How Charlemagne beat medieval Europe into submission

How do you write a detailed biography of someone who lived more than 1,200 years ago? Someone, that is, for whom you have almost no personal correspondence, no diaries, no chatty memoirs by friends – and of course, no reports in newspapers, as people would not get round to inventing those for another 800 years.

Well, it helps if the person you are biographising was an important ruler, and it helps a lot if he was Charlemagne, by far the most important European ruler to emerge after the end of the Roman Empire.

Powerful people always leave a paper trail – or, in this case, a parchment trail. And it’s surely no exaggeration to say that Charlemagne became, in his lifetime (748-814) one of the two or three most powerful men in the world.

He was born to rule: his family had been hereditary senior ministers to the Frankish kings, but had managed to edge the last of those kings off the throne, taking his place. The kingdom included much of northern and eastern France, plus a slice of the German lands, up to the Rhine; more French land was conquered during Charlemagne’s teenage years. All this was then inherited by him and his younger brother, who conveniently died a few years later. So, at the age of 23, Charlemagne automatically became the dominant ruler in Europe. But he didn’t stop there. Within a few years he had added northern Italy to his portfolio, by defeating the kings of Lombardy.

Then there was a big expedition into Muslim Spanish territory, beyond the Pyrenees (which ended badly, ambushed by Basques on the return journey – this was the episode commemorated much later in the Song of Roland). Over several decades he campaigned against the Saxons, a large group of warlike tribes in the German lands, eventually forcing a kind of political submission out of them. And, by the end, Bavaria, Austria and even western Hungary had fallen into his hands.

Charlemagne’s political horizons were broader than that. He received envoys from Muslim rulers in both Spain and Baghdad: the latter sent him an elephant, called Abul Abbas, which he took on some of his military campaigns.

He negotiated with the Byzantine dowager Empress, promising to marry one of his daughters to the young Emperor – and infuriating her when he changed his mind. (Another little war swiftly followed.) There was even a plan to marry one of his sons to an Anglo-Saxon princess, the daughter of King Offa; but Charlemagne pulled out when he began to feel that the provincial mini-king was getting ideas above his station.

This was very much a hands-on ruler, who, when not leading an army, travelled tirelessly around his domains. He was well over 6ft tall – somewhere between the heights of Henry VIII and Charles de Gaulle, both of whom were seen in their time as almost freakishly towering figures. Early descriptions say that he loved hunting and (more surprisingly) swimming. And there was one other physical activity that he seems to have enjoyed. He had 19 children, by his five wives and seven or so other partners. Wife number three died aged 25, poor woman, having produced nine children in 11 years of marriage.

Some of these details come from an early biography; some from Latin poems and other documents written by the intellectuals – including Alcuin of York, the most brilliant Anglo-Saxon of the time – whom Charlemagne gathered at his court. There is one personal letter from him to wife number four, and one fierce, threatening letter to Alcuin, ticking him off for disobeying orders.

But otherwise most of what we know about this extraordinary ruler has to be teased out of more impersonal or official documents: court-sponsored “annals”, monastic chronicles, collections of legal decrees, and charters granting estates to monasteries and churches. General readers, who have never looked under the bonnet of medieval history writing, will have little notion of just how difficult it is to derive even a clear narrative of events, let alone a convincing explanation of why they happened, from this sort of material. Studying Janet L Nelson’s new biography of Charlemagne will give them a very good idea. Here is an authority in the field who has spent much of her career locating hidden significances in these stubbornly resistant sources. Gradually, as a result, we get a clearer idea of Charlemagne’s commitment to certain principles – his religious views, for instance, or his trust in the value of written law.

But although I learnt a lot from this book, I have to say that for non-medievalists (of whom I am one) it will be a bit of a bumpy ride. The little side debates with other historians can become distracting; Latin terms come thick and fast, sometimes untranslated; and on some points, such as the theological heresy known as Adoptionism, it is apparently assumed that we already know what the central issue was. The “big picture” can become obscured, while some of the basic background – the social and economic systems that prevailed in Charlemagne’s domains, for example – is not really filled in.

Nelson tries hard to address the general reader – perhaps slightly too hard (“no-brainer”, “wake-up call”, “the buck stopped with him”). She also announces at the start that she will try to avoid the tendency of medievalists to use “must-haves, perhapses and probablies”, instead just telling the story as she sees it. That was a strange decision, given that all serious history writing has to distinguish between different degrees of certainty when making deductions from patchy evidence. But it quickly turns out that Prof Nelson is a serious history writer after all: I noted “surely”, “would have”, “perhaps”, “seems likely”, “probable” and “might have” before I gave up counting.

There are photo-illustrations, family trees, and many maps (some of them puzzling, as they teem with details not mentioned in the text). Experts, I am very sure, will hail this as a major work, a summa (that habit of using untranslated Latin is catching) of historical scholarship. And general readers who stay the course will learn a huge amount, and come away with a strong sense of two things: the sheer dynamism of this exceptional man, and the sheer difficulty of working out, from such distant records, what he really felt and thought.

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