an emperor in order to protect himself and the vast empire with the Church at its heart. Only Rome had nostalgia for its lost empire; the Franks held their 4th century resistance to Roman rule, and their role in dismembering the Roman Empire, as a point of fierce pride.
Ultimately though, the way Charlemagne signed his name changed nothing of the way he conducted his affairs, and the impact of his ascension – reluctant or willing – to Europe’s highest office would take another 150 years to make itself fully known. The first Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I, took the title in 962 CE and reinvented himself in the Frankish king’s image, creating a powerful multi-ethnic state and a crown that would endure for over 1,000 years.
Through the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s rule defined not just the primacy of France as one of Europe’s imperial, religious and cultural superpowers, but of numerous Austrian, German and Italian states too.
A career that began for Charlemagne as king  of the Franks ended not just as emperor, but also  as the father of the Europe that we can still recognise today.

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In later life, Charlemagne came into conflict with his doctors after they advised him to stop eating roasted meat

Image: Getty Images

Images: Getty Images; Alamy

Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, defeats the Moors at the Battle of Tours in 732

“Charlemagne’s journey from king to emperor has everything to do with the insecurity of the Church”

St Giles pardons the Emperor. Although a popular legend, there’s no evidence that the two ever met

Charlemagne orders the construction of a city to ford the River Main – Frankfurt, or Frank Ford

Birth of the modern Europe

Three big ways in which Charlemagne changed the continent

01 Man of letters
Frustrated by his own difficulty in mastering the written word, Charlemagne rolled out a system of reforms to the very shape of writing, insisting on a double space to separate words, an indent at the start of a paragraph and punctuation marks to indicate where the reader should pause or stop. Question marks and lower case letters also appeared.

02 Silver age
Due to a shortage of gold, Charlemagne and the Anglo-Saxon King Offa standardised their currencies based on a pound of silver – in Latin, libra – which was broken down into 20 sous, each of 12 deniers. This is the origin of many global currencies past and present, from the British pound to the Italian lira.

03 Out of the dark
Charlemagne’s interest in the arts led to the Carolingian Renaissance, a flowering of art, literature, poetry and learning.  The Dark Ages traditionally cover the 6th to 13th centuries, but for the Franks it was over before it began, and 90 per cent of surviving Roman manuscripts do so because monks copied them.