CHARLES THE GREAT (CHARLEMAGNE), king of the Franks and emperor, born April 2, 742 or 743, was the eldest son of Pepin III. by Berta (Bertrada), daughter of Charibert of Laon. At that date the Franks were governed by Pepin and his brother Carloman, who ruled as mayors of the palace under a fainéant Merovingian king. By the abdication of Carloman, in 747, Pepin became sole ruler, as his father Charles Martel had been. In 751 Pepin deposed the last Merovingian (Childeric III.) and himself assumed the Frankish crown, with the approbation of Pope Zacharias. In 754 Pope Stephen II. visited Pepin at Paris and anointed him as king, together with his two sons, Charles and Carloman. Between these two the kingdom was equally divided by Pepin on his death-bed (768), Charles receiv ing Austrasia, Neustria and western Aquitaine. This arrangement was displeasing to his junior, who perhaps claimed the whole in heritance on the ground that he was born after their father's coronation (751). In 769 Charles suppressed an Aquitanian ris ing, led by the aged Duke Hunold, and received the submission of Lupus, duke of Gascony, although Carloman declined to give any assistance. In 770 Charles married the daughter of Desiderius, king of the Lombards, probably to strengthen the influence which Pepin III. had acquired in Italian politics. But in 771 he repudi ated the Lombard princess and married Hildegarde, a Suabian lady, who became the mother of his three legitimate sons, Charles, Pepin and Lewis. Desiderius naturally resented the slight put upon his daughter and seized the first opportunity of revenge. This presented itself in 771, when King Carloman died and Charles, in accordance with Frankish law, appropriated the vacant kingdom to the exclusion of his brother's infant sons. Their mother, Queen Gerberga, fled with them to the court of Desider ius, who announced his intention of supporting their claims and vainly urged the pope to crown them (772). Hadrian, who had lately succeeded Stephen II., endangered the safety of the papal States by refusing this demand, since Charles was preoccupied with his first Saxon campaign, and Desiderius plundered and con quered at his will in central Italy. But in the autumn of 772 Charles gave ear to Hadrian's appeal for help, and demanded sat isfaction from the Lombards for himself and for the pope. Since Desiderius was defiant, the Frankish host was summoned to meet at Geneva in May 773. From Geneva the main army, led by Charles himself, marched over the Mt. Cenis to Susa, where it encountered the Lombard army, under Desiderius, holding a for tified position, and was brought to a halt. Meanwhile a second Frankish army, which had crossed the Great St. Bernard, threat ened the communications of the Lombards, who as soon as they perceived their danger fell back in haste, some to Pavia and others to Verona. Verona surrendered to the Franks in the winter of 773-774, and here the nephews of Charles fell into his hands. Their fate is uncertain, but they troubled him no more. Pavia was reduced, after a long blockade, in the following summer. Desiderius, who was found there, ended his days as a monk at Corbie on the Somme. After the fall of Pavia Charles took the title of king of the Lombards. Frankish garrisons and Frankish officials were established at Pavia and in other cities of the king dom. But some of the Lombard dukes in north and central Italy were allowed to remain in office as vassals of the conqueror. The ducal house of Benevento remained de facto independent, though in 788 the reigning duke agreed to pay an annual tribute, to date his charters by the regnal years of Charles, and to inscribe the name of Charles upon his coinage. Charles abstained from med dling with the Greek possessions in south Italy—Calabria, Apulia, Naples, Salerno, Amalfi. But later in his reign he acquired the Greek provinces of Venetia, Istria and Dalmatia. His relations with the papacy were defined during a visit which he paid to Rome at the Easter feast of 774. He was then acclaimed as Patrician of the Romans, and he confirmed the so-called Donation of 754 by which his father had guaranteed to the papacy its ancient and law ful possessions in Italy. The text of the Donation only survives in a corrupt and interpolated copy. It cannot have been precisely worded since Hadrian and Charles, who were otherwise good friends, differed sharply about its interpretation. As Patrician, Charles claimed the right of hearing appeals from the Roman law-courts, and he exacted an oath of allegiance from the Romans when Hadrian's successor was elected, though he did not interfere with the election. In Boo he presided over the tribunal before which Leo III. purged himself of various accusations. But it was Lewis the Pious who first established (in 824) the right of the emperor to supervise the temporal administration of the pope through an envoy permanently residing in Rome.
From 774 to 799 Charles was at war with the Saxons, a heathen race whose lands lay east of the Rhine and north of Hesse and Thuringia. Though troublesome neighbours of the Franks they had become tributaries of Pepin III. in 758, and the Frankish annalists do not explain the first Saxon war of Charles (in 772) by reference to any provocation that he had received. Their paganism may have been their chief offence ; the chief event of the campaign was the destruction of the sacred pillar Irminsul, together with its grove and temple. The Saxons retaliated by raiding Hesse while Charles was absent in Italy, and on his re turn, in 775, he opened a war of conquest which was only com pleted in the i4th campaign. There was no cohesion between the Saxon tribes, and they were much inferior to the Franks in mili tary science and equipment. But their country had strong natural defences (the hills and forests of the Teutoburger Wald and the Harz country, the Weser and the Elbe with their tributary streams) which made it difficult for the Franks to invade rapidly or to retreat with impunity. The Frankish host was only available in the summer months, and it was difficult to find garrisons for conquered districts. The Saxons usually offered submission when they were attacked in force, and rebelled again when Charles withdrew his forces. He did not make his difficulties lighter when he insisted that those who submitted should accept baptism. His chief opponent was the Westphalian chieftain Widukind who, in 778, raided the east bank of the Rhine up to Coblenz, and, in 782, destroyed a Frankish punitive force in Saxony. The second of these exploits was atrociously revenged in the massacre of Ver den, where Charles put to the sword no less than 4,500 Saxon captives in one day. In 785 Widukind submitted upon terms and was baptized, after Charles had wintered in Saxony, and had har ried the land continuously for some months. After this year the chief centres of resistance were the marshes on the left bank of the lower Elbe and Nordalbingia (Schleswig). To these districts Charles applied in 799 and 804 a policy of deportations, trans planting combatants and non-combatants alike to other parts of his empire. He legislated for the conquered lands on more than one occasion. His Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae (probably of 785) denounces penalties of the severest kind against idolators and those who wrong churches or ecclesiastics; it also obliges the whole population to pay tithes to the Church. His Capitulare Saxonicum (797), issued after consultation with representatives of the Saxons, modifies in some respects the customary law of the race, to make it conformable with Frankish law. The custom ary law itself is recorded in his Lex Saxonum, of uncertain date. Charles founded in Saxony the bishoprics of Munster, Minden, Osnabruck, Paderborn and Bremen. He appointed Saxon nobles as his counts, and required them to hold law-courts in the Frank ish manner. He directed the clergy to report to himself those counts who perverted the course of justice. In or before 797 he began to send his missi dominici to perambulate in Saxony. No public assembly of the Saxons was lawful unless convoked by these officials. Under this system Saxony was tranquil after 804. In the ninth century the Saxons, while retaining much of their primitive law and culture, became fervently Christian and thor oughly reconciled to Frankish rule.
Bavaria was annexed by Charles more easily and earlier than Saxony, Tassilo, the last Bavarian duke of the Agilolfing line re ceived the duchy in 748 from the hands of Pepin III., to whom he took the oath of fealty; but he persistently absented himself from the annual assembly, and took no part in the campaigns of Pepin or of Charles. Under pressure he renewed his fealty in 781 and 787. But on the second occasion he only took the oath when the Frankish host was on the march to invade Bavaria, and in 788 he was indicted before the assembly for conspiring with the Avars. His life was spared, but he was relegated to a monastery, and Bavaria was divided between Frankish counts. In the 9th century the Bavarians were the chief support of the East Frank ish monarchy and Regensburg was the chief residence of Lewis the German. As the master of Bavaria Charles came into collision with the Avars, who had been settled in the Hungarian steppes since 568. In 791 he harried their western lands, between the rivers Enns and Raab. The fortified camp (Ring) of the Avar Khan was sacked in 795 by the Margrave Eric of Friuli, and to tally destroyed by Pepin, the second son of Charles in 796. After this disaster the Avars sent to Aachen certain of their chiefs who made peace and accepted baptism. Bishop Arno of Salzburg was commissioned by Charles to convert the Avar nation, and in 8o5 the Khan, finding himself hard pressed by the Slays, became a Christian and placed himself under the emperor's protection.
More celebrated, but historically less important, than this east erly expansion of Frankish power is the campaigning with which Charles and his lieutenants harassed the Arabs of northern Spain. In 778 Charles himself commanded an expedition against Saragossa. It was a failure, since he did not receive the support which he had expected from some rebellious emirs. As he was re treating through the Pyrenees his rear-guard was destroyed, not by the Arabs, but by the Christian Basques of Pampeluna, whom he had exasperated by destroying the walls of that city. Einhard the biographer of Charles, treats this disaster as insignificant; but the fate of Roland, the Warden of the Breton march, who fell at Roncesvaux with other famous warriors (Aug. 778), passed into legend and song. To repair his relations with the Spanish Christians Charles took their side in the Adoptianist controversy, when they indicted the archbishop of Toledo as a heretic. He de sired to create a Frankish march on the south slope of the Pyre nees, as an outwork for the defence of Narbonne and Septimania; and in this object he succeeded. In 8o1 Barcelona was captured by his son Lewis with the help of Count William of Toulouse, a hero whose name, like that of Roland, lives in mediaeval epic. In 807 Pampeluna accepted the protection of Charles and became the second bastion of the "Spanish Mark," which effectively defended both the western and the eastern passes of the Pyrenees.
Only thrice between 774 and 779 did Charles revisit Italy. In each case his primary object was to tighten his hold upon the Lombard kingdom. In 775 he crushed a Lombard rebellion in which the dukes of Friuli, Chiusi and Spoleto were supported by their compatriot, the independent ruler of Benevento ; Rotgaud of Friuli lost his duchy, and Hildebrand of Spoleto, who had placed himself under the Pope's protection in 773, was forced to become a royal vassal. In 78o and in 787 Charles crossed the Alps to assert his supremacy over Benevento, an object, which, as al ready noted, he did not completely realize. During the second of these three visits he induced Pope Hadrian to crown his sons Pepin and Lewis as kings of Italy and Aquitaine. The Teutonic lands he reserved for himself and for his eldest son and namesake. These arrangements suggest that Italian affairs did not occupy the first place in his thoughts and calculations ; and it is significant that, even after his imperial coronation, he held to the plan of 780. In this same year, while still in Italy he accepted the sug gestion of the Empress Irene that his eldest daughter Rotrude should marry Irene's son and ward, the young Constantine VI. But Charles repudiated this arrangement in 787, probably because Irene and her son in that year induced the Seventh Council of Nicaea to restore image worship in the Greek Church, and called upon the Latin Church to imitate a policy which Charles and the Frankish clergy regarded as superstitious and absurd. Pope Hadrian, whose legates were present at the Council of Nicaea, agreed with its decision, but his wishes were ignored by the king. In 794 Charles held a council of the Frankish Church at Frank furt to refute the worshippers of images. It was attended by Papal envoys and representatives of the Italian, Spanish, and English clergy. The arguments on which Charles and his advisers relied are set forth in the Libri Carolini, four tracts composed in the years 789-791 by the king's orders, and published in his name. It is uncertain whether Charles was inspired by religious zeal or by a desire to discredit the Greek empire. The Libri Carolini ex pressly dispute the right of Constantine VI. to be regarded as the lawful heir of the Imperium Romanum; but there is no other evidence to suggest that Charles at this time coveted the imperial dignity. Perhaps the long struggle for the extirpation of Saxon idolatry was responsible for the vigour with which he and the Frankish Church pursued this controversy. There was no irremedi able rupture of relations with the Greek empire; for in 798 Irene sent ambassadors to Aachen to inform Charles that Constantine VI. had been deposed and that she had been acknowledged as her son's successor. Among the Frankish clergy it appears to have been the accepted view that Constantine was infamously treated and that a woman was incapable of holding the empire. There is nothing to suggest that Irene's ambassadors were discourteously received. But in 800 Charles allowed himself to be crowned as emperor at Rome by Pope Leo III.
The secret history of this coronation, and the motives of those who counselled it, can only be conjectured. Leo III., the succes sor of Hadrian, was freely elected by the Roman clergy and people in 795. Charles readily acknowledged the validity of the election, but until 799 we hear of no further correspondence be tween the papal and the Frankish courts. In 799 a Roman fac tion, who accused Leo of adultery and perjury, endeavoured to get rid of him. Brutally assaulted in the streets of Rome, he nar rowly escaped the loss of tongue and eyes and was confined in a Roman monastery ; but his attendants succeeded in conveying him to the Duke of Spoleto for protection. Leo's character was unfavourably judged by some of the Frankish clergy; for which reason Charles declined to reinstate him until the accusations of his enemies were disproved. In July 799 Leo was brought to the king at Paderborn, ostensibly as an honoured guest, and remained there for some days. He was finally sent back to Rome, escorted by a commission of archbishops, bishops and counts, who held a judicial enquiry and reported that nothing had been proved against the Pope. In Nov. 800 the king appeared at Rome, and spent more than three weeks in reviewing the situation. His chief difficulty, we are told, was still to decide how he would deal with the pope. No accuser dared to state a case against Leo, but it is evident that he was not generally popular in Rome. At last, on Dec. 23, Leo cleared himself in St. Peter's church, taking a sol emn oath upon the Gospels, that he was innocent. On Christmas Day, after celebrating mass in the same church, he crowned Charles as emperor in the presence of the Roman people who were evidently not taken by surprise, since they acclaimed Charles in the set form of words which was used to welcome a patrician. Two theologians of the emperor, Anghilbert and Alcuin prophesied obscurely (in prose and verse) the imperial coronation some months before it actually occurred. Charles may have hesi tated to run the risk of a war with Constantinople ; but the biog rapher's statement, that he was crowned unawares and against his will, is not convincing.
Once crowned, he showed himself ready and eager to come to some arrangement with Constantinople. In 8o1 he made an offer of marriage to Irene, but she was deposed shortly after his envoys arrived at the Greek court. They were well treated by her suc cessor Nicephorus I., who made counter-proposals for an honour able peace between West and East. Charles responded amicably and proposed a boundary line which would have given him Ve netia, and the coast towns of Istria and Dalmatia. But Nicephorus preferred to fight for these newly lost provinces, and there en sued a naval war in the Adriatic, conducted on the Frankish side by King Pepin. After the death of Pepin (July 8, 81o) Charles hurriedly offered peace, with the surrender of all his claims to the disputed territories. The offer was accepted by Michael Rhangabe, who succeeded Nicephorus in 811; and in 812 Greek envoys came to Aachen and saluted the emperor of the West as Basileus, thus acknowledging the equality of the two empires. In view of these facts it cannot reasonably be contended that Charles regarded the Roman empire as indivisible.
In 8o6 Charles, in accordance with Frankish custom, drew up a scheme for the partition of his realms between his three legitimate sons. It provided that each son should be absolute in his own sphere, and did not designate a successor to the empire. But in 813, when peace had been made with Constantinople, and Charles the Young and Pepin were dead, he nominated Lewis the Pious as his consort and successor in the empire, at the same time as signing Italy to Bernhard the son of Pepin. Charles thus asserted the hereditary character of the empire. It is remarkable that the coronation of Lewis took place, not at Rome, but at Aachen, and that Charles himself placed the crown upon his son's head, as if with the intention of showing to the world that the pope had no voice in the disposal of the empire. Next to the Greeks the Danes were the chief enemies with whom Charles had to deal in his last years. A Danish kingdom was already in existence, and it men aced his north-eastern frontier; Danish pirates were already har rying the British Isles. In 8o9 Charles built a fort at Itzehoe to protect the right bank of the Elbe. In 811 and 812 he concluded treaties with Danish kings. But he relied especially upon his North sea fleet which was based upon Boulogne, and built in his shipyards at Ghent. He ordered that ships should be found for defence of all ports and navigable rivers on his northern coasts. He also maintained patrols in the Mediterranean from Narbonne to the mouth of the Tiber, to guard against the descents of Arab pirates, but the danger from this side did not engage his personal attention. By capitularies of 802 and 811 he made naval service obligatory on all the inhabitants of maritime provinces, even upon the magnates. It was no fault of his that the Franks failed to create a strong naval power against the evil days that were in sight.
The reign of Charles witnessed a revival of arts and letters in Francia. Illuminators, goldsmiths, workers in ivory and metal reached a high degree of skill, although the higher arts were still neglected, and the emperor's chapel at Aachen was adorned with pillars and bronze portals fetched from Rome and Ravenna. Among the Frankish clergy scholarship was encouraged in the reign of Pepin, by the king himself and by the Englishman Boni face, archbishop of Mainz. Charles stimulated the clergy to fur ther efforts. He himself studied Latin grammar with Peter of Pisa, rhetoric and dialectic and astronomy with Alcuin of York, and he listened with attention while his clerks read to him works of his tory or St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. The effect of classical studies, upon Charles himself and his advisers, is revealed in his legislation which is more grammatically and intelligently com posed than those of his predecessors. He aspired to emulate the legislators of Constantinople. Though he never attempted to make a code, he revised the laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks, and caused those of the Saxons, Thuringians and Frisians to be written down. His Capitularies, which were binding on his subjects without respect of race, supply a remarkable conspectus of Frankish institutions. In these texts we can study the duties of his counts and missi, the functions of the local law courts and assemblies, the law of vassalage, the rights of exempted estates (immunitates), the composition of the national host; the Capita lare de Villis even supplies full information concerning the man agement of the royal demesnes. The credit for the details of this legislation is due to the arch-chaplain and the clerks of the royal chaplain, ecclesiastics who were trained in seminaries of the Carlovingian renaissance. By his Admonitio Generalis (789) Charles required that every bishop should test the theological education of his priests, and that reading schools should be every where established. For a select minority a higher type of educa tion was provided in cathedral schools, such as those of Orleans and Lyons, and in such monastic schools as those of Tours, Corbie, St. Riquier, Metz and St. Wandrille. The Palace school, a Merovingian institution, was reorganized by Alcuin in the years 782-796. In it were educated the emperor's children, the sons of great nobles and also some ecclesiastics who afterwards did much to promote the new studies, as for example Adalhard of Corbie and Anghilbert of St. Riquier. The Palace school declined after the death of Charles, but the new cathedral and monastic schools produced a remarkable race of literati. To the libraries founded in connection with such schools we are indebted for the oldest ex tant manuscripts of Caesar, Sallust, Lucretius, Tacitus and Sue tonius, and many of the works of Cicero. In the emperor's life time, and with his encouragement, the text of the Latin Vulgate was restored to a purer form by Alcuin and other scholars. One of these recensions not the work of Alcuin, was officially recom mended to the Frankish bishops by the encyclical De Emenda tione Librorum (c. 787). The scholars whom Charles patronized are well remembered as excellent grammarians. In their hands Latin became once more a polished and flexible medium of lit erary expression. The thoughts which they expressed in copious prose and verse are of ten banal pleasantries or insipid exhorta tions. Alcuin's letters, a few topical poems by Alcuin and Theo dulf of Orleans, and the biography of Charles by Einhard, one of the royal clerks, are the cream of this Carolingian literature.
At Aachen he built a palace (of which no trace is left) and a chapel which, with many alterations and restorations, is incorpo rated in the existing cathedral. He commenced to build another palace at Ingelheim near Mainz, which was the great bridge-head for his armies, and a third at Nymwegen (near the Saxon border) of which the chapel, consecrated by Leo III., is the only relic. For three years, 792-794, he settled at Regensburg, the old Ba varian capital, but this step was taken for political and military reasons. At Aachen he was in his homeland. The forests of the neighbourhood gave him good hunting; with his sons and his no bles and his bodyguards he bathed and swam in the hot springs which still feed the Kaiserbad. In his dress, as in his pastimes, he affected the old Frankish mode, and he disdained elaborate ban quets, preferring a simple, heavy meal at which the staple dish was broiled venison, served to him on the spit by his huntsmen. When business of State was in hand he was prompt, methodical and labourious. He prided himself on the magnificent furniture of his chapel and on the decorum with which its services were celebrated. He kept to the end his interest in scholarship and in theology, and left a large library of manuscripts. But his private life was lax in one respect. Though a devoted husband to three of his four wives, he had illegitimate offspring by five mistresses. His court was dissolute and the conduct of his daughters caused grave scandals.
Charles died on Jan. 28, 814, of ter four years of failing health, from an attack of pleurisy. He was buried in the chapel at Aachen, probably in the antique sarcophagus which is preserved there ; this at all events is the coffin in which his bones were found in 1165, when they were disinterred by Frederick Bar barossa.