Charlemagne
Charlemagne conquered most of western Europe and was crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800, which he said he would have avoided had he known. He succeeded his father Pippin in 768 jointly with a brother who died three years later, and spent the following four decades campaigning almost every summer. The Lombard kingdom was annexed in 774, Bavaria absorbed, the Avar treasure taken, and Saxony subdued over thirty-two years of war that included the execution of some 4,500 prisoners in a day at Verden and a policy of conversion at the point of the sword. The Spanish march produced the rearguard action at Roncevaux that became the Song of Roland. What distinguishes him from other successful warlords is the administration. He ruled through counts supervised by travelling inspectors, issued capitularies on everything from weights to the duties of bishops, standardised the coinage on a silver penny, and required every monastery and cathedral to keep a school. The scholars he assembled — Alcuin from York, Theodulf, Einhard, Paul the Deacon — produced a reformed script, Carolingian minuscule, in which most surviving classical Latin literature was copied, and which is the ancestor of the lower-case letters on this page. He could read and, by Einhard's account, kept a tablet under his pillow and never quite learned to write. He died at Aachen in 814, and the empire was divided among his grandsons at Verdun in 843, producing the outlines of France and Germany. The coronation is still argued about. Einhard says he would not have entered the church that day had he known what the pope intended, which may be modesty, may be a claim that the pope had no business conferring anything, and may be simple diplomacy towards Constantinople, which had an emperor already.
- Lived: 748 CE – 814 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: leader, military_leader
