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Charlemagne the Man, the Legend, and the Birth of Western Christendom Checkmate Far Left: This 11Th-C

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Charlemagne the Man, the Legend, and the Birth of Western Christendom Checkmate Far Left: This 11Th-C CHRISTIAN HISTORY Issue 108 Charlemagne The man, the legend, and the birth of Western Christendom CHECKMATE Far left: This 11th-c. chess piece may allude to Charlemagne’s elephant. “listen up, boy” Left: Charle- IBRARY magne instructs his son Pippin. L RT A ON THE ROAD AGAIN Above: Charlemagne and his soldiers RIDGEMAN ride to battle. B HE T IBRARY / L Bán, my cat / ‘Tis a like task we are at; / Hunting mice TURE is his delight / Hunting words I sit all night. Prac- C I Did you know? P tice every day has made / Pangur perfect in his trade; IBRARY L / I get wisdom day and night / Turning darkness into RT LIFE IN CHARLEMAgne’s wORLD GOSTINI A A light” (translated by Robin Flower). E D CHARLES, LOUIS, CHARLES, LOUIS. RIDGEMAN In a world without last names, famous people were LUNCH IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. B ENTURY / C HE known by their nicknames. Charlemagne, originally . would have been bread, certainly; meat, probably T called Charles or Karl, became “Charles the Great”: (although if you were a peasant, maybe not); and ale, TALY / I TALY, 9TH I “Carolus Magnus“ in Latin and “Charles le Magne” in without a doubt. It would have been seasoned with E, C Old French. His father was called Pepin (or Pippin) the many herbs but few spices and cooked over a large ENI Short, and his mother, Bertrada, “Bigfoot Bertha.” Pre- open fire in the middle of your house. V IANA, sumably she was tall—or at least taller than Pepin! You would have eaten it from wooden plates, mostly C AR M OLIO 154, VERSO, A One of Charlemagne’s illegitimate sons was “Pip- with your hands, and finished up the meal with a gen- F C I2, pin the Hunchback,” his legitimate son Louis (who later erous helping of fruit. (Read more about what people O inherited the empire) was “Louis the Pious” due to his of Charlemagne’s day ate, wore, and did in “How they IBLIOTE B reputation for devoutness, and one of Louis’s brothers feasted and fasted,” pp. 34–35). ROM CODEX was “Charles the Younger.” Charlemagne’s grandchil- F ENTURY / dren fared worse: “Charles the Bald,” “Louis the Stam- I WANT AN ELEPHANT FOR CHRISTMAS C merer,” “Charles the Child,” and “Lothar the Lame” In 797 Charlemagne sent ambassadors to the ruler were among them. The empire finally collapsed under of the Arab world, Harun al-Rashid (“Harun the Charlemagne’s great-grandson “Charles the Fat.” Upright”), whose magnificent court at Baghdad was arriage—14th later memorialized in the tales of the Thousand and One C Nights. Charlemagne’s delegation included two envoys CATCHING MICE IREN-COM S Charlemagne encouraged scholarship in monasteries and a Jewish interpreter named Isaac. Imagine every- / ippin on the throne—miniature throughout his empire. While monks preserved and one’s surprise when Isaac returned five years later (the P copied manuscripts, they sometimes voiced complaints envoys, Lantifrid and Sigimund, had died en route) WIKIPEDIA and thoughts in the margins: the heat, the cold, the fact with a present from the caliph for Charlemagne—an that their pens didn’t work, the disruption of nearby bat- elephant. tles, and even the singing of birds outside the windows. No one had seen an elephant in Europe for a thou- One Irish monk wrote a whole poem about his cat on sand years, and they were the stuff of legend; it was as lephant Chessman— CHARLEMAGNE AND SOLDIERS IN A WOODEN E a copy of Paul’s epistles. It reads in part: “I and Pangur if someone today brought a unicorn to the president. CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SON Christian History IBRARY L RT A RIDGEMAN B HE T ILLI / W ETER P E / C The elephant caused a great sensation in Aachen, Char- ninth-century penmanship Left: “Carolingian lemagne’s capital, and became a tourist magnet. Called minuscule” was much easier to read and write than ARIS, FRAN P Abbu’l Abbas, it may have died in 810 on a war cam- previous scripts. paign near the Rhine. Harun’s own annals do not men- OUVRE, L tion the gift; Charlemagne’s small and far-away king- KINGLY BLADE Right: This French coronation sword dom was of little note to the famed Arab caliph. is traditionally said to have been Charlemagne’s. IOUS STONES) / with each other and in writing poetry. Charlemagne, C MEET MY JOYFUL SWORD Swords were serious business in the Middle Ages, and naturally, was King David. blacksmiths highly honored. Made from iron and car- bon, a good sword could cost as much as three cows. ARE WE THERE YET, DADDY? Knights and rulers often named their swords. Char- Charlemagne had 17 children that we know of, both lemagne called his Joyeuse, “joyful.” Many swords legitimate and illegitimate, and was married either four spawned whole legends. English king Edward the Con- or five times (historians differ as to whether his first fessor (reigned 1042–1066) supposedly wielded Sword of long-term partner was a wife or concubine). He liked Mercy, and King Arthur’s Excalibur even gave its name to take his whole family with him on his travels and to a movie about the mythical ruler. his sons on military campaigns. Travels were frequent until Charlemagne established a permanent capital for TODAYWEDON’TWRITELIKETHIS. his empire at Aachen in the 790s. because of advances in handwriting made in Char- Charlemagne refused to let any of his daughters lemagne’s court. At the palace school he encouraged marry, not wanting them to become political pawns, (see “For the love of learning,” pp. 24–29), students were but he did not frown on affairs. One daughter, Bertrade taught a new style of writing later called “Carolingian (779–826), had a long-term relationship with one of WIKIPEDIA minuscule.” Spaces between words and lowercase let- Charlemagne’s courtiers, Angilbert. Their son Nithard ule— C ters became common—neither had been used before. became a notable historian. Another, Rotrude (775–810), Handwriting was not the only thing taught at the was betrothed as a child to Byzantine emperor Con- school. Charlemagne and his advisors were very inter- stantine VI. She never married him, nor her later lover ested in the study of the Old Testament, and many took the Count of Maine, and ended up as a nun in a convent word with sheath, said to have belonged Charlemagne (747–814)(gold set pre CAROLINGIAN MINUS S biblical names that they used in their correspondence where Charlemagne’s sister Gisela was the abbess. CH Issue 108 1 Editor’s note WHY DOES CHARLEMAGNE MATTER? Why revivals of learning, built on the foundation stones devote an issue of Christian History to an eighth- Charlemagne laid. Proponents of what eventually century king of a tribe called the Franks, a king who got named the Renaissance, in the fourteenth century, never learned to write, liked food and drink almost as claimed they had single-handedly “discovered” clas- much as he liked conquest, and went through wives sical Greek and Roman literature and labeled the mil- like they were going out of style? lennium before their time as “Dark Ages.” They were Perhaps we should because that king also ruled wrong. over much of modern France and Germany; was Just as the articles for this issue were coming in crowned emperor of the west—the first such emper- from our team of authors, I happened to be traveling or since the fifth century—by the pope, in Rome, on in the United Kingdom. There I drove along Hadrian’s Christmas Day 800; and proceeded to usher in a new Wall, which marked the northern boundary of the western age of intensified Christian education and Roman Empire at its height. And there I stood on the culture. floors of churches built in Charlemagne’s day, and I The empire Charlemagne founded did not out- bowed in wonder before stone crosses carved in those live his great-grandsons. But the ideas he founded are remote British outposts, even while he sat on his living still. As he wedded Christian devotion to state throne in Aachen (now a city in modern Germany). power and the remains of the Roman Empire to the When the power of Rome’s empire receded in energetic conquering spirit of the Franks, something the fourth and fifth centuries, several hundred years new was born—the idea of Christendom, a Christian before Charlemagne, the power of the church in nation unified under a Christian king, where church Europe remained—a complicated power of monastic and state worked and prayed hand in hand. Those rip- holiness and fierce conquest, of profound learning in ples swelled into tidal waves over the next thousand ornate palaces and priests struggling to read the Latin years, as rulers struggled to build Christian kingdoms liturgy in tiny rural chapels. This issue tells the story across Europe and, eventually, in America as well. of an emperor and a people trying to make sense of who they were before God and who they were as a CROSSES AND CROWNS kingdom. Those are questions that Charlemagne, despite his own inability to write, also have not gone away. They trouble presided over a revival of learning. The idea that Rome us, and our nations, still. Read this “fell” overnight and all its learning was lost is consider- story, and you will see that we are ably overstated, as you will soon read. But it is undoubt- all still living in Charlemagne’s edly true that under Charlemagne’s direction, and that shadow.
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