PAUL FREEDMAN: Today,
ladies and gentlemen,
we move back to Northern Europe
to the northern part of
the former Roman Empire.
And since you've done the
reading, I won't be giving
anything away by saying that the
culmination of what we're
talking about is Charlemagne and
Charlemagne's coronation
in Rome at the hands
of the Pope in
the year 800 as emperor.
We'll talk about what that
title means, a title that had
not been seen in 325 years in
the West, at least not agreed
upon by everyone in
Western Europe.
Charlemagne, at this time,
didn't control quite
everything in Western Europe.
You have a map in the Wickham
book of his empire, bequeathed
to his successors in the year
843, the year that it is
partitioned.
This does not include
the British Isles.
It does not include most
of Spain, which
was in Islamic hands.
But it is a pretty convincing
effort at the restoration of
the Roman Empire, even
though its base--
in other words, where
Charlemagne and his ancestors'
lands were, where their wealth
came from, where they lived,
where their followers
came from--
was at what had been the borders
of the Roman Empire,
what's now northeastern
France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, west northwestern
Germany--
a territory known at this
time as Austrasia.
Charlemagne's ancestors were
great men, major nobles of the
region of Austrasia--
again, eastern France, western
Germany, the Low Countries.
They were nominal servants of
the Merovingian rulers and
rose to prominence with
a title of maior.
And Wickham preserves just
the Latin, maior--
major, larger, great man.
The maior of the palace--
"the mayor of the palace"
is how this is usually
translated.
And of course, our word
mayor applies
to a municipal official.
So mayor of the palace is
a rather funny title.
But it's really a kind of prime
minister or leader of
the soldiers--
prime minister and defense
secretary or minister.
And this title tended
to be hereditary.
One of the problems of rulers
in Merovingian world, in the
Lombard world, in all of Western
Europe, is controlling
their mighty servants.
Because these people were not
just easy to fire, you
couldn't just cut their
salaries or stop their
paycheck, because they're
not getting a paycheck.
They are the leaders
of soldiers.
They own castles,
fortifications.
But most of all,
they own land.
And as landowners and as
established powers within the
society, their power rivals--
and in the case of Charlemagne's
ancestors--
would exceed the power
of the king.
So these are not people who
are easy to dislodge.
And they are people who tend to
want their power to be not
appointive but hereditary--
in other words, to bequeath
titles like mayor of the
palace to their sons.
I mention this now because next
week we'll see this is a
problem that Charlemagne's
descendants would have. They
would have the same problem.
How do you make your officials
that you've appointed listen
to you, obey your orders, if
you don't have sufficient
coercive power to remove them?
And the reason you don't have
sufficient coercive power to
remove them, again, is because
they are military officials,
they have their own followers,
they are well-established in
various territories, and so
they're hard to tame.
They are becoming little
kings themselves.
And a key aspect of the ability
to become a local
ruler, even though officially
you're subject to the real
king of a large realm, is
because it's become
hereditary.
It's become a family property.
This tendency to
decentralization, inheritance,
and weakened royal power is
often called "feudalism," a
word that you may as
well write down--
you've heard of it--
but which we're not
going to use.
And we're not going to use it
for a couple of reasons, one
of which is nobody uses
the term at the time.
It carries a lot of other
overtones that are not
relevant to us, and really
insofar as it has use, it
describes a later period, a
History 211 kind of reality, a
post-year 1000 reality.
But what is to be recalled is
that, once you no longer have
an official state apparatus
with an administrative
structure or bureaucracy like
Diocletian, like Constantine,
like Justinian, or even like
those Byzantine emperors we
were talking about, or like
the Abbasid Caliphate--
all of those are complex
structures of state
bureaucracies funded
by taxation.
Here we have something that is
not that sort of polity.
It is more personal.
It is more military.
It depends more on plunder, on
expansion, on charisma, that
is, personal ability to get
people to obey you.
It has a very rudimentary
structure.
And the success of a state is
judged on the basis of its
ability to survive, even if
the ruler doesn't have
charisma, even if the ruler's
not all that great.
Because people obey the state,
they obey its officials, they
obey the idea of the state,
and not the individual
personality.
So we're going to talk about
Charlemagne's ancestors and
how they got into power, how
they went from being mighty
servants, but servants
nonetheless, to kings of
France and eventually,
in 800, emperors.
What happened to the
Merovingians?
Last time we checked, the
Merovingians were certainly
kicking people around Francia,
warring with each other,
occasionally regretting it and
burning the tax rolls, but
pretty quickly returning to the
old plunder, and killing
people, and having fun kind
of barbarian economy.
The Merovingian dynasty lasts
to the mid-eighth century.
But for its last hundred years,
roughly 650 to 750, its
rulers are ineffective.
They have the title "kings."
They have great prestige.
But they are weak.
A lot of our understanding of
their position really is
simply a gloss, or an
elaboration, of a few lines of
Einhard, the biographer of
Charlemagne, whom you've read.
"The family of the
Merovingians," he says on page
16 of this book, "From which the
Franks used to make their
kings, is thought to have lasted
down to King Childeric
whom Pope Stephen
ordered deposed.
His long hair was shorn, and
he was forced into a
monastery." Remember, one of
the symbols of Merovingian
familial prestige was
this long hair.
But Carolingians had short
hair and wore mustaches.
They kind of broke with
the Merovingian look.
But of course, this is not just
a male fashion statement.
"Although it might seem that the
Merovingian family ended
with him, it had in fact been
without any vitality for a
long time." The Merovingians
were just given a little
shove, because they were already
basically finished.
"There was nothing of any worth
in it, except for the
empty name of king.
For both the riches and power
of the kingdom were in
possession of the prefects of
the palace," this is how he's
translating it, "who were
called the mayors of the
palace, and to them fell
the highest command.
Nothing was left for the king
to do except to sit on his
throne with his hair long and
his beard uncut, satisfied to
hold the name of king only
and pretending to rule.
Except for the empty name of
king and a meager living
allowance, which the prefect of
the court extended to him,
he possessed nothing else of his
own but one estate and a
very small income."
Now, so much depends on these
words of Einhard, who then
goes on to describe them going
around in these ceremonial
carts, people acclaiming them.
But everybody knows that if they
want anything done, the
person to talk to is the
mayor of the palace.
It's to Einhard's interest, or
at least to the interests of
the Carolingians for whom he's
writing, to make it appear as
if the Merovingians were
already finished.
But nevertheless, it's clear
that they were much weaker
than the people we've
been reading about
in Gregory of Tours.
What happened to them?
Well, one possibility that
Einhard, in effect, sort of
encourages is that something
happened to the family.
They were weak personalities;
maybe they had some hereditary
degeneration.
Or, they ran out of money.
They did not have
lands to reward
their followers anymore.
Remember that in this economy,
this is not something in which
tax revenues are funding
the state.
Up to a point they are, because
we saw that Fredegund
and Childeric had
tax revenues--
at least, tax records--
to burn.
But as the inheritance
of Rome--
Roman administration, Roman
literacy, Roman organization--
frayed, as that inheritance
became further and further
degraded, the ability to
tax the population--
rural, dispersed--
dwindled.
So it's not only a question of
the administrative decline but
of the economic decline, or
at least the economic
decentralization of the
way people lived.
The Merovingians had depended an
awful lot on war and on the
plunder received from war.
You'll remember that when we
were talking about Clotar, the
son of Clovis, that his men
rebelled when he didn't want
to fight the Saxons.
That's not just because they're
warlike savages, or
insofar as they're warlike
savages, they're also in it
for treasure, plunder.
Beowulf is a plunder-driven
world.
The author of Beowulf is
well aware that this is
stupid, in a way.
Right?
The dragon has all
this plunder.
And what does he do with it?
Dragons are not consumers.
He lies on beds of gold coins
and beautiful armor and all
sorts of things that
have been seized.
He has absolutely no use
for all of this stuff.
And yet, stealing just a little
tiny ring or a little
bit of it enrages him.
And so he starts his
depredations
out of anger at that.
The Merovingians, once they stop
expanding, don't have the
opportunities to keep their
economy going, their source of
income going.
And in particular, they lose the
ability, so it would seem,
to reward their followers.
Their followers, their knights,
to call them that
anachronistically, their
military entourage does not
flourish by being paid because
there's very little in the way
of coinage.
There is very little in
the way of revenues.
They benefit from things like
land, but as you are running
out of plunder and giving away
land, then sooner or later
you, yourself, the giver
of land, will not
have anymore to give.
That's another hypothesis about
Merovingian decline.
In fact, there is an effort by
a mayor of the palace of the
late seventh century to depose
the Merovingian king--
a man named Grimoald, who is
an ancestor of Charlemagne.
But this is unsuccessful.
He tries to depose a
Merovingian ruler.
And even though the Merovingians
are weak, their
other followers prevent Grimoald
from succeeding.
And indeed, he's executed.
The prestige of the Merovingians
was such that
even if they were not effective,
they were still the
kings because the blood of
Clovis flowed in their veins.
And this was symbolized
by their familial
distinctiveness, which included
the long hair, the
uncut beard, the traveling
around in carts.
This is important because it
means that you could not
succeed by direct action against
the Merovingians, at
least not in 661, when
Grimoald was killed.
In order to make this happen--
in other words, even though he
was killed, his successors
remained as mayors
of the palace.
They were tightly enough
ensconced or inserted into the
structures of power and
successful enough as a family
that they were able
to survive, but as
mayors of the palace.
Looked at from the long term--
that is from the perspective
of 751, the year when Pippin
declared himself King of the
Franks and deposed that last
Merovingian ruler--
looked at from that perspective,
the strategy of
the dynasty which we can call
Carolingians, even though
we're not yet at Charlemagne,
the strategy of the
Carolingians was to come up with
another rationale for why
they should be kings and not the
Merovingians, what we can
call "legitimacy".
Legitimacy in politics is the
sense that the people who are
ruling are ruling for good
reason, that their rule is
legitimate.
This can be on the basis of an
election: "I may not like the
president, but he was elected in
a fair election, therefore
I accept the fact that he's
president." It may be triumph
in war: "This emperor came
to power, deposed his
predecessor, and got the
Bulgars off our back,
therefore his rule is
legitimate." It may be
economic benefit: "This guy
has made my life easier
economically or I have the
feeling that things are going
right." It may be dynasty: "This
is the oldest son of the
former king." The British rulers
just changed to end
discrimination between men and
women in the succession.
Obviously, Britain has a queen
rather than a king and has for
the last sixty years, but the
favored candidate would be a
male child.
The circumstances of Elizabeth's
succession don't
need to detain us, but she was
not the logical eldest--
obviously not the eldest
male child.
So there are all sorts
of ways of having
legitimacy as a ruler.
The challenge for the mayors
of the palace was to create
this legitimacy.
And they did it by several
different means.
It's not that there's this
project where they set out in
year 662 and say, "Within ninety
years we're coming to
power, and here's how we're
going to do it." It is
historians who impose that
rational strategy.
But nevertheless, it
is discernible.
In fact, they are mayors of
the palace of several
different pieces, because
the Merovingian
realm was not unified.
It was in particular pieces.
So these guys are the mayors
of the palace of Austrasia.
So their opponents include the
other kingdoms, particularly
Neustria which is more or less
the region of Paris, the
Seine, the central to northern
part of modern France, but
further west than Austrasia;
So Austrasia is northeast.
Neustria is more central
and slightly south.
So there are lots of rivals.
It's a very dangerous
situation.
It's a very violent world.
But this is their plan.
A lot of what they, that is
the Carolingians, the
ancestors of Charlemagne,
accomplished was military.
This is the bottom line of
leadership in the period we're
dealing with.
Without military prestige and
military success, it's very
hard to craft a polity, let
alone hand it down to your
descendants.
What is more unusual than
military leadership, however,
is that the Carolingians allied
themselves to the Church.
Their legitimacy as rulers would
be based very much on an
alliance with the
Church, and in
particular, with the papacy.
The Bishop of Rome is someone
whom we haven't
talked about very much.
We mentioned Leo I back in the
fifth century, who was
responsible for negotiating with
the Huns in the absence
of the emperor and who also
upheld doctrinal orthodoxy
against Monophysitism.
But the pope was not inevitably
the sole ruler of
the Church in the way he would
become in the modern world
within the Catholic Church.
The pope was the
Bishop of Rome.
He was the guardian of some
of the chief relics of the
Christian world, the relics of
Saint Peter and Saint Paul,
the apostles.
He was the inheritor of the aura
of the city of Rome, the
imperial city.
He even had appropriated some
titles from the Roman
emperors, such as Pontifex
Maximus, an old pagan title.
So the pope is the inheritor
of a lot of Roman imperial
prestige, but he is a
beleaguered inheritor of that.
In fact, the pope's life
in Rome was dangerous.
He was often eclipsed by or
threatened by the Lombards.
The Lombards, a barbarian tribe
who had invaded Italy--
we talked about them
last time.
They invaded in 568.
They took most of Italy from
Justinian's heirs.
They were Arian for
a longer time than
other barbarian tribes.
And even when they ceased to be
Arian, they were eager to
seize Rome.
They weren't overwhelmingly
eager to seize Rome because
they never did it, but they
threatened the pope.
During the seventh century, the
pope considered himself
the ally of the Byzantine
Empire.
The emperors continued to
intervene, to debate various
doctrinal things.
But as the Lombard threat
grew, as the Byzantine
emperors were iconoclast, the
pope cast around for a new
protector, beginning in
really the 720s, 730s.
And so the alliance between
Carolingians and popes is
natural, in the sense that they
both want something out
of the other.
The Carolingians, the mayors
of the palace, want
legitimacy.
They want to be sacred figures
within the Christian world, to
trump the pre-Christian aura
of the Merovingians.
And the pope, out of the
Carolingians, wants protection
from the Lombards and a sense
of rule over most of Europe
that will favor the Church
and allow the Church
to advance its work.
The means of cementing this
alliance, however, are
interestingly enough monks.
The people who are the shock
troops of the Christianization
of Europe, the expansion of
Europe, of the Church, and the
furtherance of its mission are
monks, many of them from
Ireland and Britain, who would
try to convert the
countryside, either those places
that were minimally
Christian or, beginning in the
late seventh and early eighth
centuries, extend Christianity
to places like Holland or
central Germany that were not
parts of the Roman Empire and
had never been Christian.
So these monastic settlements
not only converted the
countryside, but they served
as foci for economic and
social development.
There was an alliance between
the mayors of the palace and
monks such as the English monk,
Saint Boniface, Apostle
to the Germans.
Saint Boniface, in the eighth
century, would convert a lot
of the Germans in and
east of the Rhine.
He would receive support from
the mayors of the palace of
Austrasia, because this is east
of where they are, and
they're interested in expanding
and settling there.
And he received support from the
pope who is interested in
the conversion of Christians.
And so it's through
intermediaries like Saint
Boniface and other monks that
the countryside gets converted
and that the Carolingians and
the pope approach each other.
Why monks?
Who are these guys?
When we looked at the
Benedictine world, it seemed
as if monks were supposed
to be enclosed in their
monasteries and not
wander around?
These are somewhat
special monks.
These are wandering monks.
The Irish tradition was
different from the Benedictine
tradition and encouraged
wandering
as a form of penance.
If you wanted to do penance or
to experience the power of God
and randomness in the world,
which would you rather do--
pray seven times a day in the
same place for decades, or
just kind of like wander around,
try to convert people,
and see if you could
get martyred?
Certainly, the latter
is dangerous.
The latter is truly dangerous.
But these are very enterprising
guys.
We just have this idea.
Oh yeah, monks pray or they
copy manuscripts or they
wander around and convert
people-- all of which are
insanely difficult
things to do.
You really have to admire
these guys.
So many of them are from
Ireland, or from
recently-converted Anglo-Saxon
England.
Anglo-Saxon England combines a
Benedictine structure with
some of this inheritance
of Irish wandering.
But it is these monasteries
that are founded in the
countryside of Germany, of the
Netherlands, and the alliances
between the mayors of the palace
and the papacy that are
key in creating the Carolingian
dynasty.
The mayors of the palace of
Austrasia come to preeminence
in the Merovingian realms in
the early eighth century.
One of the key events here is
one that we've looked at from
several sides now and
that will be, I
hope, familiar to you.
And that is the Battle of
Poitiers in 733, also known as
the Battle of Tours.
This is the battle in which
the Arabs were defeated in
northern France, and eventually
retreated to Spain.
733 marks the high water point
of Arab incursions into Europe
and is, in a sense, a parallel
to 717, the defeat of the
Siege of Constantinople.
The victor at Poitiers was the
mayor of the palace of
Austrasia, a man named Charles
Martel, "the Hammer." He
doesn't have a last name.
It's sort of a
[clarification: a sobriquet]--
Charles Martel.
And he gained tremendous
prestige from this.
That legitimation that we said
comes from military leadership
certainly was his.
The Merovingian king
was nowhere to be
seen at that battle.
It was led by the mayor
of the palace.
Charles' son, Pepin the Short,
started really to put together
these aspects of rule.
Pepin the Short, 741 to 768.
Now there's something going on
here that I don't have an
explanation for.
If he really was short--
yet we know from digging up his
body that Charlemagne was
on the order of 6' 7".
Charlemagne is really tall
for pre-modern people.
He's really, really tall.
And Einhard describes
him as tall.
Einhard says his voice was
kind of squeaky and high,
given just how huge he was.
I don't know how that works.
Many of you are more advanced
in science and
genetics than me.
But my pet theory, since Pepin's
body hasn't been
found, is that actually he was
really tall too and that he's
called Pepin the Short as a kind
of joke; you know like
guys nicknamed Tiny are
often 350 pounders.
I'm just saying.
Pepin the Short is the person
who crystallizes this
potential alliance among papacy,
missionaries, and
mayors of the palace.
And in doing so, he
transforms Europe.
He favored the Church.
He could mobilize his new power
and legitimacy through
this alliance with the Church.
He encouraged various kinds of
monastic reforms urged by
Saint Boniface, which meant
better discipline over
priests, more councils of
bishops, the restoration of
lands to the Church, and a
role for the king as the
guardian and protector
of the Church.
It may be at Boniface's
instigation that Pepin wrote
to the pope, Zacharias at this
time, asking, "Is it right for
the man who holds the power not
to wear the crown, while
the person who wears the crown
does not hold the power?" He
asks this as if it were a
hypothetical question.
"Oh, you know, we were just
discussing this last night and
wondered what you think." But
of course, the pope is quite
aware of what's at stake and
says it is wrong for the
person who holds the power not
to hold the crown; whereupon
in 751, Pepin had himself
elected king of the Franks,
deposed and put in a monastery
the last Merovingian king, and
by his being put in the
monastery, he was tonsured,
that is to say much of
his hair was cut off,
desacrilizing him.
And unlike Grimoald's failed
coup d'etat, this was totally,
peacefully, no problem,
greeted by everybody,
successful.
In 753, two years later, the
new pope, Stephen, made an
unprecedented--
literally unprecedented--
journey across the Alps.
No pope had ever been
in northern
Europe until this year.
And he crowned Pepin.
He was desperate over the
situation with the Lombards.
And in return, Pepin led an
expedition that, although not
the definitive invasion of Italy
that Charlemagne would
undertake, at least gave the
pope some breathing room and
defeated the Lombards.
At Pepin's death in 768, he
was succeeded by his son,
Charles, and his other
son Carloman.
Charles--
the future Charles the
Great, Charlemagne.
Carloman died in 771, maybe
naturally, maybe not, leaving
Charlemagne as the sole ruler.
Charlemagne at this point is
king of the Franks, inheritor
of the title and accomplishments
of his father.
He was the beneficiary, then,
of well over a hundred years
of Carolingian ascent.
And let's just review the
factors that had aided his
predecessors--
the weakness of the
Merovingians; their position
as mayors of the palace;
the activity of monks,
missionaries, to Germany and
the eastern part of the
Frankish world; Byzantine
weakness and the Lombard
threat; and, of course,
Byzantine flirting with
heresies like Iconoclasm.
The result is then a kind of
geopolitical shift of the
papacy towards the North.
Another chapter in that long
book of the end of
Mediterranean hegemony.
Instead of looking to the
eastern Mediterranean for
protection and for the ruler who
was his natural ally, the
pope now looks to a northern
transalpine ruler.
Charlemagne you've read about.
And you've read Einhard's
biography of him.
It is, in some sense, at least a
seemingly artless biography.
He obviously likes him, admires
him, but he describes
him as a real person.
We learn that he liked baths and
roast meat, that he had a
high voice, that he loved having
his daughters around
him but probably kind of
mistreated them by not
allowing them to marry.
And then Einhard is scandalized
that since they
couldn't marry, they had all
sorts of guys hanging around.
We get a sense of Charlemagne's
personality.
Charlemagne is a man very much
at home in his time.
He is comfortable with
being a warrior.
He would lead campaigns year
after year after year.
At the same time, he is a person
of learning, or at
least a person who believes
learning is important.
Einhard tells us that he never
quite really learned to read
and write, that he tried, that
he slept with Augustine's City
of God by his side, which is an
impressive thing to do as
bedtime reading.
And we also know that
he is pious.
His piety does not interfere
with his enjoyment of life or
with his harsh prosecution
of military campaigns.
He's not a sensitive person.
He's not a self-examining
kind of character.
But very important is that his
notion of leadership combines
what might be thought three
available forms of legitimacy
of this era.
One, and the most important,
is military prestige and
power, war leadership.
And he conquered lots
of peoples.
It was not just a
question of war
leadership with no results.
He had tremendous results.
He conquered the Lombards
in Italy in 774.
He conquered the Avars
in the 790s.
So much treasure did he seize
from them-- remember we saw
the Avars as besiegers
of Constantinople?
By this time, they're in
more-or-less modern Hungary.
He seized so much treasure that
the entire economy of his
empire basically was financed
on the basis of this plunder
until his death in 814, so
for nearly twenty years.
He conquered the Bavarians.
He conquered the Saxons in
northern, eastern Germany, a
very, very difficult series of
campaigns from 774 to 806 that
involved large numbers of
civilian casualties, virtual
exterminations of peoples,
and forced conversion.
It was the first real, sustained
campaign of forced
conversion to Christianity
in European history.
Brutal, but successful,
opening up really the
definition of modern Germany.
Much of what the modern German
state is, in its central and
eastern parts, in the
north, is Saxon.
There is a part called Saxony
still, a province of the
former East Germany.
But in fact, a province, or a
land as they're called, of the
former West Germany is called,
Nieder-Sachsen, Lower-Saxony.
So the Saxons are spread
throughout northern Germany.
And by Charlemagne's death,
Germany or the eastern
Frankish realm starts to look
like something familiar.
He conquers a bit in Spain
against the Muslims. His
forces would seize Barcelona
in the year 801.
But he does not get as
far as he had hoped.
In particular, he had hoped
to take Saragossa.
His army was defeated by,
actually, Basques.
But their defeat leads to the
literary triumph known as the
Song of Roland, one of the great
works of the Middle Ages
in which the enemy are Muslims.
And the Song of
Roland is a great sort of
Crusade ideology text which
shows, in its own words,
that Christians are
right, pagans are wrong.
Of course, they call
the Muslims pagans.
They depict them as worshipping
Apollo, and
Termagent, and other gods.
They know that the Muslims
are not literally pagans.
But it has higher rhetorical
value.
Charlemagne is tremendously
successful as
a war leader then.
His second form of power
and legitimacy is
as a Christian ruler.
He is a man with a vision of a
Christian polity, of alliance
with the Church, and as seeing
himself as responsible for the
spiritual health
of his people.
This is important, this latter
responsibility, because it has
a lot to do with the program
of education that we'll be
talking about next week, the
intellectual air of his court.
He believes himself, therefore,
to be not just
somebody who is supposed to
convert the Saxons forcibly,
but is supposed to educate his
population into becoming
Christians of a real sort.
This also means that he is
allied with the pope and
believes that the pope is
capable of aiding him in more
than merely symbolic ways.
The third aspect of power
and legitimacy is
the legacy of Rome.
It is the thing that unifies
this entire course.
Charlemagne, according to
Einhard, went to Rome to
rescue the pope yet again, not
this time from the Lombards in
800, but from the
Roman factions.
Pope Leo III was rescued by
Charlemagne, put back in Rome.
Charlemagne, Einhard tells us,
went to Saint Peter's on
Christmas Day to pray.
And lo and behold, the pope
jumped out from behind a
pillar and put the crown on his
head and he was acclaimed
Roman emperor.
And Charlemagne said later,
he wouldn't have gone--
even though it was Christmas--
he wouldn't have gone to
church at all if he'd known
this was going to happen.
We can be cynical about the
surprise aspect of this, or
about Charlemagne's
uncharacteristic modesty.
Nevertheless, we have to think
about the implications of the
pope crowning the emperor.
Constantine wasn't crowned
by a pope.
The problem with having someone
crown you is that it
could be implied that he is the
one who bestows the crown
and could decide not to crown
someone in the future.
It looks as if he's the
more powerful one.
He's standing; he's putting
the crown on
you; and you're kneeling.
Indeed, as an evocation of this,
almost exactly 1,000
years later in 1804, when
Napoleon had himself crowned
by the pope, Napoleon seized
the crown from the pope's
hands and put in on himself, put
it on his own head, in a
direct reference
to Charlemagne.
So Roman, Christian, and
military leadership.
Of these, the Roman is the most
impressive and the most
sort of historically dramatic,
but probably the least
significant at the time.
Charlemagne did not consider his
empire to be exactly the
same thing as the
Roman Empire.
He would divide it.
The fact that he handed it over
to one son is that he
only ended up having
one surviving son.
But he had plans to divide it.
It's not clear if he regarded
the imperial title as anything
that would really survive.
Nevertheless, he was an emperor;
and an emperor
meaning that he ruled
over many peoples.
He was more than just the king
of the Franks because he now
ruled over Barbarians, Avars,
Visigoths, Lombards.
He had made a good stab at
restoring the Roman Empire in
the West. But it's a different
Roman Empire.
Its base is not really in Rome
nor even in Milan or Ravenna,
the late Roman imperial capitals
of the fifth century.
It is in Aachen, a city in
Austrasia where remains of his
palace chapel still stand.
His lands, influence, cronies,
family, political base,
economic base, military
recruiting base, are all in
northern Europe.
Charlemagne is, then in some
sense, the reviver of the
Roman Empire.
But he is also the founder of
Europe as something not just a
geographical expression but
a cultural expression.
Whether it is a socio-political
expression,
time will tell.
When the European Union, the
Euro, and all these things
that are sort of semi-unraveling
now were
cemented in their current form
in the early 1990s, the
treaties that established that
were deliberately made in the
territories that are neither
French nor German entirely,
but are really part of the old
Carolingian patrimony.
The treaties in places like
Maastricht, the location of
Brussels as the capitol of the
European Union, all of this is
really evocative of the
empire of Charlemagne.
These are the lands of the
Carolingians and this is, in
the next thousand years,
in certain respects
the center of Europe.
We'll talk more about the
Carolingians next week.
