The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
A tireless, sociable, God-certain Frankish warlord who took his brother's half of the kingdom, put away two wives in a year, beheaded and baptised the Saxons into one people with the Franks, and then spent his last fifteen years trying to govern a doubled realm by letter, oath, inspector and schoolroom.
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Critical acts
- 1
Taking the Whole Kingdom: Corbeny, 771
On 4 December 771 Carloman died suddenly, aged twenty. Within days Charles was at Corbeny on the border, where Carloman's leading bishops and counts came over to him; the revised royal annals describe him as "Intent on taking over the kingdom in its entirety".
- 2
Conquering Lombardy and Securing the Nephews, 773-4
Charles first tried to buy the nephews. He offered Desiderius 14,000 solidi, which Nelson reads as "a pair of wergilds", the blood-price of two princes, and he made the offer twice. Desiderius refused: "What father does deals with the man who has repudiated his daughter?"
- 3
Verden and the Capitulatio, 782
Charles marched to the meeting of the Aller and the Weser. The Saxons submitted and handed over the men blamed for the rebellion, and, in the words of the royal annals, "4,500 of them" were put to death, all except Widukind, who escaped.
- 4
Turning Widukind, 785
Instead of hunting them down, Charles made the first move. Through Saxon intermediaries he urged them "to put perfidy behind them and come over to fidelity to him", promised them impunity and sent them hostages for their safety, as he had once done for Tassilo.
- 5
Breaking Tassilo of Bavaria, 788
In 788 Charles summoned him to an assembly at Ingelheim. According to the royal annals, Bavarians accused him of breaking faith, and Tassilo "confessed" to contacting the Avars, telling his men to swear oaths with mental reservations, and saying that "if he had had ten sons, he would rather lose every one of them" than keep his agreements.
- 6
Taking the Imperial Title and Governing by Programme, 800-802
He came to Rome in November 800 with gifts for St Peter weighing nearly a hundred kilos and presided at the synod that let Leo clear himself by oath on 23 December. That same day messengers arrived from Jerusalem with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. On Christmas Day Leo crowned him and the Romans acclaimed him emperor.
Maxims
When the throne falls vacant, ride to the border
Charles was at Corbeny within days of Carloman's death and took over his brother's men before the widow could organise. Nelson's verdict was that he "moved fast" at every crucial moment. See Act 1.
Settle the family question before the foreign one
Nelson argues that the nephews in Desiderius's care, not the pope's appeals, drove the Lombard war, because kin rivalry was "a much more dangerous Achilles heel" than any frontier. See Act 2.
Offer gold before iron
He offered Desiderius 14,000 solidi, twice, before crossing the Alps. Only when Desiderius refused did he besiege Pavia. See Act 2 and "The Iron Charles at Pavia".
Make your fiercest enemy your godson
After years of terror, Charles sent hostages to Widukind, promised impunity, and raised him from the font. Widukind never troubled him again. See Act 4.
Vengeance dressed as law is still vengeance
Nelson thinks the Saxon death-decrees may have been drafted at Verden to legalise the beheadings, which were also Charles's revenge for his dead counts. The massacre fuelled more revolt, not peace. See Act 3.
Part IThe Story
On Christmas Day in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter in Rome, a scene unfolded whose meaning would be contested for a millennium. A king rose from prayer. A pope placed a crown on his head. The Romans assembled for worship proclaimed him "emperor of the Romans." The king — broad-shouldered, imposingly tall, his neck thick and his voice unexpectedly clear for a man of his stature — had traveled south in late autumn to settle a question that was, on its surface, about the pope's personal fitness for office. Leo III had been physically attacked by a Roman faction that accused him of tyranny and personal misconduct; they had tried to pull out his tongue, to blind him. He had fled north across the Alps to the court of his protector. Now, restored to his see, the pope repaid the debt with an act of breathtaking audacity: he revived the Roman Empire in the West, dormant since the fifth century, and placed it on the brow of a Frankish warlord who had tried, late in life, to learn to write and largely failed.
Einhard, the king's courtier and biographer — a small, learned Frank sent to court from Fulda in the 790s, who called the king "my lord and foster father" — would later claim that his master "would not have entered the church that day, even though it was a great feast day, if he had known in advance of the pope's plan." Janet Nelson, his most recent biographer, does not believe it: "Einhard muddied the waters." Two days before Christmas, on the day Leo cleared himself by oath, messengers had arrived from Jerusalem with the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. The timing points to careful planning, and Nelson is blunt: "Any argument to the contrary simply can't be sustained." But the fiction of surprise mattered, because it preserved the thing Charlemagne valued most: the appearance that power flowed from his own hand, not from any pope's. Thirteen years later, in 813, when he placed the imperial crown on the head of his sole surviving son, Louis the Pious, he did it himself. In his own chapel at Aachen. No pope present. No pope invited.
The coronation of 800 is the hinge on which the story of Europe turns — the moment when the fractured, tribal, half-pagan West began to imagine itself as something coherent, something that could claim continuity with Rome. But it was also, in a deeper sense, a confidence trick performed by a man who understood that the greatest power is the power to define what power means. Charlemagne was not an innovator. He said so, in effect, through the administrative record of his reign: his concern was to make more effective the political institutions he had inherited. He invented almost nothing. He perfected nearly everything.
The Usurper's Grandson
We do not know for certain when Charlemagne was born. The old date of 742 comes from Einhard, who says he died "in the seventy-second year of his age"; Nelson shows that Einhard simply copied Augustus' age from Suetonius, on whose Lives of the Caesars he modelled his book. Nelson and David Ganz both accept 2 April 748, which makes Charles a small boy of three when the most important event of his childhood occurred. In 751, his father, Pippin III — known as Pippin the Short, a man who held the title of mayor of the palace but wielded effective power over the Frankish kingdom — seized the throne from the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, with papal approval. The Merovingians had ruled the Franks for nearly three centuries. By the eighth century they had been reduced to what later French tradition contemptuously called "do-nothing kings," ceremonial figureheads whose long hair was their only remaining symbol of authority. Pippin had them shaved and sent to a monastery.
This was a coup. It was also a precedent. The Carolingian dynasty — named retroactively for Charlemagne himself, Carolus Magnus — came to power not through bloodline but through a deal: papal sanction in exchange for military protection of Rome. Pippin's father, Charles Martel, had earned his surname ("the Hammer") by turning back a Muslim army near Tours in 732, an event that later generations inflated into one of the decisive battles of Western civilization. Martel was the illegitimate son of a Frankish noble who had clawed his way to dominance using the office of mayor of the palace to build a personal following strong enough to fend off rival aristocratic families. His grandson inherited a kingdom, but also a problem: the Carolingians ruled by the grace of God and the sword, not by the ancient right that had legitimized the Merovingians. Every generation had to earn the throne again.
By the Numbers
The Carolingian Empire
46Years as King of the Franks (768–814)
~1M sq miApproximate territory at its height
14Years as Holy Roman Emperor (800–814)
19+Children by at least nine partners (Nelson's count)
32Years of Saxon Wars (772–804)
4,500Saxons beheaded at Verden, per the royal annals (782)
7,900Surviving book fragments from 800–900, vs. 1,900 pre-800
What little is known of Charlemagne's youth suggests he was educated not in letters but in the practical arts of Frankish power: hunting, riding, warfare, the management of men. His father's court was itinerant, following the king as he campaigned and extracted income from scattered royal estates. The boy would have watched Pippin forge the papal alliance at the royal palace of Ponthion in 753–754, where Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to ask for Frankish protection against the Lombards in Italy. He would have seen the pope anoint his father and — crucially — himself and his brother Carloman, sanctifying the new dynasty in oil and sacred ritual. He would have absorbed, at six years old, the central lesson of Carolingian statecraft: that power requires two foundations, the military and the sacred, and that neither alone is sufficient.
A Brother's Convenient Death
When Pippin died in 768, the Frankish kingdom was divided according to custom between his two sons. Charlemagne received the outer territories — a coastal strip from southwestern France through the Netherlands into northern Germany. Carloman got the richer interior: southern Austrasia, Burgundy, Provence, the lands bordering Italy. The arrangement was immediately and predictably disastrous. Almost from the first, rivalry between the brothers threatened civil war.
The brothers kept up an anxious parity. Both married noble Frankish women and both named their first sons Pippin, which Nelson reads as a sign of "fraternal rivalry." Einhard admits that the peace between them "was kept, though with the greatest difficulty." Then their mother Bertrada arranged a grander match for Charles with a daughter of Desiderius, king of the Lombards — a move that alarmed the papacy, since Pippin's Italian policy had been built on restraining Lombard ambitions. To make room, Charles put away Himiltrud, the mother of his son Pippin. Einhard calls her a concubine; Nelson argues she was his first wife.
Then, on 4 December 771, Carloman died suddenly, aged twenty. Within days Charles was at the border villa of Corbeny, receiving his brother's bishops and counts. "Charles, as at previous crucial moments, moved fast," Nelson writes. Carloman's widow Gerberga fled with her two small sons to Desiderius. Charles repudiated the Lombard princess, very probably sending her back to Pavia, which Nelson calls "the most blatant of insults" to her family, and married the Swabian noblewoman Hildegard. He had put away two wives in about a year, and he was twenty-three. Nelson's verdict: "Changing political imperatives trumped any moral ones. In these respects, Charles in effect did what it suited him to do."
Within three years he would besiege the Lombard capital at Pavia and take the title of king of the Lombards. The pope had asked for help against Desiderius, but Nelson argues that the real driver was Carloman's sons, sheltered in Pavia as a living alternative to Charles's own line. Charles first offered Desiderius 14,000 solidi for them, twice — "a pair of wergilds," the blood-price of two princes. Desiderius refused: "What father does deals with the man who has repudiated his daughter?" When the boys were finally surrendered at Verona in 774, they vanished from every source. Nelson draws the inference the court writers avoid: "Nephews were the classic rivals, and victims, of their paternal uncles. … For the man who wears the crown, there are sleepless nights. The rest is silence."
The Thirty-Year War
Charlemagne's military campaigns occupied the first three decades of his reign and established the territorial basis of what would later be called the Holy Roman Empire. But the campaigns were not, in any modern sense, "strategic." They were the fulfillment of an obligation. By Frankish tradition, the king was a warrior chief, expected to lead his followers in wars that expanded Frankish hegemony and produced rewards — land, treasure, captives — for his companions. A king who did not fight would lose his following. A king who lost would lose his throne.
The Italian campaigns were the simplest. Charlemagne crossed the Alps in 773, besieged Pavia through the winter with the pregnant Hildegard and his sons in the camp, and took the city in June 774. Desiderius was exiled for life, and Charles took his treasure and his kingdom. The conquest of Bavaria was equally decisive. In 788 Charles summoned his cousin Tassilo III, the last Agilolfing duke, to an assembly at Ingelheim, having first rounded up the duke's wife, children and treasure. Tassilo was disarmed, "confessed" to breaking his oaths, and was condemned to death; Charles, "for love of God and because Tassilo was his kinsman," commuted the sentence to tonsure and the cloister. Nelson calls the annalists' account of Tassilo's crimes a "retrospective construction." Charlemagne then used Bavaria as the staging ground for campaigns in 791, 795, and 796 that destroyed the Avar kingdom on the middle Danube, producing such quantities of plunder — fifteen ox-carts of it reached Aachen in 796 — that it visibly affected the Frankish economy.
But the defining military struggle of Charlemagne's reign was the thirty-year war against the Saxons, which began in 772 and did not end until 804. The Saxons were everything the Franks were not: decentralized, pagan, ungovernable. Their independent nobles, the edhelingi, lived on estates among forest clearings, dominating a stratified society of freemen, half-free, and slaves. There was no Saxon king to defeat, no capital to besiege, no treaty that could bind all factions. Each of Charlemagne's punitive expeditions bit deeper into Saxon territory, leaving behind forced conversions, deportations, and massacres — and each time the Frankish army withdrew, the Saxons revolted, slaughtered priests and officials, and raided as far westward as they could.
The savagery was mutual and escalating. In 782 Saxon rebels wiped out a Frankish force at the Süntel hill, killing two of Charles's officers, four counts and some twenty other nobles. At Verden, where the Aller meets the Weser, the Saxons handed over the men blamed for the rising, and the royal annals say 4,500 of them were beheaded. Nelson finds the number "suspiciously large" and wonders whether a scribe was "adding a zero," but she accepts the massacre and reads it as revenge as much as justice: "Vengeance was indeed the Lord's, but not only the Lord's: it was also Charles's vengeance" for his dead officers. It provoked a general revolt the next year. His Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae, usually dated around 785 but possibly issued at Verden itself as the legal basis for the executions, imposed the death penalty for refusing baptism, for violating the Lenten fast, for destroying churches. It was the logic of total war fused with the logic of total conversion: submit to Christ or die by the sword of Christ's earthly champion.
— Charlemagne, Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae (782 or c. 785)If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter, concealed among them, shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism, and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.
The Saxon resistance eventually coalesced around a chieftain named Widukind, who managed what no other leader could: holding together a majority of Saxon tribes in sustained armed resistance. Widukind was the anti-Charlemagne — operating without a treasury, without an administrative apparatus, without papal blessing, drawing his authority purely from the willingness of free men to follow him into the forest. In 785, after a winter in which Frankish raiders burned Saxon farms, Charlemagne did not hunt him down. He promised Widukind impunity and sent him hostages for his safety. Widukind came to the villa of Attigny, deep in Francia, and was baptized there, with Charlemagne himself raising him from the font as godfather. Widukind then simply vanishes from the record, which suggests he stayed loyal. A decade of peace followed, but the war broke out again in 795, and its last phase was fought by ravaging, mass hostage-taking and deportation. In 804 Charles moved the Saxons beyond the Elbe into Francia and gave their land to the Abodrites.
The Spanish campaign of 778 was Charlemagne's only outright failure. He marched south across the Pyrenees at the invitation of Muslim opponents of the Umayyad caliph of Córdoba, besieged Pamplona, failed to take Saragossa, and retreated north with nothing gained. Basques waiting at the top of the forested pass of Roncesvalles fell on the rearguard and the baggage train and, Einhard writes, "killed them to the last man." Among the dead were the overseer of the royal table, the count of the palace and "Roland, the prefect of the Breton March." Nelson shows these were officers Charles had chosen himself, and the court annalist, writing late in the reign, says: "The pain of the wound the king received overclouded … in his heart a large part of what had gone successfully in Spain." The loss was minor in military terms but enormous in cultural ones: three centuries later, the French epic The Song of Roland would transform the skirmish into a founding myth of Christian chivalry, turning Roland into the archetype of the noble warrior.
The Itinerant Court
Charlemagne's political genius was not invention but intensification. He inherited the machinery of Frankish governance — the counts who administered local districts, the bishops who doubled as civil administrators, the annual military assembly where the king addressed his followers — and he tightened every bolt, greased every joint, added mechanisms for feedback and enforcement that had never existed before.
The central instrument of his government was the palatium, the itinerant court: a shifting assemblage of family members, trusted lay and ecclesiastical companions, and assorted hangers-on that followed the king as he moved between royal estates, military campaigns, and assembly sites. The court was not a palace; it was a caravan of power. The essential binding agent was personal. Charlemagne governed through relationships, not institutions.
His most innovative measure was the regularization and expansion of the missi dominici — literally "envoys of the lord" — royal agents charged with making regular circuits through defined territorial units to announce the king's will, gather intelligence on the performance of local officials, and correct abuses. These were, in effect, the first systematic auditors of governmental performance in post-Roman Western history. They traveled in pairs — typically one cleric and one layman — and carried the authority of the king himself.
The missi were supported by a dramatic expansion of written communication. Royal capitularies — quasi-legislative documents dispatched across the kingdom — set forth the king's will with a precision that the Merovingians had never attempted. Charlemagne could not write, but he understood the power of the written word better than any of his literate predecessors. He kept tablets and notebooks under his pillow, according to Einhard, so that in any free time he could practise forming letters, "but his effort, begun too late, achieved little." The irony is inescapable: the man who could not form his own letters built an empire on the expanded use of written documents.
He also required subjects to swear oaths of loyalty — not merely the aristocrats who already owed military service, but in 789 and again in 802 every free man, the second time everyone over twelve. Broken oaths were the charge that destroyed Tassilo and that Einhard used to justify the Saxon war. And he formalized the lord-vassal relationship, accepting powerful men as royal vassals in return for benefices of offices and land, creating a web of personal obligation that ran from the humblest local lord to the king himself. The system had a fatal structural weakness — the grants of land and immunity that purchased loyalty today could become the foundations of independent power tomorrow — but in Charlemagne's lifetime, his personal force of will held the centrifugal tendencies in check.
God's CEO
The most consequential transformation of Charlemagne's reign was not territorial but conceptual. Drawing on the Old Testament and the teachings of St. Augustine, Charlemagne and his advisers progressively redefined the purpose of kingship. The king was no longer merely a war chief who happened to be Christian; he was God's minister on earth, personally responsible for the spiritual and material well-being of all his subjects. Kingship took on a ministerial dimension that obligated the ruler to direct religious life, enforce orthodox doctrine, discipline clerics, and ensure that every Christian under his authority lived according to the faith.
This was, in modern terms, a hostile takeover of the Church by the state — except that neither "Church" nor "state" existed as separate entities in the Carolingian imagination. Charlemagne appointed bishops and abbots, controlled ecclesiastical property, convened synods, set their agendas, and gave their enactments the force of law through royal capitularies. His religious reform program was formulated in a series of synods made up of both clerics and laymen, summoned by royal order. The resulting legislation focused on strengthening the church's hierarchical structure, improving the intellectual and moral quality of the clergy, standardizing liturgical practices, intensifying pastoral care, and rooting out paganism.
The ecclesiastical establishment not only accepted this royal domination — it actively welcomed it. The king controlled appointments, distributed vast patronage, and served as the guarantor of the Papal States. But the clergy's support was also genuine, reflecting approval of the king's desire to deepen the piety and correct the morals of his Christian subjects. Charlemagne was glorified in his own day as the rector of the "new Israel," the "new David," the "new Constantine." The language was not metaphorical. His court theologians genuinely believed that a new sacred community — the imperium Christianum — was being assembled under Carolingian protection, and that Charlemagne was its divinely appointed guardian.
— Alcuin of York, letter to Charlemagne (799)Lo, now upon you alone reposes the whole salvation of the Churches of Christ.
Alcuin of York — the most influential intellectual at Charlemagne's court, an Anglo-Saxon cleric who had left the cathedral school at York to accept the king's invitation and who became, in effect, the chief architect of the Carolingian Renaissance — wrote those words at a moment of genuine crisis, when the pope was under physical attack in Rome and the Byzantine empress Irene had seized the Eastern imperial throne by blinding and deposing her own son. Alcuin was not merely flattering his patron. He was articulating a theory of power that would shape European politics for the next thousand years: the idea that secular and spiritual authority were fused in the person of the Christian monarch, who answered to God alone.
The New Athens
The cultural achievement of Charlemagne's reign is, in one sense, the easiest to quantify and the hardest to explain. Before the year 800, approximately 1,900 surviving books or book fragments are known from Western and Central Europe. From the century between 800 and 900 — largely as a consequence of programs initiated under Charlemagne — that number explodes to 7,900. The transition from papyrus to vellum helped; the establishment of scriptoria across the kingdom was decisive. More surviving written text exists from the ninth century alone than from all preceding centuries combined.
Charlemagne peopled his court with intellectuals recruited from across the Christian world. Alcuin came from York. Peter of Pisa, an aged grammarian, taught the king Latin. Paul the Deacon arrived from the Lombard monastery of Monte Cassino. Theodulf came from Visigothic Spain. These men did not represent a single school or tradition; they brought the scattered remnants of Classical and patristic learning from the peripheries of Christendom to its new center, the court at Aachen.
The program they devised under Charlemagne's patronage had a primary and explicitly practical goal: the extension and improvement of Latin literacy. This was not aestheticism. Charlemagne's letter to Abbot Baugaulf of Fulda — one of the few documents in which the king's own voice can be heard with something approaching directness — makes the case with blunt administrative logic: "We began to fear lest perchance, as the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be." Bad Latin meant bad theology. Bad theology meant bad governance. The chain was direct.
The results were staggering in their reach. A new uniform script — Carolingian minuscule — replaced the chaotic tangle of regional handwriting styles, making copying and reading dramatically easier. (Carolingian minuscule is, through later Renaissance adaptations, the ancestor of the typefaces you are reading now.) Libraries and schools proliferated. Episcopal and monastic schools were revitalized or founded across the kingdom. Textbooks were compiled in the seven liberal arts. The number and size of libraries expanded, especially in monasteries, where book collections often included Classical texts whose only surviving copies were made for those libraries. Much of the Latin literature that survived into the modern world did so because a Carolingian monk, working in a scriptorium established at Charlemagne's command, made a copy.
Alcuin boasted that a "new Athens" was being created in Francia. The claim was grandiose but not entirely wrong. The new Athens came to be identified with Aachen, which from about 794 became Charlemagne's preferred residence. There he built the Palatine Chapel — a masterpiece of Carolingian architecture modeled on the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, itself built under the Byzantine emperor Justinian — and installed in it a marble throne where he sat to hear mass, elevated above his court, closer to the mosaics of Christ in the dome than to the congregation below.
The Weight of the Crown
The coronation of December 25, 800, was the product of converging crises. In Constantinople, the empress Irene had blinded and deposed her own son Constantine VI in 797, becoming the first woman to rule the Eastern Roman Empire in her own right. Her constitutional position was, to Carolingian eyes, illegitimate; Alcuin wrote that the imperial throne was effectively empty. In Rome, Pope Leo III — a man of, by contemporary agreement, inferior caliber to his predecessor Adrian I — had been attacked by a faction of Roman nobles who accused him of tyranny and sexual misconduct. He fled to Charlemagne's court at Paderborn for protection, and was escorted back to Rome under Frankish guard.
The choreography of what followed was intricate. Charles arrived in November with gifts for St Peter weighing nearly a hundred kilos. Leo purged himself of the charges against him by public oath on December 23, the day the keys arrived from Jerusalem. Two days later, as Charlemagne rose from prayer at Christmas mass, the pope placed a crown on his head and the assembled Romans acclaimed him Augustus and emperor. The immediate beneficiary was the pope, whose position was now secure — backed by the military might of the man he had just crowned. But Charlemagne had been crowned, not asked to crown himself. The distinction would haunt his successors.
Einhard's claim that his master was surprised and angry has the quality of a diplomatic fiction — useful precisely because it was transparent. The king wanted it known that he had not sought the title, even as he immediately set about extracting diplomatic recognition of it from Constantinople. That recognition took twelve years of warfare and negotiation before the Byzantine emperor Michael I grudgingly acknowledged Charlemagne's imperial title in 812 — and even then, only as "emperor," not as "emperor of the Romans," preserving Constantinople's claim to be the sole true successor of the Caesars.
The deeper paradox was Charlemagne's own ambivalence about what the title meant. He avoided calling himself "emperor of the Romans," a "significant evasion," in Nelson's phrase, that left room for peace with Byzantium. He styled himself "Emperor Governing the Roman Empire" and kept his old title of "King of the Franks and of the Lombards." The title did launch a burst of government: before 802 he had issued a dozen or so capitularies, and "In the single year of 802 alone, the count would be fourteen." He continued to live in the traditional Frankish manner, eschewing the ceremonial protocols associated with imperial dignity. He relied less on the circle of advisers who had developed the ideology that led to the revival of the empire. Most tellingly, in 806, he decreed that on his death his realm would be divided among his three sons — a quintessentially Frankish arrangement that treated the kingdom as a family patrimony, flatly contradicting the idea of a unified imperial entity implicit in the Roman title.
And yet the title mattered to him. He fought for Byzantine recognition. He attempted to bring greater uniformity to the diverse legal systems prevailing in his empire. The artistic motifs in the building complex at Aachen reflected an imperial consciousness. In 813, by crowning Louis himself, he asserted that the imperial office was his to bestow — not the pope's.
The Man at the Table
Einhard's portrait of Charlemagne is the most intimate we have of any early medieval ruler, and it has the quality of a sketch made by someone who loved his subject without being blind to his oddities. Einhard modelled it closely on Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, and left out what embarrassed the family, so the oddities have to be weighed. "He was tall, but not unduly so," Einhard notes with charming precision, "since his height was seven times the length of his own foot." His eyes were large and lively, his nose a little larger than average, his hair fine and white, his face cheerful. His neck seemed short and thick and his stomach seemed to project, "but the symmetry of the other parts hid these flaws."
He was an enthusiastic swimmer and built his palace at Aachen in part because of its warm springs, sometimes inviting his sons, nobles, friends, and bodyguards to join him, so that "there would be more than a hundred people bathing together." Einhard says he "made friends easily and held on to them most constantly," and Nelson calls sociability "a character-trait of this man that shines out." He wore the Frankish national dress: linen shirt and breeches, a tunic fringed with silk, a blue cloak, and a sword always at his hip. He despised foreign costumes, however handsome, and never wore them except twice in Rome, when diplomatic necessity required him to don the Roman tunic.
He was moderate in eating and more so in drinking, "since he very much hated to see anyone drunk," but could not easily abstain from food and complained that fasting was bad for his health. He loved roast meat and "trusted his own judgement more than the advice of his doctors, whom he almost hated," because they wanted him to eat boiled meat instead. He had books read aloud at dinner, preferring histories and, especially, Augustine's City of God. He learned grammar from Peter of Pisa and studied "rhetoric and dialectic, and especially astronomy" with Alcuin. He learned Latin "well enough to pray in it as much as in his own native language," understood Greek better than he spoke it, but never mastered writing.
Nelson counts "at least nine sexual partners" and "at least nineteen children," and knows of no other early medieval king who "repudiated one wife after another in quick succession within hardly more than a year." He kept his daughters unmarried at court, "saying that he could not give up their companionship" — a policy that may have been as much dynastic calculation as paternal affection, since marrying princesses to foreign kings created potential rival claimants. When they took lovers, Einhard says, he "concealed this so well that there was no suspicion of anything shameful about them." Nelson shows that three of them had sons outside marriage, including twins by the courtier-poet Angilbert. His humour could be cruel. When the widowed English queen Eadburh came to Aachen, he offered her a choice between himself and his son; she chose the son, and he laughed: "If you'd chosen me you'd have had my son – but you chose my son, so you won't get either of us!" Nelson thinks the joke authentic, and says it "hinged on humiliation and cruelty." He was, by every account, a man of tremendous energy, rising four or five times during the night, hearing legal cases while he dressed, deciding matters of state while putting on his shoes.
The Inheritance That Could Not Hold
In January 814, Charlemagne fell ill with a fever after bathing in his beloved warm springs at Aachen. He died one week later, on January 28. On the birth date Nelson accepts, he was sixty-five. His grandson Nithard, writing in the 840s, claimed that the great king had "left all Europe filled with every goodness."
Modern historians have been less generous. They have noted the inadequacies of his political apparatus — a system of personal government that could not function without an extraordinary personality at its center. They have pointed to the limitations of his military forces in the face of new threats from seafaring enemies: the Vikings, whose raids began shortly after his death and would devastate the Frankish coastline for a century, and the Saracens pressing from the south. They have questioned whether his religious reforms touched the great mass of Christians or merely rearranged the habits of the clerical elite. They have called attention to the narrow traditionalism of his cultural program and the oppressive features of his economic and social policies — forced labor, forced conversion, mass execution.
The empire did not survive him intact. Charlemagne had intended to divide his kingdom among his three sons, in the traditional Frankish manner, and was spared the consequences of that plan only because two of the three sons died before him, leaving the entire inheritance to Louis the Pious. Louis was a devout, well-meaning ruler who lacked his father's iron will, and within a generation the empire fractured — at the Treaty of Verdun in 843 — into the three kingdoms that would eventually become France, Germany, and the lands between. The Carolingian dream of a unified Christian Europe survived only as an idea.
But the idea proved more durable than the empire. Charlemagne's renewal of the Roman Empire in the West provided the ideological foundation for a politically unified Europe — a concept that has inspired Europeans ever since, sometimes with unhappy consequences. Napoleon visited his tomb before his own coronation in 1804 and called his crown "the Crown of Charlemagne." The Wehrmacht named a unit after him during World War II. Since 1950, the city of Aachen has awarded an annual International Charlemagne Prize for outstanding contributions to European unity; recipients have included Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Francis. Every year since the prize's founding, someone has invoked the "Father of Europe" to justify whatever vision of European integration happens to be ascendant.
— Nithard, grandson of Charlemagne (c. 840s)He left all Europe filled with every goodness.
His religious reforms solidified the organizational structures and liturgical practices that eventually enfolded most of Europe into a single Church. His cultural renaissance provided the basic tools — schools, curricula, textbooks, libraries, teaching techniques — upon which later revivals would build. His formalization of the lord-vassal relationship and of manorialism planted the seeds of the feudal system that would organize European society for five centuries. The Carolingian minuscule script that his court developed would become, through its adoption by Italian Renaissance humanists, the basis for modern European printed alphabets. Every time you read a lowercase letter, you are using a technology that traces its lineage to a scriptorium commissioned by a king who could not write.
The Springs at Aachen
There is a detail in Einhard's biography that resists easy interpretation. In describing Charlemagne's last years, the biographer notes that "His health was good until four years before he died, when he suffered from constant fevers," and that "Towards the end he would limp on one foot." Ganz points out that the limp, and the contempt for doctors, both have models in Suetonius, so even this intimate detail may be partly borrowed.
The old emperor kept swimming. He kept bathing in the warm springs. He kept eating the roasted meat his doctors forbade. He kept rising four or five times in the night, kept hearing cases at dawn, kept the machinery of his enormous and creaking empire in motion through the sheer force of habit and personality. The resources with which to reward followers had declined because the era of great conquests was over. New enemies — Vikings in the north, Saracens in the south — probed his coastlines with impunity. The magnates he had raised and rewarded were beginning to grasp the political power inherent in the lands and immunities they had been granted. That is the traditional picture of a center weakening with the old man in the warm water. Nelson rejects it. He still hunted and swam in his sixties; in 811 and 813 he bombarded his bishops with questionnaires and held five church councils on a single timetable; and after losing Rotrud, Pippin and Young Charles in eighteen months, "He wept, but continued to govern and plan and organize."
On a January morning in 814, in the palace at Aachen — in the building he had raised over the warm springs of a Roman bath, next to the chapel he had built to echo the glories of Ravenna and Constantinople, surrounded by the books that were read aloud to him and the scripts his court had invented — the first emperor in the West since the fifth century developed a fever after bathing. He "prescribed for himself abstinence from food, as he always used to do in case of fever," Einhard reports, and kept fasting even when pleurisy set in. Thegan, writing a little later, says he died at sunrise on January 28, softly singing, "Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit." Einhard puts it "in the seventy-second year of his age," a figure borrowed from Suetonius. He was buried that same day in the Palatine Chapel, beneath a golden arch, under an inscription that read, in part: "the great and orthodox Emperor." Einhard claims there was doubt about where to bury him, "because while alive he had specified nothing." Nelson's reply: "Einhard misleads." The tomb, probably an antique marble sarcophagus showing the abduction of Proserpina, had been prepared in advance, and the funeral was handled by his daughters. When Louis arrived thirty days later, he cleared "the crowd of women which was very large" out of the palace.
The warm springs still run at Aachen.
Part IIThe Playbook
Charlemagne's reign offers a set of operating principles for anyone who seeks to build, govern, or transform an organization at scale — principles that are all the more striking for having been developed in an era without telecommunications, standing bureaucracies, or even reliable literacy. He is one of the figures studied in The Anatomy of Greatness. What follows is an attempt to extract the operational logic embedded in his forty-six years of rule.
The principles
- 1.Legitimacy is manufactured, not inherited.
- 2.Consolidate ruthlessly before you expand.
- 3.Build the audit function before you need it.
- 4.Make the technology stack serve the mission.
- 5.Recruit talent from the periphery.
- 6.Fuse ideology with administration.
- 7.Personal presence is irreplaceable — until it isn't.
- 8.Convert your enemies into infrastructure.
- 9.Control the succession or lose everything.
- 10.Own the standard, own the system.
- 11.Never let the ceremony define the power.
- 12.Build for the replayers, not just the players.
Principle 1
Legitimacy is manufactured, not inherited
The Carolingians did not have a right to the Frankish throne. They took it, and then they spent three generations constructing a legitimacy framework to retroactively justify the seizure. Pippin's alliance with the papacy — military protection in exchange for divine sanction — was not an act of piety; it was a branding exercise. Charlemagne's coronation as emperor was the final iteration: the claim that the Carolingian project was not merely a political enterprise but a divinely ordained mission.
Legitimacy is an output of sustained performance, strategic alliance, and narrative control — not an input. Once the title was secured and backed by decades of military success, the Carolingians became more legitimate than the dynasty they had displaced.
Tactic: When entering a new role or building a new organization, don't wait for legitimacy to be conferred — construct it by aligning with credible institutions, delivering early results, and controlling the narrative around your authority.
Principle 2
Consolidate ruthlessly before you expand
Charlemagne's first act upon Carloman's death in 771 was not to launch a foreign campaign but to ride to the border, absorb his brother's territories and men, and disregard the inheritance claims of Carloman's sons. Even the Lombard war, on Nelson's reading, was first a hunt for those nephews, who disappear from history once they fell into his hands. Nelson's summary of his first decade: "Intra-familial conflict was a much more dangerous Achilles heel than any frontier dispute." Only after he had unified the Frankish realm under his sole control did the great military campaigns begin in earnest.
This sequencing was deliberate. The Merovingians had been weakened not by external enemies but by internal partition — the Frankish custom of dividing the kingdom among all male heirs. Every generation fractured what the previous one had built. Charlemagne understood that expansion without consolidation produces fragility: the larger the territory, the more devastating the internal split.
Tactic: Before pursuing growth, eliminate internal fragmentation — competing power centers, ambiguous reporting lines, unresolved succession questions — that could turn expansion into overextension.
Principle 3
Build the audit function before you need it
The missi dominici — Charlemagne's royal inspectors, traveling in pairs through defined circuits to monitor local officials, announce royal policy, and correct abuses — represent one of the earliest systematic attempts at organizational accountability in post-Roman Europe. Charlemagne did not wait for a crisis of local misgovernance to create the system; he built it proactively, recognizing that the loyalty of counts and bishops could not be assumed but had to be verified.
The missi were paired — one cleric, one layman — precisely to prevent capture by any single constituency. They carried the king's personal authority and reported directly to the palatium. Their effectiveness depended not on coercive power but on the credibility of the threat that malfeasance would be detected and punished.
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The Missi Dominici System
Charlemagne's approach to distributed governance auditing
| Component | Function |
|---|---|
| Paired inspectors (cleric + layman) | Prevented capture by single interest group |
| Defined territorial circuits | Ensured comprehensive coverage |
| Written capitularies | Standardized what inspectors enforced |
| Direct report to the king | Bypassed local power structures |
Tactic: Build independent monitoring mechanisms into your organization's architecture from the start — not as a response to scandal but as a structural feature that keeps distributed teams aligned with central strategy.
Principle 4
Make the technology stack serve the mission
Charlemagne's cultural program — the Carolingian Renaissance — was not an indulgence in learning for its own sake. It was a direct response to an operational problem: the empire's administrators and clergy could not read and write Latin well enough to execute royal policy consistently. "As the skill in writing was less, so also the wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be," Charlemagne wrote to Abbot Baugaulf. Bad communication produced bad execution.
The solution was systematic: a new standardized script (Carolingian minuscule) that made documents faster to produce and easier to read; a network of schools to train literate administrators; a library-building program to ensure that the essential texts were available where they were needed; textbooks compiled for teaching Latin to non-native speakers. Each element served the operational goal: more reliable transmission of royal orders across a vast and linguistically diverse territory.
The program worked. The explosion from 1,900 surviving pre-800 book fragments to 7,900 from the ninth century alone is evidence of a step-change in the empire's information-processing capacity. Charlemagne built what was, for its era, a knowledge management system.
Tactic: Invest in communication infrastructure — standardized tools, shared languages, training programs — not as a cultural amenity but as a force multiplier for strategic execution.
Principle 5
Recruit talent from the periphery
Alcuin of York came from England. Peter of Pisa came from Italy. Theodulf came from Visigothic Spain. Paul the Deacon came from a Lombard monastery. The intellectual circle that Charlemagne assembled at his court was drawn from the margins of the Christian world — from places where classical learning had survived in isolated pockets while it decayed at the center.
This was not accidental. The Frankish aristocracy could supply warriors and administrators, but the cultural capital necessary for Charlemagne's reform program had to be imported. By recruiting from the periphery, Charlemagne gained access to diverse intellectual traditions — Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Spanish, Irish — and prevented any single faction from monopolizing the cultural agenda. The imported scholars also owed their positions entirely to the king, making them more loyal than any native-born courtier. Notker the Stammerer, a St Gall monk writing seventy years after Charles's death, turned this into legend: Charles inspects a school, finds the poor boys' work excellent and the nobles' "full of all fatuity," and thunders at the idle sons of his magnates, "By the King of the heavens I think nothing of your nobility and your beauty." It is a monastic moral tale, not history, but it fits the better-attested record of a king who promoted Einhard and the Lombard cleric Fardulf on ability.
Tactic: When building for transformation, recruit from outside your core network — people with different training, different frameworks, different reference points — who owe their position to the new mission rather than the old order.
Principle 6
Fuse ideology with administration
Charlemagne's redefinition of kingship — from warrior chief to God's minister on earth, responsible for the spiritual and material well-being of all subjects — was not merely a theological innovation. It was an organizational move that vastly expanded the scope of royal authority. If the king was responsible for the souls of his people, then no aspect of life — education, morality, liturgical practice, clerical discipline — was outside his jurisdiction.
This fusion of sacred purpose with administrative power produced extraordinary buy-in from the clerical establishment, which might otherwise have resisted royal encroachment on ecclesiastical prerogatives. The bishops and abbots supported the king's religious reforms because those reforms aligned with their own institutional interests: stronger church structures, better-trained clergy, more resources. They hailed Charlemagne as rector of the "new Israel" not because he forced them to but because his program genuinely served their goals.
Tactic: Frame operational objectives in terms of a larger mission that stakeholders already believe in — then use the resulting alignment to expand your authority into domains that would otherwise be contested.
Principle 7
Personal presence is irreplaceable — until it isn't
Charlemagne governed through personal relationships. He heard complaints at annual assemblies. He delivered commands in his own words. He accepted vassals personally, creating bonds of loyalty that ran directly to him. The system worked because of his extraordinary physical energy, his emotional force, and his willingness to spend decades in the saddle, moving ceaselessly through his territories.
But personal governance has a scaling limit. By the 790s Charlemagne was already delegating whole wars to his sons: Pippin of Italy took the Avar Ring and sent the treasure home while his father stayed in Saxony. In his last years, with the era of conquest over, the plunder that sustained elite loyalty dried up, though Nelson insists the old man's government was more energetic than declining. New enemies appeared at the periphery, and he could not be everywhere at once. The missi dominici, the capitularies, the oath-swearing — all the mechanisms he had built to extend his presence — functioned as substitutes, but imperfect ones. When the personal force was removed by death, the whole structure groaned.
Tactic: Build systems that encode your judgment and values into organizational processes — but recognize that the transition from personal to institutional authority is the hardest moment in any organization's life and must be planned explicitly, not assumed.
Principle 8
Convert your enemies into infrastructure
Charlemagne's treatment of defeated peoples followed a consistent pattern: military subjugation, forced conversion, integration into Frankish administrative and ecclesiastical structures, and — over time — the transformation of conquered territories into productive parts of the empire. Bavaria, once an independent kingdom under the Agilolfing dukes, became the staging ground for the destruction of the Avar kingdom. Saxony, after thirty years of savage resistance, became in the tenth century one of the great centers of political, cultural, and religious life in Europe.
The process was brutal and often counterproductive in the short term — the Saxons revolted repeatedly, and the harshness of the early capitularies had to be softened by the Capitulare Saxonicum of 797, in which "Compensation payments rather than death penalties were the rule," with Saxons paying fines on the same scale as Franks. Alcuin had warned that "Tithes, so it's said, have destroyed the faith of the Saxons," and urged "preachers not plunderers" for the conquered Avars. The most effective conversion was personal: Widukind, the most dangerous Saxon of all, became Charlemagne's godson. But the long-term result was structural: former enemies became taxpayers, soldiers, and administrators, adding capacity to the system rather than draining it.
Tactic: When absorbing competitors, rivals, or resistant internal factions, invest in their transformation into productive contributors rather than simply neutralizing them — the ongoing maintenance cost of suppression almost always exceeds the one-time cost of integration.
Principle 9
Control the succession or lose everything
Charlemagne was saved from his own worst instinct — the Frankish custom of dividing the kingdom among all male heirs — only by the deaths of two of his three sons by Hildegard before his own. He knew how lethal the family could be. In 792 his eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback, the son of Himiltrud, watched his younger half-brothers made kings and plotted to kill his father and them together at Regensburg. The plot was betrayed; some conspirators were executed, and Pippin was tonsured and sent to the monastery of Prüm. Had all three survived, the empire would have been partitioned in 814, and the Carolingian project might have fragmented a generation earlier than it did.
The emperor knew the danger. His decree of 806, which laid out the planned partition and contained what one historian called "positively hair-raising provisions" to protect royal nephews from their uncles, was Frankish tradition at its most self-destructive — treating the greatest political achievement of the age as a family estate to be carved up among sons. When only Louis survived, Charlemagne adapted: in 813 he crowned Louis himself, in Aachen, with no papal involvement, asserting that the imperial title was a dynastic asset under Carolingian control. But the underlying structural problem — no mechanism for ensuring undivided succession — was never solved. Louis's own sons went to civil war within two decades.
Tactic: Design succession mechanisms that prioritize institutional continuity over personal claims — and build them before you need them, when you still have the authority to make them stick.
Principle 10
Own the standard, own the system
Carolingian minuscule, the standardized writing system developed under Charlemagne's patronage, is the most enduring legacy of his cultural program — and the most instructive example of standards as strategic instruments. By establishing a uniform script that was faster to write, easier to read, and simpler to teach than the chaotic regional hands it replaced, Charlemagne's court created a communication layer that bound the empire together more effectively than any army.
The script outlived the empire by a thousand years. When Italian humanists of the Renaissance wanted to recover what they believed was the original Roman writing style, they adopted Carolingian minuscule — mistaking it for an ancient form. The typefaces they developed from it became the basis for modern European printed alphabets.
Tactic: When you control the standard — the format, the protocol, the shared language — you embed your influence into the infrastructure that others must use, creating leverage that persists long after your direct authority has faded.
Principle 11
Never let the ceremony define the power
The coronation of 800 gave Charlemagne an imperial title but also created a dangerous precedent: the pope had placed the crown on his head, implying that papal authority was the source of imperial legitimacy. Later popes — most notably Innocent III — would argue that Leo III had "transferred" the empire from the Greeks to the Franks and that the papacy could transfer it again at will.
Charlemagne saw the danger immediately. His response — crowning Louis himself in 813, in Aachen, without the pope — was a deliberate counter-narrative: the constitutive act was the acclamation of the Frankish nobility, not the blessing of a priest. The contrast with 800 was intentional. Charlemagne understood that whoever controls the ritual controls the interpretation, and whoever controls the interpretation controls the power.
Tactic: Be deliberate about the ceremonies and rituals that confer authority in your organization — who conducts them, where they happen, what they signify — because the symbolism will be used by others to claim powers you never intended to grant.
Principle 12
Build for the replayers, not just the players
The full fruits of the Carolingian Renaissance emerged only after Charlemagne's death. The schools he established trained the teachers who trained the next generation. The libraries he built preserved the texts that later scholars would rediscover. The administrative practices he systematized provided the template that successor kingdoms would adapt. The education infrastructure he created served as the basis upon which later cultural and intellectual revivals — including the twelfth-century Renaissance and, ultimately, the Italian Renaissance — would be built.
Charlemagne was building, whether he fully understood it or not, for the second and third order of replayers: people who would use his tools for purposes he could not foresee. The manuscripts copied in Carolingian scriptoria preserved classical texts that would otherwise have been lost entirely. The governmental models he refined would be studied and imitated for centuries. His definition of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority became the central axis of European political history.
This account draws mainly on Janet Nelson's King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne, a warm but sceptical life built from charters, annals, letters and capitularies, which repeatedly exposes the cover-ups in the court sources. The two early lives are collected in David Ganz's Penguin translation, Two Lives of Charlemagne: Einhard's, written by a courtier who loved him and modelled the book on Suetonius, and Notker's Deeds of Charlemagne, written in the 880s from monastic oral tradition and best read as legend. Nelson's Charles is less a builder for posterity than a man who kept switching tracks as events demanded, yet the infrastructure he left created conditions its architects could not have imagined.
Tactic: When building systems, institutions, or infrastructure, optimize not only for immediate users but for the generations of adapters, modifiers, and replayers who will inherit your tools and use them in ways you cannot predict.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Legitimacy follows performance. The Carolingians took the throne by force, then spent three generations constructing the narrative that they deserved it — and the narrative held because the performance was real.
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Consolidation before expansion. Charlemagne unified the Frankish realm completely before launching foreign campaigns; every great territorial gain was preceded by the elimination of internal rivals.
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Literacy is an operational weapon. The Carolingian Renaissance was not cultural ornamentation but a direct response to the administrative problem of governing a multilingual empire through unreliable written communication.
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Audit everything, trust nothing. The missi dominici system assumed that local officials would drift from royal policy unless independently monitored — a presumption that proved correct in every century since.
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Import your transformers. The intellectuals who built the Carolingian Renaissance came from the periphery — England, Italy, Spain — because the center lacked the cultural capital the mission required.
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Fuse purpose with power. By redefining kingship as a divine ministry, Charlemagne expanded his authority into domains — education, morality, liturgy — that no purely secular ruler could have claimed.
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Personal governance does not scale. The system held together through Charlemagne's physical energy and iron will; within a generation of his death, the centrifugal forces he had restrained tore the empire apart.
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Standards outlast empires. Carolingian minuscule survived the Carolingian dynasty by a millennium, embedding itself so deeply in Western literacy that its origins were forgotten — the ultimate triumph of infrastructure over individual achievement.
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Control the ritual or lose the narrative. The coronation of 813 — self-administered, in Aachen, without papal involvement — was Charlemagne's correction of the dangerous precedent set by the coronation of 800.
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Build for the replayers. The schools, libraries, scripts, and administrative models Charlemagne established provided the foundation for cultural and political developments their creator could not have foreseen — his greatest legacy was making other people's achievements possible.
In Their Own Words
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
To know another language is to possess a second soul.
To love justice is the first step toward being just.
To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.
To spare the vanquished is to disarm the victor.
To wage war is human; to make peace, divine.
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
I consider it necessary to compel the rebellious to submit, for the sake of peace.
I have resolved never to start an unjust war, but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies.
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Right action is better than knowledge; but in order to do what is right, we must know what is right.
If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter, lurking among them, shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism, and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.— Charlemagne, Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae (c. 785)
The whole salvation of the church of Christ rests in your hands.— Alcuin of York, letter to Charlemagne (c. 796)
We exhort you not only not to neglect the study of letters, but also with most humble mind, pleasing to God, to study earnestly in order that you may be able more easily and more correctly to penetrate the mysteries of the divine Scriptures.— Charlemagne, Letter to Abbot Baugaulf of Fulda (c. 780–800)
He was so moderate in the use of wine and all sorts of drink that he rarely allowed himself more than three cups in the course of a meal.— Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni (c. 817–830)
I judged it better to hand over these things to the memory of posterity than to suffer the most illustrious life of the most excellent king and greatest of all men of his age to be banished to the darkness.— Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni (c. 817–830)
