King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne

"If you ever want to read one book on Charlemagne, then this would be the one. It’s wonderful. A whole raft of biographies came out around 2014 to commemorate 1200 years since his death. Nelson’s book came out a little bit later. She has worked on Charlemagne for half a century. Still, she manages to reread all the primary sources. She knows her stuff: every little scrap of information—be it archaeology, art history, history, or some strange manuscript in an obscure German monastery. She has it all and she manages to use these bits and pieces as part of a big puzzle, most of which is missing. She doesn’t try to tell us a coherent, working story that starts with birth and ends at death and mechanically goes through the points in between. She tells us what we don’t know as well, and she tries to make the most of the bits and pieces we have. She also shows how difficult it is to interpret them sometimes. “We know him as the first emperor in the West after the Roman period and the man who conquered most of what is now Western Europe, more or less” In the introduction, she says she wants to make the sources speak. And that is what I find so wonderful about this book. She interprets them, but the main characters in her book are all these bits and pieces of evidence through which we can get an idea about who Charlemagne was and why he is interesting. It is wonderful to have the primary sources at the heart of the book and she makes space for them. She points out things that are strange, or contradictions between sources and asks, ‘What can we make of that?’ which I love. Many biographies of Charlemagne have been written, but this reads as a really fresh and interesting new take on the whole story. One thing she deliberately does not do is fall into the trap of writing with hindsight. She calls him Charles because ‘Charlemagne’ was a later development in the story. And she tries to stick as much as she can to contemporary material, to really zoom in on what was happening, not what people later said had been happening. That’s a big difference. Her Charlemagne is not the lone genius, trying to rebuild the Roman Empire. Her Charlemagne is somebody who sometimes messed up monumentally but was very good at improvising. He is someone who had to learn how to rule this enormous empire just by doing it and trying things out, and by trusting people. Sometimes that was not a very good idea, as it turned out. He’s somebody who was very good at thinking on his feet and who was a very energetic person and interested in a lot of things. He’s not the big emperor with a crown on his head and a big flowing beard, sitting on the throne and ‘ruling’. No, he’s running up and down his empire all the time because there were people attacking it and people being unfaithful. He was a very busy emperor. That’s a very good question. And, of course, you can have a long discussion about whether or not this was a ‘state’ in any modern sense of the word. I think there are several parts to the secret of his success. One is simply that he was a very good military leader, with a bigger and stronger army than the neighbours. He certainly profited from weaknesses in neighbouring areas. But I think you can also say that he wasn’t building an empire. It wasn’t a conscious process, where he woke up one morning, wondered what he should do that weekend, and decided to build an empire. Even the imperial coronation has some issues of interpretation. What he needed to do, given the kind of rule he was exercising, was to make sure that the people who were faithful to him—his military leaders, his commanders, his counts—stayed faithful. Since this is not a state as we know it, with a separate army, you need to make sure that these people stay happy. And one way of keeping them happy is to win wars and to divide the plunder with them. This stage of early medieval history has been labelled a ‘plunder economy’—because you need to expand in order to keep this internal balance. A count who gets a nice chunk of treasure to take home to his wife and children will come back and fight for you again. “We just know very little about this guy” That is something that starts to get harder under Charlemagne’s grandsons when the Empire gets divided. Then, you have three kings to choose from, and sometimes even four. So, if one doesn’t pay you enough, you simply go to the neighbours. But Charlemagne was good at this and, by winning some wars that produced really spectacular amounts of treasure, he had a nice base to work with. The other thing is that he embraced Christianity as a way of life. Christianity, at the time, was more than what we would call a religion. By collaborating with the Pope he was certain that he ruled by the grace of God on Earth. That’s not only nice because then you get extra support from Heaven in your wars, if you need it, but it also comes with obligations, because it’s then your responsibility to save people who, like the Saxons for instance, are pagans. Saxony was conquered and converted at the same time. So, there is also this ideal of spreading Christianity, early medieval style. That is a building block as well, this idea of a Christian empire. I don’t think that he was trying to revive the Roman Empire. This coronation in 800 is still a bit of a mystery. We have very conflicting stories about it. Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, says that Charlemagne had no idea that it was coming. According to Einhard, Charlemagne was there in Rome, in church on Christmas Day, happily praying at the grave of Saint Peter when the Pope sort of sneaked up behind him and put this crown on his head and said, ‘Hooray, we have an empire and an emperor!’ That’s not very likely, right? But why does Einhard write this down? Others, later on, thought that this train of events was impossible and that Charlemagne must have planned it years and years ahead. But these contradictory stories are already a reason to think that something was going on here. Maybe the plan was not so much to revive the Roman Empire, but for the Pope to get a stronger ally, or to say thank you for some favours that Charlemagne had done him. Or something else. Even once he was emperor, he didn’t use that title nearly as much as ‘King of the Franks and the Lombards’. It was a nice extra, but ‘the Emperor Charlemagne’ means something very different from whatever you want to understand by ‘the Roman Emperor’."