Gone Medieval - Charlemagne

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Charlemagne is labelled by many as the most ambitious ruler in Europe prior to Napoleon - but what do we really know about him? A 46 year long rule beginning at the end of the 8th Century, responsible for a cultural and intellectual renaissance - what can we learn from the sources about Charlemagne and his own personal history? This week Cat is joined by Rosamond McKitterick to discuss Charlemagne's life, legacy, and shine some light on one of the most influential rules in European history.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit >To download, go to Android or Apple store:If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Gone Medieval content then subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter. Follow the link here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Charlemagne is often claimed as the greatest ruler in Europe before Napoleon. And in his 46-year rule that started in the late 8th century, he amassed vast territories and was responsible for facilitating a cultural and intellectual renaissance. And he has also been credited with forming a European identity.

but what do we really know about him and how in the years after his death have the different sources about his life work to shape his ongoing reputation? Today on the podcast I'm joined by Professor Rosamund McHittrick who is Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. She is also the author of numerous books

on medieval and early medieval Europe and in particular the book Charlemagne the formation of a European identity. So thank you so much for joining me today I'm really delighted to have you on the podcast. Nice to be with you, Kat. So we are recording this during Storm Eunice, so fingers crossed we get to the end without too much interference. So, bear with us.

So today I really wanted to talk to you, well, in general about Charlemagne, but also what you've done in your book. And in the preface to your book, you say that you've investigated what we can know about Charlemagne and what we think we know, which I thought was a great way of phrasing it. So you deal with the sort of sources we have. and how they have essentially shaped our subsequent knowledge and narratives. And I want to get back to those sources a bit later on. But, I mean, would you say that there are issues with our current understanding of him? Have we sort of got things wrong?

To say that we've got them wrong is too crude. But it is certainly the case that because Charlemagne became very formative to people's notions of how Europe stuck together. And actually because Napoleon himself took Charlemagne as some kind of exemplar, and the development of the idea of Charlemagne as a ruler who was important for Europe as a whole, was important for the imperial idea, was taken up by France, Germany and indeed Italy, as somebody who was a very important formative element in the history of their nations. It's expressed, for example, in the Pris-Alman, which is the prize you get for the promotion of European unity, that that colours the way people regard it.

And there's a tendency to think that the way the history has developed, the way it is written, is something that is unproblematic. It's just a straightforward conquest of a lot of Europe. He was a big grand warrior. Yes, he did some legislation. Yes, he promoted. culture, but it's all part of a way of thinking about a ruler that's actually really crude, not very helpful. As a symbol, I think that always happens when rulers become symbols of certain

things. I mean, we know with Henry the 8th and the Reformation, it's a similar kind of thing. But when you actually start to look at all the sources and try and work out what is happening and the way in which particular interpretations have developed, that actually tells you. you were an enormous amount about the development of history, about the development of national feeling, of susceptibilities, of ideals that people actually impose on the past in a really very interesting way. So let's go back to the beginning then to Charlemagne and how he comes to power. And I was hoping that we could start with the setting a bit really. So he comes to power in the late 8th century. And can you tell us a little bit about that world that he entered into?

what was the political situation like in northwestern Europe at the time? Understanding that this is a simplified version, but what we need to remember is that the Merovingian rulers in France, they had been ruling at the time Clovis since the end of the 5th century. And Clovis, king of the Franks and the Franks were one of the major groups that were taking over governance on the ground in the aftermath of the deposition of the last Roman emperor in the West. Merivindians had ruled in Frankis successfully for three and a half centuries.

During the 7th and 8th century, you begin to get development of particular aristocratic power groups, mostly centred on a person called the mayor of the palace, who is what we would think of as prime minister. Now, this is happening in different regions in France, in the West and in the East, Australia and Neustria. and in Austrasia, a particular family known as the Arnold Fings, and then they were allied with the Pippinids, and from that you get the emergence of really important prime ministers, mayors at the palace, Pippin and Charles Martel, and then Pippin III, who is Charlemagne's father.

Now, Pippin III and his brother Carleman were prime ministers. They split the kingdom between. them, Piping the Thirds and Carleman's father, Charles Martel, had been a very powerful mayor of the palace, but he had never made himself king, even though for a while there was no king. But again, just to cut things short, Piping the third decided, after Carlam and his brother decided he wasn't interested in ruling and gone off to be a monk, that the situation had got such that basically the king was no use at all. They'd pulled a little king out of a moment. monastery, mating king for appearances sake or something. So Pippin makes himself king in 751.

Now, that means that the two little boys, Charlemagne and his brother, Carleman, had not actually started out life as princes expecting rule. They were simply there. And when Pippin took over as king, I think it's really important for us to realize that there was no guarantee that that particular political solution at that time was going to last. This was. wasn't the foundation of the dynasty at the time, but that's what it looks like in retrospect. And I think that's the key, really, that we're always looking backwards. We know what happened next, and so we think all this is inevitable. Well, it wasn't. But the fact remains that Charles Martel and Kippin III and his son Charlemagne were very, very able. They were clever. They were

good warriors. And they had a vision, as far as we can see, of how things could be governed and should be governed and actually put it into effect. So Pippin takes over as king. He rules successfully from 751 to 7668. And when he dies, he leaves his realm to be governed by his two sons, Charlemagne and Carloman. Now, in what order those two were born has now actually been disputed. But whatever the case, Carleman only lived for three further years. He died in 771. What their joint rule was like has also debated, but effectively Charlemagne was left to Sorruhe in 771. And from then on, he certainly expands his realm, but this is not a process of conquest. Somebody sitting down and think, right, I'm now going to embark on taking over all these places.

A lot of it was taking advantage of particular possibilities. One of which, and perhaps the most famous, is the conquest of the Lombard Kingdom. the north of Italy, apparently in order to assist the Pope, but whatever the case, he certainly conquers Lombardy in 774. So he's now taken over the whole of the northern part of Italy, and that creates a very special relationship with the Pope, which had already been anticipated to some degree by his father, Pippin, the Third, and I'll come back to that in a moment. Now, after that, there are campaigns in the north of Spain, and so a certain part of the northern part Spain and the very southern bit of Gaul is also taken over. He also expands into and takes over

Bavaria and that was a nasty piece of work on Charlemagne's part. It belonged to his cousin, Duke Tassolo and he simply got Tassolo accused of things that he may or may not have done. There was a show trial and in 788 Tassolo was deposed. All his family were disposed into monasteries around the Kingdom, Tassolo lost everything. Bavaria became part of Charlemagne's realm. And then there's also the war against the Saxons. And that really was a war of conquest, but it took 30 years and it was campaigns each year. So by the time we get to nearly 800, Charlemagne has conquered most of what we would call Western Europe. It includes the areas we now think of as northern Spain, most of Italy down towards Rome, Bavaria, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the whole of what

we were called France. It's a vast territory. So how do you rule it? Well, in fact, he works out ways of ruling it very, very early in his reign and again, following the example of his father. He has a system of counts and Missy Dominique. These are basically agents who are very powerful. there's Bishop and the Count who work in tandem. There's a very, very elaborate system of communications. There is an alternative system of putting people to rule on the ground who belong to the area or else moving Franks into those areas, but he keeps in touch with them all. He has assemblies every year, they all have to assemble, they discuss the affairs of the realm. And the interesting thing about this is that it's not just the secular magnates, it's the church as well. One of the things that

characterises both Pippin the Third and Charlemagne's realm is that they use the church. They're very, very devoted to the church, but they regard the church as one of their responsibilities. They have power over the church to a very considerable degree, but it always stops short of determining doctrine. That is understood to be the church's business. But they're do an awful lot else about church discipline, church organisation. And they also decide that they need to be very close to what's done in Rome. This is where part of the relationship with the Pope comes in, that things that were done in Rome should be how they do it in Francia. We have a lot of discussion, usually labelled reform for want of a better word. It's certainly change. It's orienting

Frankish church matters towards Rome, getting texts from Rome, doing as they were. As they were in Rome, but in a very Frankish way. And those elements of the way in which Frankish reform is working in the church interest, as well as the political interests, are one of the things that when Charlemagne is crowned emperor by the Pope in 800, it makes a lot of sense in terms of ideology and thinking about it. But in practical terms, being made emperor made very little difference at all. It's a title. It means rule. It was. wasn't Holy Roman Emperor, as people often say. That's a later development in the 10th century. This was being governor. It was being emperor of the Romans. It was imperator. It invoked all kinds

of ideas about the Roman past and about the relationship between earlier Roman rulers and the church. But it, in practical terms, made very little difference. It's only actually after Charlemagne's reign that we begin to get the ideas of empire developed. and the implications pursued sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But all that means that when people are looking backwards at Charlemagne, they can't help be influenced by all these later developments and ideas. And what about connections further afield and further to the east especially? And one sort of interesting story that always comes up is the gift that arrives in, I think it's 801 when he receives.

an elephant, as I often used as a symbol of his connection with the Islamic world. Can you explain how that sort of played out and what those furthest connections were like for him? The diplomatic relations that Charlemagne had with the peripheral or far away nations are really very interesting. And people are still arguing about them inevitably. If we consider England first, there are, of course, there's the famous letter Charlemagne wrote to offer. There's the possibility of a marriage alliance with the. Angla-Saxon king and his son and a daughter of each respective king, which actually falls through. There are the relations with the Danish rulers, which are actually, as far as we can tell, very, very

straightforward matters of trying to preserve stability on the borders because of the Saxon conquest. Charlemagne is now actually next door to the Danes for the very first time. With the caliph in Baghdad, this may well be something that was part of the consequences of the connections with Arab Spain. And with the conquest in the north of Spain, Charlemagne then was coming in to contact to much greater extent with the Arabs in Spain. And so news is trickling across and the whole passage of news has very recently been looked at by Sam Otical Soulsby. who's been looking at all the relations of the Franks with the Arabic world, North Africa, Spain, and as far east as Baghdad. So that gift of the elephant, which is so evocative and exotic, and the poor thing of course dies quite soon, probably of cold and misery, as far as we can tell.

But he was sent across somebody who knew what it ate and how to look after it, that's Isaac. But apart from that, there's no clear indifference. that this was anything other than a diplomatic exchange with gifts. So there are some indications that may have been a bit more to that. Then of course we have the relationships with the Eastern Empire as well. And these are relayed to us both by the narrative sources and by a few letters. But the real recognition of Charlemagne's position doesn't come until 812, even though before that there are discussions of marriage ties and aligns.

which actually also fall through. Though again, Pippin III and his daughter, Gisela, Charlemagne's sister, had at one time been engaged to Byzantine Prince. So if we think of these in terms of diplomatic relations, but with Byzantium it becomes more complicated because of the stance that the Constantinopolitan-Politon patriots and the emperor take with regard to images, and you get a whole discussion about iconoclasm,

the degree to which the Eastern Emperor's can be regarded as orthodox, the degree to which they clash with the Pope. This then impinges on Charlemagne and the Carolingian's support of the Pope and orthodoxy. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is beds from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim

Smith, Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change, and my old friend Jamie Oliver. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm Now, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned briefly earlier on there, alliances and marriage alliances. And I want to just touch on that a bit because, of course, he had several marriages and quite a lot of children. Can you say a little bit about that? and you know why some of those alliances didn't really go anywhere. And in fact, I've got a quote from your book as well,

and one of the sources Einhard, I think I'm going to ask you about later on, who was saying that Charlemagne loved his daughters too dearly to be able to contemplate their leaving home to marry, which is, I think, is a reflection on some of those thoughts around alliances and marriages. Could you say something a little bit about that? The marriage alliances, there are almost none worked out, in fact. Charles the younger, the eldest one, who was supposed to. supposed to be marrying the daughter of offer. That didn't happen. There is a theory that Charlemagne

didn't want any of his daughters to marry because this would create alliances with aristocrats or with other kings that would simply produce political complications. The daughters did have liaisons. There are actually children attested as a result of basically affairs with particular individuals and some of these children were given abacis, so they were looked after. Charlemagne himself had four wives, and possibly there's the engagement, though this again is really disputed with the King of the Lombards. So that's the only alliance that looks like a political one, and we have the most extraordinary letter from the Pope at the time, protesting that he has heard the news, that this was in the winds and how dare the Franks think of doing anything so abominable as marrying into this nefarious, dreading. long by family. It's quite an extraordinary letter. And certainly that didn't happen, that particular marriage. Any other marriages, there was one alliance that was voiced with Gisela and the Byzantine ruler.

Then there was discussion about whether Charlemagne's daughter, Rotrude, should be married to the Eastern Byzantine prince. And even some have suggested that there was a notion that Charlemagne could the lie with Irena, the Byzantine Queen. But these don't happen. And as far as we can tell, when the children of Charlemagne are married, and that's the sons, the daughters do not, they are married to really quite insignificant

or really not very prominent members of the aristocracy, though certainly when Charlemagne's wife, Hildegard, her brother did get promoted and enjoy quite a political career. but it does look as if there's some substance to the idea that these alliances are very carefully judged that you don't want to create yet another powerful group of aristocrats. And still more, you don't want to create complications of alliances with foreign houses because then all kinds of other complications may ensue. So they just don't happen.

So it seems like it was quite a clever move then in a way, I suppose. But I wanted to go on to something else that was quite important, to Charlemagne and that was actually education and that was something he worked on quite heavily and really valued. How did that sort of play out? How did you do that? As far as we can tell, Charlemagne himself was well educated.

His father and his mother both appeared to have promoted the idea that he should be well educated. Every indication we have from contemporary letters to him and comments about him indicates that this is a genuine interest

and it's not an idol one of somebody who really doesn't understand it all. And this is somebody who, it is claimed by Arnhardt, his favorite book was Augustin's City of God, which is not exactly easy book to read or understand. He is certainly very devoted to the Christian religion and as far as we can tell again, very interested in problems of theological debate. So he decides that what he needs is an educated population, educated clergy. He says specifically he wants them educated so that there will be no mistake in understanding the faith. So it's linked with orthodoxy. But it's also linked with governments and how well you want everything organized. He wants people to know what to do, how to do it,

and be able to have recourse to all the past work and guidance, to follow the law, to produce their documents correctly and also to make sure that there is a sufficient understanding of the law for justice to be done properly. So this is actually part of the governmental enterprise as well as part of your church reforms and one suspects a genuine interest. The amount of information we've been able to put together about his own personal library is again problematic but it does seem as if he encouraged deliberately the idea that people should look to the past, look in their libraries, try and preserve what they found there, copy it, and really stimulate a movement for educational reform. And one of the things that's very interesting about the court circles is that there is an

enormous amount of really very sophisticated poetry and discussion going on at court. And a return or resuscitation of Latin that's much more classical in its written form. So that it's from this stage, it begin to get a divergence of the spoken Latin into what we would call remands and ultimately French, Spanish and Italian. And the formal written Latin, which remains much more classical in its structures and in its grammar and its spelling. And you actually have spelling reforms and people discussing it. And if you think about it, if you've got a court where there are lots of people all assembled, Charlemagne quite clearly is assembling scholars there. He is taught himself by them, but they come from England, they come from Germany, they come from Spain, they come from Italy. What their Latin must have sounded like from all these different places with funny accents makes one think it was very strange. So this insistence on correct spelling, correct pronunciation may well have been. to make sure that they all understood each other. That's a really good point, actually,

that I think we haven't really thought of. But does that mean then? So you're getting really quite a vast quantity and increase in the source material available, presumably, which must affect what we do know. So in terms of really understanding what was going on in Charlemagne's rule, would you say that those sources that were contemporary with his

or those produced a little bit later are sort of more significance in getting a good, understanding of it? Well, I think this is, you've put your finger on exactly the problem we have to deal with. The contemporary sources we have are letters at the time, charters issued by the Royal Writing Office, the capitularies, which are the consequences in many respects of either very large assemblies or small discussions at a provincial level, or sometimes the so-called capitularies, which are texts, which are called that simply because they set out in chapters. So it's in little headings with, we decide that you should do this on such and such a thing.

Some of these are just agendas for meetings. Those are all contemporary. And then beside that, we've got the narrative representations of what was going on, which are mostly retrospective and looking back. Now, some of them are closer to the events that are happening than others. The ones that are co-est are the Royal Frankish Annals. First put together in the 780s, however, and telling you what's happening from Charles Martel's death onwards from 741 onwards,

or some of them start a little bit earlier. Now, they are presented as year-by-year accounts, and they look incredibly attractive as, oh, this is somebody sitting down on Christmas Day, putting his feet up and writing it. up like a diary. But it's not like that at all. It's a very, very interesting construction in a year by year format in this year, such and such happened. And then the year changed to such and such. And it includes interestingly enough where the king spent Easter and Christmas and lots of events are jammed into those analytic accounts. And they become fuller and fuller

as time gets on. So the original construction, if you were sitting down in the 780s, to try and work out what had happened in 741, you would just about be able to rely on one or two people's memories, but for most of the part, it might have been only on what you found written already. So it's the difference between what we've got, which was actually produced by the people we're talking about, in order to manage affairs, to organise the realm, immediate letters that were exchanged,

and then these narrative representations which get later and later as one proceeds. We mentioned one account a bit earlier on by someone called Einhard, which is the Vita Karoli. So this one in your book, you mentioned, you write about it at the beginning, so this was written down not that long after his death. And you said that in some ways that account could have said to have created Charlemagne or at least be extraordinarily influential in doing so. Can you explain what that does and why you said that? Well, Einhard says to us,

and a lot of what we know is from Einhardt telling himself, that he was writing this account of Charlemagne as a form of gift, a gratitude for everything that Einhard had done with him. Einhard was certainly at the court, and there are descriptions of contemporary poems which describe him there. Einhard also achieved considerable prominence under the reign of Charlemagne's son in that he was given an abbessy to look after, in fact, too, but he was a layman, very, very well educated. He wrote very, very good Latin.

Einhard sets out to describe the entire reign of Charlemagne, and he does it modeled on Roman histories, the famous histories of the 12 emperors, 12 Caesars by Cetonius, and in fact, when you read it, there are lots of little bits which are more or less verbating quotations, especially disconcertingly, the description of Charlemagne is very like the description of the Emperor of Grastus. But what he does is to create this image of a man. He tells us about his family. He tells us about his conquests. He tells us about his relations with Rome, the Pope and St. Peter.

He gives us an idea of his interest in learning. He gives details even about he had some things translated into German. He talks about his love for his family. that's the quotation you gave us earlier. And crucially, he provides a chronology. So he explains right from the beginning, well, you know, the family took over from these useless Merovingians, and there we have these great Carolingians,

and here is our great and glorious Charlemagne, who quite clearly is all 12 emperors rolled into one. And it's in that respect you've got this package where everything is set before you in a very clear, very attractive biography. So here we have him set out before us, and it's picking away what Aynard told us, and why he presented some things in one way and hid other things or may have hidden other things, is one of the interesting things that he's left us all to dismantle.

That must be quite a challenge, I suppose, really. But then if we move forward in time a bit and sort of later in the medieval period, does there sort of representations do the ways that, Charlemagne is described and talked about, does that change over time or what happens? It doesn't so much change as it becomes very much more selective, so that what is stressed are the Christian king, the warrior who brings Christianity to the Saxons. That in fact might be the first and most interesting example that Einhardt, talking about the conquest of the Saxons, talks about it as, and one of the things he did was to make the Franks and Saxons one people.

And then at the end of the 9th century, you have a poet who talks about Charlemagne's conquest of the Saxons, as he brought the Saxons Christianity. He made them into part of the whole of the Frankish Empire, and that subsequently is what is then remembered by the 10th and 11th century writers in Germany. This is what Charlemagne did. He brought as Christianity. He's even likened to being another apostle. It's a very curious development when you first look at the annals accounts of the slaughter and the conquest and the destruction of Charlemagne and his Frankish armies are reeking on the Saxons. The whole way in which something like the Chances de Roland looks at him again as a Christian warrior, they can flate him in a way with legends and the way Charles Martel's defeat of a particular Saracen

group is described in earlier. sources. So that becomes an element. And it's more Charlemagne as a warrior that really is what is stress and Charlemagne the Christian emperor. Other elements, the promotion of learning, the legislation, the attention to government, that is given less prominence. And also another aspect that I didn't mention earlier, but the attention to government is something, and I think it may be one of the things that drew parallels with Napoleon. He also regulates weights and measures so everybody's using the same. And he actually also reformed the coinage so that money had a stable value. And you can often realize how stable the government is, is how stable their

coinage is. And Charlemagne and Louis the Pius both achieve remarkable stability of coinage with the regulation of the money. So that that is another aspect. But these things aren't taken up in the later medieval accounts at all. It's something that historians now have established. That sort of brings us quite nicely back to this idea, what you have as the subtitle to your book, the formation of a European identity. So what, in your opinion then,

is that most significant legacy that he left behind in those terms? Sometimes I quite regret that sometimes. But in the light of events after it was published, I will stand by it. I don't regret it because I think in other respects, simply because Charlemagne is somebody, whether you call him Carlo Mano or Carol de Grosso or Charlemagne, he is somebody or it's a period, but it's associated with the ruler, who was formative in a very, very real way for most of the countries of Western Europe. But it's also very formative. It's what they've got in common. And you can actually trace back

to the Carolingian period a number of the methods of government, the assumptions that are made about education, and indeed a lot of the strands of the intellectual developments of particular texts that remained important in the curriculum, or remained important to scholars. It all goes back to the 8th and 9th centuries. So that in many ways, it is a very way. is actually part of European identity, this history, this knowledge, the memory of Charlemagne is actually embedded into the European identity in actually very interesting ways. And I think it's quite important that the big exhibition for Charlemagne in 1965 that was held in Archen was started very soon after the war. It became a symbol, if you like, of European unity. I think that's a really

nice place to endless really thinking of that legacy. So Rosamund, thank you so much for joining me and sharing us with us today. Okay, Kat. Thank you. So this has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Thank you all so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and look out for our Medieval Monday's newsletter that you can subscribe to in the episode notes. And we will be back again soon.