Ich und Karl der Große: Das Leben des Höflings Einhard

"Patzold is a professor of medieval history at the University of Tübingen. This is a very brave book. Instead of adding yet another book to the thousands that already exist about Charlemagne, he has tried to write a book on Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard. And we know even less about Einhard than about Charlemagne. What he does to solve that problem is to rely on historical imagination. That’s why it is brave. There are many people, especially in Germany , who don’t like this approach at all. They want facts and sources. But he really knows his stuff. He talks about primary sources and he asks interesting questions about them. He’s trying to flesh out Charlemagne through the eyes of the man who was with him for 30 years. And he uses Einhard to give us a sense of the world in which these people moved. I think it’s wonderful. It’s a type of historical writing that you don’t see very much. It’s also intended for a slightly wider audience. He’s a good storyteller. I’m surprised it hasn’t been translated into any other language yet. It’s not a novel, nor is it only hardcore scholarship. It’s in between. He will present us with a manuscript and ask what we should make of it. He also shows the kinds of puzzles that historians have to try and solve every day, like what to make of little marginal notes in a manuscript, or something that is not a hard fact and open to interpretation. Then he leads you through the steps that inform his interpretation, making clear that we can never be sure. He’s very conscientious in the gaps he fills. He doesn’t say, ‘It was a sunny morning and Einhard was walking in the garden…’ or anything like that. It revolves around primary sources, the material from the time, and he tries to reconstruct this world around the King-Emperor, who builds this court at Aachen, and all the people around him—who are a really nasty, backstabbing bunch, because the competition is so harsh. Einhard was very small. He was not big and manly enough to become a real warrior. That’s probably why his parents shipped him off to a monastery at Fulda to have a good education. Because of his size, the nasty men at the court accused him of being an ant, or suggested that he could be used as a table leg. But they also knew he was one of the brightest minds of the time. There are bits and pieces you can use to get an image of Einhard, but mostly Patzold uses Einhard to look through his eyes into this inner circle around the emperor. He’s one of the prime ministers. There were many people competing for that position. Einhard spent a long time at the court and, after Charlemagne died, his son, Louis, took him on. That shows that Einhard was greatly appreciated for his advice. It was perhaps an advantage for him that he was not a high nobleman. He was not part of a faction, which meant he was able to survive the chaos that broke out after Charlemagne died and work with Louis for a while. It was at Louis’s court that he wrote his biography of Charlemagne, perhaps to show Louis how it is done and, through the life of his father, provide him with an example. “Einhard tells you that Charlemagne was tall and that he had a bit of a squeaky voice and a bit of a potbelly and reddish hair” Historians do not agree exactly on the purpose of Einhard’s book. Patzold offers a very different interpretation to Nelson’s. For Nelson, it was intended as a mirror for the new king. Here was the story of his great father, as long as he was going to do as his father had done, he’d be fine. The book is also a product of the intellectual culture of the time. There is a bit of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars in there, and Cicero, too. It’s a way of showing off how great your Latin is. People would recognise that; it was the intellectual in-game. But, according to Nelson, the book is also a literary experiment, because, apart from saints’ lives, biographies had not been written since the Roman period. Patzold accepts that it is, to some extent, a mirror but he points out that Einhard doesn’t talk at all about the difficult things at the time. He seems to steer around all the controversies and backbiting. He says the reason for this is that Einhard wanted to keep out of all these debates and keep his hands clean and show that he was a good adviser. He wanted to keep his job, or maybe even get a better job, and this was his application letter. It’s not very long at all. It’s about 50 pages. You do and you don’t, because Einhard tells you that Charlemagne was tall and that he had a bit of a squeaky voice and a bit of a potbelly and reddish hair. But in these descriptions Einhard is borrowing from Suetonius. When Charlemagne’s nose is described, it’s a direct quote from the Lives of the Caesars . Then you can ask yourself what he was doing. Did Charlemagne have the same nose as one of these emperors, or did he think this just sounded about right for a text like this? That is the big enigma. We don’t get a direct sense of what this man would have been like to have a pint with. You can see him being nice to children and the series of wives he had. You can see him being very energetic and running up and down his Empire with an army to intervene. You can see him rewarding his faithful followers when he has just avoided being murdered. That kind of thing. But a portrait of a person as we would like to see it now, in a biography ? No. Not really. He points out that he’s not worthy to be telling the story of the great Charles, but that’s another literary trope. It’s not a text written straight from the heart. It’s very worked over and full of quotations and things we probably don’t even get anymore today and can’t understand. But this is the best evidence we have about Charlemagne as a person. It’s the only description of him that is more or less contemporary."