The Life of Charlemagne | Human Voiced, No Ads

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:01]He ordered the massacre of 4 and a half thousand prisoners in a single day. He spent his evenings having the Bible read to him aloud at dinner. And he wept over Augustine's city of God.

[00:00:16]You can't call him a good man, nor a bad man, and definitely not a simple one.

[00:00:22]Reducing him to either one of those misses the point entirely.

[00:00:27]He was Charlemagne, Charles the Great, the king of the Franks, and he built the largest political entity that Western Europe had seen since the fall of Rome. modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, all under a single authority, administered through a reformed church, a revived tradition of Latin learning, and the considerable persuasive power of military force.

[00:00:59]His own century recognized the scale of his achievements. His biographer modeled his life story on the biographies of the Roman Caesars, and nobody was saying that that was far-fetched.

[00:01:13]This is the man who turned the door between the ancient world and the medieval. And today we're going to talk about his life in quite a lot of detail.

[00:01:25]Hello and welcome to the channel. Thank you very much for tuning in. Give it a like, comment, and subscribe for the algorithm. And thank you to those who are supporting this crowdfunded project by being members on the Patreon, YouTube memberships, donating, and checking out the merch store links in description and pinned comment. Let's begin. Now, the story begins in 742, which is when Charlemagne was born, though that exact date and place are a little uncertain. reminder that even the most famous people of the early medieval period lived in a world without the best administrative machinery of birth registration.

[00:02:07]Well, his father was Pippen III, the king of the Franks. His mother, Bertrada of Leyon.

[00:02:16]He was the heir to a dynasty, the Carolindians, that had itself only recently acquired a royal status through one of the most significant political coups of the 8th century. And understanding the Carolian rise helps us explain the ideology and also the anxiety that would drive Charles owner.

[00:02:41]The Franks had been the dominant people of what is roughly modern France since the fifth century. And when the Meravenian king Clovis had united the Frankish tribes, he converted to Catholic Christianity, a conversion of enormous political consequence since it aligned the Franks with the Roman church, rougher with the uh Aryan Christianity of the other Germanic peoples. where they built a kingdom that survived for two and a half centuries.

[00:03:12]Quite impressive given the chaos of the time.

[00:03:16]By the early 8th century, the Meravenian dynasty had declined into what historians have called the Dis Fenons, the do nothing kings, a succession of frankly weak monarchs who were increasingly just figureheads. While real power rested with the palace mayors, the chief administrators of the uh royal household.

[00:03:41]The most capable of these mayors was Charles Martell, also known as the hammer. That was Charlemagne's grandfather who in 732 defeated a rather large Muslim army at the battle of Turs holding the northward advance of the Umayad caliphate into Western Europe in an engagement that later historians perhaps with a bit of exaggeration would describe as one of the most decisive battles in the history of Western civilization.

[00:04:14]Though it's not that much exaggeration, it was pretty important.

[00:04:19]Whether the Arab forces were genuinely threatening a permanent conquest of Frania or just conducting a seasonal raid, we don't quite know. But the victory enhanced Charles Martell's reputation enormously.

[00:04:35]And this was the point where the Carolian family was established as the real power in the Frankish world.

[00:04:45]Charlemagne's father, Pippen III, completed the transition from power behind the throne to power on the throne in 751 with the explicit approval of Pope Zachary who ruled in a formula preserved in later sources that it was a better for the man who actually held royal power to bear the royal title.

[00:05:08]Pivan had the last Meravenian king, Childdrich III, deposed and shorn of his famous long hair, the traditional symbol of Meravenian royal status. And then they shipped him off to a monastery for a early and quiet retirement.

[00:05:27]Pippen was then anointed king of the Franks. And in 754, Pope Stefan II himself came to Frankia and anointed Pippen again along with his sons Charles and Carlaman in a ceremony that forged an alliance between the Carolian dynasty and the Roman papacy. One that would define European politics for generations to come.

[00:05:52]The Pope needed the Frank's military support against the Lombards who were threatening Rome. The Carolinians needed the church's religious legitimation for a dynasty that had however capable acquired its crown through the displacement of its predecessors.

[00:06:10]The deal was making both parties stronger and it made Charlemagne's world a reality.

[00:06:18]Everybody wins.

[00:06:21]But Vivven died in 768, dividing his kingdom between his two sons, as Frankish custom dictated.

[00:06:31]Charles received the northern and western portions, Carlan, the southern and eastern.

[00:06:38]But this division was politically awkward. The two brothers were apparently not close. Their interests conflicted almost immediately.

[00:06:49]But this was quite easily resolved when Carlaman died in 771, which made his interests quite irrelevant, and it left Charles sole king of older Franks at approximately 29 years of age.

[00:07:05]He had been the king of his portion for 3 years, long enough to have some administrative experience. He had been raised in a court that produced capable administrators and military commanders, and he had inherited from his father and grandfather a kingdom that was already the most powerful entity in Western Europe.

[00:07:26]Fortunately, he was going to use it because he knew how to.

[00:07:34]Of course, Charlemagne fought for almost every single year of his reign. In the 46 years between his assession as soul king in 771 and his death in 814, there were perhaps four or five years in which the Frankish army did not take the field somewhere on the kingdom's frontier.

[00:07:56]The list of military campaigns is so extensive that it reads less like a reign and more like a military general's career.

[00:08:06]There was the conquest and subjugation of Saxony pursued with horrifying tenacity from 772 to 804.

[00:08:13]32 years of intermittent but brutal warfare.

[00:08:19]The conquest of the Lombard Kingdom of Italy from 773 to74.

[00:08:24]Campaigns against the Avars of the Banonian plane in the 790s. Multiple expeditions across the Pyrenees against Muslim Spain. campaigns against the Breton in the northwest, the Danes in the north, the Slavs in the east. No one was safe.

[00:08:43]Well, at the height of his power, Charlemagne's armies were operating simultaneously on multiple fronts, and the logistical and organizational demands this placed on the Frankish state were oh, even by the standards of the early medieval world, very extraordinary.

[00:09:03]Of all these wars, the Saxon wars was the most prolonged, the most expensive in human lives and the most revealing both about Charlemagne's methods and well, frankly, his ambitions.

[00:09:20]Now, who were the Saxons?

[00:09:23]They were a Germanic people occupying the territory of modern northwestern Germany, a pagan society, but one of considerable military resistance organized around a tribal structure without a permanent central authority that could be defeated or negotiated with decisively.

[00:09:43]Their conversion to Christianity, which Charlemagne pursued as the religious dimension of political subjugation, was repeatedly attempted. and a few times achieved on paper but then repeatedly abandoned when the Saxons found a new leader and well the new leader was always willing to revolt.

[00:10:04]The greatest of these leaders was Whitikund uh who led multiple major Saxon uprisings against the Frankish domination through the 770s and 80s before finally accepting baptism in 785 with Charlemagne himself standing as his godfather.

[00:10:23]It was a gesture of reconciliation.

[00:10:26]There was also a political statement about the terms of Saxon submission.

[00:10:31]All done in metaphors, of course.

[00:10:34]But the darkest episode was the Saxon Wars and one of the darkest of Charlemagne's entire career. It came in 782 at the Aller River in the aftermath of a Saxon ambush that had destroyed a Frankish force, including several senior royal officials.

[00:10:54]Charlemagne's response was the massacre of Verden, the execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners in one day. Same one we mentioned in the introduction.

[00:11:07]I was hoping that would hook you into watching the rest of the video.

[00:11:12]If you're still watching, I guess it did.

[00:11:16]The Royal Frankish annals record this with a a kind of matterof factness that does not attempt to justify it beyond the context of uh ongoing rebellion.

[00:11:27]Many historians in the modern time have debated whether numbers accurate or just exaggeration in transmission.

[00:11:35]But the event itself is not doubted.

[00:11:38]There was a massacre.

[00:11:41]It was a calculated act of terror. You see, using mass killing to communicate to the Saxons that rebellion had a price, and it was one that their society could not afford to pay.

[00:11:54]But it didn't end Saxon resistance.

[00:11:57]Briticand revolted again within the year for the relentless combination of military pressure, forced resettlement of Saxon populations, systematic church burning, and the imposition of Frankish legal and administrative structures eventually produced something that looked at least from a distance like complete pacification.

[00:12:22]The capabulatio de partibus saxonier, excuse the Latin pronunciation, the ordinance imposing Christianity on the Saxons, that is, was one of the most coercive religious documents of the period. It imposed the death penalty for a remarkable range of offenses. Eating meat during Lent, cremating the dead in the pagan manner, refusing baptism, killing a priest, and entering a church to steal.

[00:12:52]The intent was to make the practice of paganism legally equivalent to a crime worthy of capital punishment.

[00:13:01]Alguin of York, Charlemagne's most respected scholar and a man of genuine pastoral concern, wrote to Charles to protest with considerable courage given the context. You cannot baptize people at sword point and call it a conversion, he argued.

[00:13:18]True faith required. Well, true uh conviction, not compulsion.

[00:13:26]Charles did not rescend the capitalio.

[00:13:30]But the exchange reveals something important about the tensions within the Carolinian enterprise. The gap between the ideal of a Christian empire built on genuine spiritual renewal and the brutal political and military realities of how that empire was actually assembled.

[00:13:49]The Italian campaign of 773 to74 was by comparison swift and decisive. The Lombards who had been intermittently threatening Rome and the papacy for decades were defeated at their capital Barbia after a siege of several months and their king Desidarius was deposed and sent to a Frankish monastery.

[00:14:13]Charlemagne assumed the title King of the Longbards and was received in Rome by Pope Hadrien I. First of several visits to Rome that gave him direct experience of surviving uh monuments of Roman imperial power and that reinforced his sense of his own historical position in relation to that legacy.

[00:14:35]Sight of Rome still immense still partially standing. the Pantheon intact, aqueducts partially functioning. Well, it all made a deep impression on a man who had grown up in the Rhineland, those palaces of the Franks, and whose mental image of the Roman Empire was formed primarily from what he'd read in manuscripts.

[00:14:58]But the real thing, well, there was a little bit of a feeling of magnificence, but also melancholy.

[00:15:07]You know what I mean?

[00:15:10]Now, as for Charlemagne's court, that was not bonedly fixed in a single location for most of his reign. The Frankish kingdom was governed itinerantly, with the king and his household moving between royal estates and palaces throughout the year, the court forming both the government and the largest household in the kingdom wherever it stopped.

[00:15:32]But in the last decades of his reign, Charlemagne increasingly made Arkin in the Rhineland in what is now in the far west of modern Germany his primary residence and de facto capital of the empire.

[00:15:47]The reasons were practical in part.

[00:15:50]Arkin had hot springs and Charles used uh therapeutically these springs and according to Einhardt loved swimming quite a bit but it was partly ideological.

[00:16:02]A permanent palace complex at Arkin was a statement that the empire had a center, a capital, a Rome of its own.

[00:16:12]The palace complex in Charlemagne, built at Arken, was the most ambitious secular building project in Western Europe since the late Roman period.

[00:16:23]Its centerpiece was the Great Hall, an enormous timber and stone building where Charles held his assemblies, received ambassadors, and conducted the public business of the empire.

[00:16:36]Adjacent to it, and still standing today as the Paladine Chapel, now embedded in the medieval Cathedral of Arken.

[00:16:48]Well, that was the Royal Chapel begun around 792.

[00:16:53]A magnificent octagonal structure of dressed stone modeled on the Byzantine church of San Vital in Ravena.

[00:17:01]Its interior sheathered in marble columns looted from Roman monuments in Ravena itself. By the way, the mosaic in its dome depicted Christ in majesty surrounded by the 24 elders of the apocalypse.

[00:17:17]Charles worshiped here twice daily. He knew this building was a statement about his wealth, his ambitions, and his theological conviction, but also his relationship to the Roman and Byzantine tradition. He built it all accordingly.

[00:17:35]The Palatine Chapel survived the centuries. It outlasted Charlemagne's empire by a thousand years. It's still there in Arkin today as the best preserved physical evidence of what Carolindian civilization looked like at its most confident expression.

[00:17:54]The court assembled around this palace was one of the most intellectually remarkable ones of the day.

[00:18:00]Charlemagne's deliberate recruitment of scholars from across the Christian world from England, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Frankish heartland itself created what is sometimes called the Carolinian Renaissance, a sustained effort to revive the standards of Latin learning, to recover and copy the texts of classical antiquity in the church fathers, to standardize the liturgy, and to reform the curriculum of cathedral and monastic schools, producing a general generation of educated clergy capable of administrating an empire and preaching in a way that its people would understand.

[00:18:38]The scale of manuscript copying programs alone was transformative.

[00:18:43]A significant proportion of the classical Latin texts that we possess today survive in copies made in Carolindian scriptoria during the late 8th and early 9th centuries working from older manuscripts that have since been lost.

[00:19:00]When you read Virgil or Cicero or Sutonius today, remember that you're reading a text whose survival depended on a monk in a Carolindian monastery picking up that stylus around 800 CE.

[00:19:16]But the most important figure in the Carolindian intellectual circle was Aluine of York, an Anglo-Saxon scholar trained in the Cathedral School of York, which was then one of the finest libraries in Europe.

[00:19:30]He came to Charlemagne's court around 782 and remained there in close correspondence with Charles for the rest of his active career.

[00:19:39]Algowin was the architect of the educational reforms, the reformer of the liturgy, a prolific writer of theological and pedagogical texts and Charlemagne's most trusted intellectual adviser on matters of religion and learning.

[00:19:55]He was also in his letters remarkably forthright, willing to challenge Charlemagne on methods of Saxon conversion, willing to argue for the proper treatment of prisoners and the limits of royal authority over religious practice, doing so with the confidence of a man who knew that his value was recognized.

[00:20:17]The letters between Alguin and Charlemagne, preserved in considerable number, constitute one of the richest documentary records of intellectual friendship. And they reveal a Charles who was genuinely curious, occasionally chasened by good arguments, and deeply invested in the project of making his empire not just powerful, but good, a nice place to be.

[00:20:46]While other figures at the court included Inard himself, the biographer who was a skilled metal worker and an architect as well as scholar, a real Renaissance man just a few hundred years before the Renaissance.

[00:21:02]Then there was Paul the Deacon, a Lombard scholar who wrote to the uh primary source for Lombard history, the historiangorum, while at Charlemagne's court finishing that up.

[00:21:16]Then we have Theodulf of Olon, a Visig Gothic scholar from Spain, writing poetry of considerable sophistication and serving as both bishop and a royal cultural ambassador.

[00:21:30]The Irish scholar Dungal corresponded with Charlemagne on astronomical questions.

[00:21:37]This was a real intellectual community, not a court of ceremonial learning.

[00:21:43]People were here to debate, to argue, to write poetry, and they took on nicknames from classical antiquity.

[00:21:52]Charles himself was called David after the biblical king poet. Aluin was called Flacus after Horus. Iard was Bizariel, excuse me, Bzaliel after the craftsman who built the Ark of the Covenant.

[00:22:08]The nicknames were playful, but they expressed something quite serious. a self-conscious identification with a classical and biblical tradition of combined wisdom and power. This was what the court was explicitly trying to embody and convey.

[00:22:27]But what about the man himself?

[00:22:31]Well, we've got Einhard to thank for that. His life of Charlemagne written shortly after Charles death in 814 is really really good in layman's terms.

[00:22:45]I mean we don't have that many uh at least not to this level that many intimate portraits of med early medieval figures. It's worth spending a bit of time talking about it. You see Einhard knew Charles for decades. He lived at his court. He observed him in public and private. And he wrote about him with a bit of admiration, but also a biographer's eyes for the telling particular.

[00:23:15]Charlemagne was physically imposing.

[00:23:18]Einhardt describes him as tall, quote, 7 times the length of his own foot, which scholars have estimated puts him around 6'2 in or 1.88 m. Now that's considerably above average for the error. He also had a round head, large and lively eyes, a cheerful expression, and a thick neck.

[00:23:44]He was broad and well-built, carrying his height well rather than appearing disproportionate and lanky. His voice, Einhard knows with slight embarrassment, was clear and strong, but perhaps thinner than one might expect from a body of such size.

[00:24:02]He wore frankish dress, linen shirt and breaches, a silk fringed tunic, stockings and shoes with a blue cloak in winter. He disliked the long robes of Roman style that foreign ambassadors sometimes urged on him and wore them only on state occasions and even then with visible reluctance.

[00:24:24]On his sore Dhard notes the hilt and belt were usually of gold. He carried a uh jeweled sword sometimes, but he was over that for major feast days.

[00:24:36]He was athletic too, a dedicated swimmer and hunter. Einhard says that swimming was the exercise that he loved the most, and Arkin was chosen partly because its natural hot springs gave him the best bathing facilities in the Frankish world.

[00:24:53]He built a pool there large enough for large numbers of people. And he invited not just his companions and bodyguards, but his sons, noblemen, and sometimes his whole household to swim with him, so that up to a hundred people might be in the water at once.

[00:25:11]He also rode daily when his health allowed. He hunted constantly. It was the primary recreational activity of the Frankish aristocracy and also a practical source of food for the royal household and at he was characteristically energetic and competitive.

[00:25:31]He ate and drank moderately by the standards of his time in class. Einhard said he was restrained about wine and rarely drank more than three cups at a meal, and that he also disliked feasts of many courses, preferring roast meat, usually brought straight from the spit and rather simple food.

[00:25:53]His health in old age was impaired by fevers, and toward the end of his life, he disobeyed his doctor's recommendations by resisting their advice that he abandoned roasted meats for boiled, which he apparently hated.

[00:26:09]He slept lightly and briefly. Einhard says he would wake up during the night multiple times and use the wakeful hours to work, dictating, hearing cases, conducting business.

[00:26:22]He rose early and was active before breakfast. He was by any measure a man of extraordinary energy and the range of his daily activity from military planning to theological debate to administrative legislation to the supervision of building projects and education of his own children suggests a man who of mind and body simply required more input than most people's.

[00:26:49]One of Einhardt's most charming details is that Charlemagne kept writing tablets under his pillow so that in idle moments he could practice the skill that he had come to late in life and never fully mastered. His large hand apparently struggling with the precision required.

[00:27:09]He could not, it seems, make himself stop working even when he had gone to bed.

[00:27:18]Charlemagne's personal life was complex in ways that his admiring biographer handles with a bit of diplomatic tact.

[00:27:25]He had multiple wives in succession. He repudiated the Lombard Princess Desidorata within a year of marrying her for reasons the sources not clearly explain. And then he married the beloved Hildigard who bore him nine children and unfortunately died young in 783.

[00:27:45]He then married Fastrada, described in the sources as proud and cruel, after whose death in 794 he married a fourth wife, Lutgard.

[00:27:58]Beyond the official wives, he had a number of concubines and a few illegitimate kids alongside the legitimate ones.

[00:28:06]He was devoted to all of them and raised them with great care. His devotion to his daughters was so strong that he refused to allow any of them to marry, keeping them at court throughout his lifetime. A decision that Einhardt implied produced complications that the emperor chose to overlook.

[00:28:26]Those complications had specific names.

[00:28:29]His daughter Bertha bore two children with the court poet Angelbert with whom she maintained a long relationship conducted more or less openly at Arkin.

[00:28:41]His daughter Rotuda had an illegitimate son by a Frankish count.

[00:28:47]Charles knew about all of it and he didn't really do anything. Just shrugged his shoulders.

[00:28:54]The picture of him is a man who surrounded himself with the people he loved, followed the sexual customs of his class without significant self-reroach, and applied the same tolerant logic to his daughter's conduct, whatever the official theology required.

[00:29:13]And then we have Notka the Stammer writing at St. Gaul decades after Charlemagne's death. and he adds a few anecdotes whose historical reliability is uncertain but uh the texture is vivid. In one story, Charlemagne tested whether his bishops and nobles were actually maintaining the educational standards he required, disguising himself and arriving at a school to observe the boy's work directly.

[00:29:42]finding that the children of the poor were working diligently while the aristocratic boys, the nobility were coasting on their status, he reportedly gave the rich boys a dress down with a severity that reduced several of them to tears and then warned them that he would remember their laziness.

[00:30:06]Well, imagine that you're slacking off in school and the king shows up and starts screaming at you.

[00:30:15]Yeah, try talking back then, kids. Maybe that's what we need to do with these kids in school now. Bring in uh bring in Charles III.

[00:30:25]Have him yell at them for a little while. I'm sure he's still got some energy in him.

[00:30:31]Well, whether or not the story about Charlemagne is a real history or polished legend, we don't know. But it says something about the man that he was genuinely interested in the quality of work he was commissioning, and he of course was going to come and check up on it.

[00:30:51]But governing an empire the size of Charlemagne's with the administrative technology of the 9th century, i.e. No printing press, no standard bureaucracy, no rapid communication, no professional civil service. But that was a problem of organizational genius as much as it was of political will.

[00:31:14]The mechanisms Charlemagne uh developed to manage his empire were not always original. Many were built on Frankish and Roman precedents. But their systematic application on an imperial scale and the documentary record they left constitute one of the most significant administrative achievements of the early medieval period.

[00:31:37]The primary instrument of the Carolian local government was the count that a royal appointee responsible for administering a defined territory. the county in the king's name.

[00:31:52]The count held court, collected taxes, raised troops, maintained order, and enforced royal legislation.

[00:32:00]The problem with counts, however, as Charlemagne quickly recognized was that they tended to become autonomous. Once established in a territory, account had strong incentives to manage it for his own benefit rather than for the kings, to develop local loyalties that competed with royal ones, and to transmit his offers to his children, as if it were hereditary property rather than a royal delegation.

[00:32:28]The Carolinian answer to this problem was Missi Dominiki, the envoys of the Lord King.

[00:32:37]He's of inspectors, typically one layman and one cleric, sent out twice a year to travel through defined circuits of counties, hear appeals against local officials, check accounts, inspect churches and monasteries, and report back to the king on conditions throughout the empire.

[00:32:55]The capitularies, the written ordinances that constitute the primary documentary record of the Carolindian administration, give us an extraordinary detailed picture of what Charlemagne expected his empire to look like and how far it fell short of those expectations.

[00:33:14]Can't win them all, I'm afraid.

[00:33:17]The Capitolare Devilis, an ordinance concerned with the management of royal estates, specifies in exhaustive detail what each estate should produce, maintain, and account for, lists of craftsmen who should be a resident on each estate, specific fruit trees that should be planted, the proper management of fish ponds and beehives, the correct way to account for wine production and grain storage, things like that it even specifies the steward of a royal household should ensure that the women's workshops on the estate where cloth was produced are properly equipped with combs, flax, wool, and other materials.

[00:34:02]This is not the legislation of a man vaguely interested in good management.

[00:34:07]is the work of someone with a detailed operational vision of how his property should function expressed in the form of instructions precise enough to be audited.

[00:34:18]Now the educational reforms were understood by Charlemagne as administrative reform rather than just cultural enrichment.

[00:34:28]The letter he addressed to the abbotts of his kingdom around 789.

[00:34:33]The apisa de liaris kolindis the letter on the cultivation of learning that is makes this connection explicit.

[00:34:42]He had found he writes that letters he had been receiving from monasteries were poorly written filled with grammatical errors which made him doubt whether the monks who wrote them were really understanding what they read at all.

[00:34:57]If the clergy could not read Latin correctly, they could not perform the liturgy correctly. If they could not perform the liturgy correctly, well, guess what? The prayers of the church were defective. And if the prayers of the church were defective, then the divine protection on which the empire depended was compromised.

[00:35:18]The educational program was therefore a strategic necessity. The connection between grammatical correctness and the imperial security seems at first glance like a leap. But think about it within the theological framework of this Carolian world. It makes a kind of severe internal sense.

[00:35:40]I mean the proper ordering of language and the proper ordering of the cosmos were understood as related aspects of this same divine order.

[00:35:51]Well, Charlemagne's monetary reform, the introduction of a new silver penny, the dinarius, which is a call back to old Roman days. this uh standardized weights and qualities too and also the reorganization of the coinage system into the pound, the shilling and penny structure whose ghost actually persists in predesimal British monetary systems and in the use of the abbreviation of D for pence which was one of his uh most practical consequential administrative acts by standardizing the coinage across the empire and cracking down on the proliferation of debase local coinages.

[00:36:30]es. He created the conditions for more reliable commercial exchange across a territory that stretched from the Ebro to the Elba. He also planned, though he never completed, a canal linking the Ryan and Danube River systems that would have connected the North Sea to the Black Sea, a project that is so audacious in its engineering ambition that nothing comparable was attempted until the 19th century.

[00:36:57]The foundations were begun in 793.

[00:37:00]The autumn brains turned the ground to mud and the project was abandoned.

[00:37:07]Hey, good try, though. It was indeed characteristic that they attempted it at all. I suppose they were just a little bit too early for that.

[00:37:19]Wait a thousand or so years and then the bulldozers can do it, right?

[00:37:26]But the relationship between Charlemagne and the church was the real defining relationship of his reign, and it was considerably more complex than the simple alliance of mutual convenience that a superficial reading might suggest.

[00:37:41]You see, Charles was a genuinely deeply religious person. Einhard is emphatic on this point, and there's no reason to doubt it. But his religion was of a robustly proprietatorial kind. He believed that as he was the ruler of the Christian people, he had responsibilities for the spiritual welfare of his subjects that extended well beyond the conventional royal obligations of endowing churches and protecting pilgrims.

[00:38:13]He believed in short that proper governance of the church was simply part of his job.

[00:38:21]This belief produced friction with popes who had their own ideas about the church's independence from secular authority. The coronation of 800 for all its symbolic uh symbolic magnificence was a complicated gift. On one hand, it gave Charles a title that placed him in the lineage of Roman emperors and gave his claims to universal Christian authority a historical grounding that the mere title king of the Franks couldn't really provide.

[00:38:50]But on the other hand, it implied that the emperor's title was the pope's to confer, which Charles evidently found intolerable as a political proposition.

[00:39:03]his subsequent negotiations with the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople, who regarded the Western Coronation as an illegal usurppation of the title of Roman Emperor, which only the Eastern Court had the right to confer, by the way, were partly driven by the desire to establish a basis for his imperial title that did not depend on papal grant.

[00:39:27]He eventually secured a form of recognition from Constantinople.

[00:39:32]Though the terms and meaning of that recognition remained to be contested on theological matters Charlemagne was an active participant rather than passive patron. The Libri Carolini, the Carolinian books, a lengthy theological treatise produced at his court in the 790s in response to decisions of the second council of Nika regarding the venerations of images represents his court's direct engagement with the most contested theological question of the age.

[00:40:04]The Eastern Church under imperial pressure had restored the veneration of religious images after a period of iconoclasm.

[00:40:13]The Carolinian response was a characteristically independent one.

[00:40:19]Neither the complete iconocclasm on the of the eastern heretics nor the full image veneration that the council had endorsed but more of a middle position. Images are acceptable for decoration and instruction, but should not be venerated as if they were wholly in and of themselves.

[00:40:39]The Libri Karolini challenged both the Greek church and implicitly the papacy that had endorsed the council's decisions with considerable intellectual confidence.

[00:40:52]Basically, a king claiming theological authority for himself.

[00:40:57]Then there was the adoptionist controversy, a theological dispute originating in Spain in which some bishops argued that Christ in his human nature was the son of God by adoption rather than just because.

[00:41:13]This occupied Charlemagne's theological attention through the 790s.

[00:41:18]The position's most prominent advocates were Eleandandis, or excuse me, Alleandis, the uh Archbishop of Toledo, and Felix of Urgel. And the disagreement had real stakes, too. By the way, you see, if Christ was the only adoptive son of God in his humanity, well, then the implication for the theology of the incarnation and for the church's mediary role were serious enough to require a formal response.

[00:41:51]Charlemagne convened the council of Frankfurt in 794, one of the largest ecclesiastical assemblies of the early medieval period which condemned adoptionism def uh definitively with Aluin as the primary theological draftsman.

[00:42:08]The council also issued cannons on church discipline, monasticism and the treatment of Jews. That gives us a detailed picture of the scope of the Carolinian ecclesiastical governance.

[00:42:21]Charles directed this entire process. He identified the issue, mobilized the resources, and convened the machinery, and he drove toward a resolution that would produce theological unity across the empire.

[00:42:36]The church was, in his understanding, an instrument of imperial order as much as an independent spiritual authority.

[00:42:45]His personal religious practice as described by Inard was intense. He attended church twice a day at mattens and vespers and was present at all the canonical hours when his health permitted. He was a generous endowerer of churches, gave lavishly to the poor from his own resources, and maintained a concern for the welfare of Christians in distant lands that extended to sending gifts to the churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage.

[00:43:20]When the patriarch of Jerusalem sent him the keys to the Holy Sephila, an act of symbolic submission to Frankish protection, Charles received them with great ceremony.

[00:43:32]He had a relationship with Harun al-Rashid, the opposite caiff in Baghdad that produced an exchange of diplomatic gifts, including famously an elephant named Abul Abbas, the first elephant to set foot in the Frankish realm, whose arrival in 802 caused understandable sensation, and who appears in the Royal Frankish annals as a minor but charming presence until its death in 810.

[00:44:03]The elephant was both a diplomatic gesture and a statement of the range of Charlemagne's international connections, but it also says something about the abit caiff's own prestige that Harun al-Rashid, the ruler of the most sophisticated empire in the world at that moment, regarded a Frankish king as a partner worth cultivating with magnificent and rare gifts.

[00:44:30]Well, the intellectual project of Charlemagne's reign, what historians call the Carolindian Renaissance, is perhaps the aspect of his legacy that uh is least immediately dramatic but most consequentially important.

[00:44:45]When we speak of the survival of classical learning in the western tradition, we are speaking largely about the decisions made and the manuscripts copied in the Carolinian monasteries and cathedral schools during the late 8th and early 9th centuries. And the scale of the recovery effort and its long-term consequences for European intellectual history can hardly be overstated.

[00:45:11]There is uh no back that is not patted sufficiently enough for this.

[00:45:18]Now the state of Latin learning in the Frankish kingdom and Charlemagne came to power was by his own account in the epistol deliteris kendis poor.

[00:45:29]This clergy could not perform or rather they could perform the liturgy but many could not explain what they were saying or write a grammatically correct letter as we mentioned. Now the libraries of the major monasteries contained manuscripts but they were not always well-maintained weren't always legible not always correctly transmitted through generations of copying by scribes who didn't really know what they were actually copying. It was the same as just drawing a funny picture to them.

[00:46:00]The reform Charlemagne initiated addressed this simultaneously on several fronts, schools at every cathedral and major monastery teaching the full triv, rhetoric and logic. The production of corrected standard texts of the Bible, the liturgy and the church fathers, and the uh active search for classical manuscripts that could be copied and preserved before whatever held them together gave way entirely.

[00:46:31]Well, the scriptor of the Carolindian monasteries were basically the printing presses of their age and the script that they developed, the Carolian minuscule, a clear legible lowercase letter form that replaced the various regional scripts of the pre-carolindian period was one of the most important innovations of the medieval period.

[00:46:53]Its clarity made the manuscripts more readable, more accurately copyable. Its standardization across the Carolindian world made texts produced in one scriptorum legible in another.

[00:47:06]When the humanists of the 15th century Italian Renaissance found the manuscripts written in Carolian minuscule and not recognizing that it was relatively recent and medieval script rather than an ancient one, they took it for classical Roman handwriting and they modeled their own humanist script on it and the humanist script became the basis for the Roman type faces used in printing from Gutenberg onward.

[00:47:34]The letters you're reading on a printed page today, probably Times New Roman, are the direct descendants of uh a script standardized in Charlemagne's monasteries.

[00:47:46]That is the reach, the Carolian Renaissance.

[00:47:51]But the content of what was being copied and studied is equally significant.

[00:47:55]The Carolian scholars did not limit themselves to Christian texts. They had a full range of classical Latin literature copied, studied and used as models of correct Latin style.

[00:48:09]At Virgil, Ovid, Horus, Cicero, Sudonius, Plenny, Vetuvius, Caesar, they added all old all the classics.

[00:48:19]This was functional rather than antiquarian. You could not write good Latin without models of good Latin. And the best models were the classical authors.

[00:48:29]The consequence is that the Carolinian period is responsible for preserving in usable form the greater part of classical Latin literary heritage that was not already securely established in manuscript tradition. Without the Carolian copying programs, we probably wouldn't have these.

[00:48:50]Charlemagne's own intellectual ambitions were genuine, if limited by the constraints of his formation. He spoke Frankish as his native language. But he learned Latin well enough to be understood in it, though not to speak it with full fluency. He made a serious attempt to learn Greek, a project that Inard reports with gentle sympathy as less successful than Charles's other educational efforts.

[00:49:19]He commissioned a grammar of Frankish, the language he grew up speaking, wishing to preserve it systematically.

[00:49:26]He gave Frankish names to months and to the 12 winds, replacing the Latin designations with native ones, an expression of Frankish cultural pride alongside the classical learning.

[00:49:40]He had also collected and written down the old Frankish heroic songs, the barbarian lays as Einhard calls them, a collection that was subsequently destroyed on the orders of his son Louis the pious who found their pagan content objectionable.

[00:49:58]Yet Louis the uh a little bit too pious, I think. Now the loss of those songs is one of the more melancholy casualties of the Carolinian period. the oldest secular vernacular, literature of the Franks, gathered at Charlemagne's direct instruction, and just put to the fire by his own son within a generation.

[00:50:22]The monastery of St. Gaul preserved what it could, but most of it didn't survive.

[00:50:31]The last decade of Charlemagne's life was shadowed by the deaths of the people he had loved most, but also by an increasing preoccupation with the question of succession that he had managed in the manner of powerful men to defer for too long.

[00:50:48]His beloved son, Pippen, the king of Italy, died in 810.

[00:50:55]his elder son Charles the Young whom he had intended as his heir had uh already associated in the royal government died in 811.

[00:51:08]The succession that had seemed quite straightforward, a man of four sons had options was suddenly narrowed to one.

[00:51:16]That was Louie, the youngest surviving legitimate son, King of Aquitane.

[00:51:22]A man of genuine piety and genuine ability, who was also, as events would prove, less suited than his father to a managing the competing ambitions of the Frankish aristocracy.

[00:51:36]I mean, it's a hard act to follow. Let's give him some credit.

[00:51:40]In 813 in a ceremony at Arkin of considerable significance, Charlemagne was uh crowned Louie emperor himself without papal involvement. Making the point of uh went as clearly as possible that the imperial title was his to pass on by his own authority rather than the pope's to confer. He placed the crown on Louis head and declared him co-emperor.

[00:52:08]It was, by all accounts, a moment of visible emotion.

[00:52:13]Charles was in his late 60s, which by the standards of his era was genuinely old, and the physical decline that Einhardt describes had been progressing for several years. He had fevers. He had a limp from an injury, the loss of easy physical energy that characterized his whole life.

[00:52:35]He had outlived two of his four sons, several of his wives, and most of the companions of his earlier years.

[00:52:43]Also, Aluin had died in 8004 in the monastery of St. Martin at Tours, where he had retired. Einart was still present, but the court at Arkin was quieter than it had been in the good old days.

[00:52:58]The great collaborative energy of the Carolindian Renaissance first decades was all a memory. Now Einhardt describes the last months with the precision of a man who was there and who loved the subject of his biography.

[00:53:15]Charlemagne was struck by a puricy, a fever with a sharp chest pain in January of 8:14, and he took to his bed. He refused most food and sustained himself with liquids only.

[00:53:30]On the seventh day, his fever got worse.

[00:53:34]He received communion and he died quietly in the morning. He was buried the same day in the Palatine Chapel at Arkin, the building he had built as a centerpiece of his imperial capital.

[00:53:48]They dressed him in his imperial robes with the gospels laid open on his knees and a pilgrim satchel and staff placed beside him. The tomb was subsequently opened at various points in the medieval period by successors who wish to associate themselves with his legacy.

[00:54:07]Charlemagne was canonized in a move more political than theological by the anti-bo Pascal in 1165 at the insistence of Frederick Barbarosa and the various accounts of the tomb's opening described with varying reliability the condition of the body and its surroundings.

[00:54:28]One account attributed to Emperor Otto III, who opened the tomb in the year 1000, describes finding a Charlemagne seated upright on a marble throne, fully robed, his flesh relatively intact, a golden crown on his head, a piece of his fingernail that had grown through his glove, and the gospel book still there on his knees.

[00:54:56]The relationship of this account to a historical fact is impossible to assess.

[00:55:01]But I don't know, picturing it in your head, the symbolic point is clear enough. The great emperor seated in his chapel, a king even in death.

[00:55:16]Of course, things did not last too long afterward. Charlemagne's empire did not survive him long as a unified political entity. His son Louis the pious spent much of his reign managing the competing claims of his own sons. And the treaty of Verdon in 843 concluded between Louis's three surviving sons after a civil war divided the empire into three kingdoms whose general boundaries correspond to roughly modern France, Germany, and Italy.

[00:55:49]The political unity that Charlemagne had spent 46 years building was gone within a generation after his death.

[00:56:00]This is the standard judgment on the Carolian Empire's political legacy and it is accurate as far as it goes.

[00:56:10]But it misses the more important point which is that the civilization that Charlemagne built proved considerably more durable than the political entity in which it was first expressed.

[00:56:25]So let's end on back to Einhard because Einhard ends his life with an account of the omens and port tents that preaged Charlemagne's death. Solar eclipses, a bridge that collapsed, a portigo of the Palatine Chapel struck by lightning.

[00:56:46]You know the sound lightning makes. He includes them not because he's superstitious. I mean, Einhart was very sophisticated, but because they are the conventional literary frame, but the death of a great man drawn from his Sutonian model and from the whole tradition of ancient and medieval biography.

[00:57:07]They serve to mark the scale of a loss, a death so significant that it has disturbed the natural order, because no less a disturbance would be adequate to the occasion.

[00:57:19]What they actually mark is something simpler, more honest than portent, the end of a life of extraordinary energy, range, and consequence.

[00:57:30]But remember that Charlemagne was a real human being.

[00:57:34]contradictory, impatient, capable of magnificent generosity and horrifying brutality, deeply loving, but sometimes ruthlessly indifferent.

[00:57:47]And he happened to live at the moment when his particular combination of ambition, intelligence, and energy was exactly what the situation required.

[00:57:57]Well, he slaughtered thousands when he uh and then heard the city of God read aloud at supper. He kept writing tablets under his pillow, and he refused to let his daughters marry cuz he loved them a little bit too much. But then he indulged in their unofficial relationships at court with poets and Frankish counts.

[00:58:22]He remade the world that he founded. the world that we live in bears the marks of his remaking.

[00:58:30]And in terms of legacy, uh, that seems like it's good enough.

[00:58:37]Well, thank you so much for listening.

[00:58:39]We had a great time, didn't we? About Charlemagne.

[00:58:44]And uh, well, I suppose we'll have more biographies coming up.

[00:58:50]But that is it from me today. Hope you've enjoyed. I will see you in the next video and farewell for now.