Carolingian Empire

The last attempt to rebuild the western Roman Empire, which lasted one long reign and set the shape of Europe anyway. Charlemagne inherited the Frankish kingdom in 768 and spent forty-six years campaigning - subduing the Lombards, forcibly converting the Saxons over thirty years of war, pushing into Spain and Bavaria - until he governed most of Latin Christendom. On Christmas Day 800 the pope crowned him emperor in Rome, an act that claimed the Roman inheritance for the west and permanently complicated relations with Constantinople, which had an emperor already. The administration ran through counts and missi dominici who inspected them, and the court at Aachen gathered scholars from across Europe under Alcuin of York in what is called the Carolingian Renaissance: manuscripts copied and corrected, a legible script invented that our lower-case letters descend from, and classical texts preserved that would otherwise be lost. Almost every surviving Latin work reaches us through those copies. The empire was divided among Louis the Pious's sons at Verdun in 843 and never reassembled. Charlemagne is claimed as a founder by France and Germany both. The Aachen chapel is a World Heritage site. The empire covered around a million square kilometres at its height. Aachen was the principal residence. Carolingian minuscule was revived by Renaissance humanists who mistook it for Roman writing, which is why modern typefaces derive from it. The silver denier became the standard coin of western Europe. Charlemagne was canonised by an antipope and the cult was never formally endorsed. The imperial title lapsed in the west in 924 and was revived by the Saxon king Otto in 962, on a different footing.

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