Charlemagne, King of the Franks

The story

The kings of the Franks and their stewards

The Franks were a Germanic people who, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, had settled in Gaul, which is now France. Their first great Christian king, Clovis, had converted around the year 500. But two centuries later Clovis's descendants, the Merovingians, were weak kings, called “do-nothing kings” by historians, and the real power was in the hands of their steward, the “mayor of the palace”, who was head of the administration and of the army.

The most powerful family of stewards was the Carolingians. Charles Martel stopped the Arabs at Poitiers in 732. His son Pepin the Short, in 751, with the support of the pope, removed the last Merovingian king and had himself crowned king in his place: the pope needed a protector against the Lombards, who were threatening Rome, and a few years later (754–756) Pepin helped him by giving the Church a part of central Italy (the so-called “Donation of Pepin”).

Two brothers on the throne

Pepin died on 24 September 768. According to Frankish custom, the kingdom was divided between his two sons. Charles received the northern and western part, Carloman the southern and eastern part. Charles was about twenty years old; he was probably born in 747 or 748, but the date is not certain. The two brothers did not get along, and their mother, Bertrada, tried to keep the peace between them. In 771 Carloman died suddenly, and Charles took his kingdom as well, ruling alone.

Charles would go down in history as Charlemagne, from the Latin “Carolus Magnus”, meaning “Charles the Great”.

A king always at war

His reign was full of wars. He fought the Saxons, a pagan Germanic people of northern Germany, for more than thirty years, from 772 to 804, in harsh and cruel campaigns: in 782 at Verden he had about four thousand five hundred rebel Saxons put to death, according to the chronicles. He forced them to become Christians.

One of his first acts against the Saxons was the destruction, in 772, of the Irminsul, an enormous sacred tree trunk which, in their belief, held up the sky. But the Saxons rebelled several times, led by their chief Widukind, and Charles had to return every year. In the end he forced them to be baptised and to join his kingdom.

In 773–774 he attacked the Lombards, who were threatening the pope: he besieged Pavia, their capital, captured King Desiderius and proclaimed himself king of the Lombards. He entered Spain to fight the Muslims, but in 778 the rear guard of his army was massacred by the Basques in the Pyrenees, at Roncesvalles; this episode later inspired the poem “The Song of Roland”. Around 796 he defeated the Avars, a people of the steppes.

Governing a huge kingdom

Charles did not rule only with the sword. He divided the kingdom into counties, entrusted to officials called counts. To keep watch over them, he usually sent out pairs of inspectors every year, a churchman and a layman, called “missi dominici”, meaning “envoys of the lord”. He issued laws, called “capitularies”, because they were divided into chapters. He had a single silver coin minted, the denarius, which made trade easier.

The counts had the job of collecting taxes, judging cases and gathering the warriors in case of war. To help people who could not read the capitularies, the bishops had them read aloud in the churches. It was a way of reaching all the subjects in a kingdom with no newspapers and no post stations.

Unlike the kings of ancient times, he had no real capital. In the early years he moved with his court from one residence to another, eating the produce of his own lands. Later he settled mostly at Aachen, where he had a great palace built, and an eight-sided chapel inspired by the Italian churches of Ravenna.

In 800 Charles was crowned emperor in Rome. He died on 28 January 814, after about forty-five years as king.