Characters

"Right action is better than knowledge; but in order to do what is right, we must know what is right."

Charles the Great — Charlemagne — was the towering figure of the early Middle Ages, a warrior-king who spent nearly his whole reign on campaign and forged the largest European empire since Rome. Tall, energetic, and restlessly ambitious, he conquered the Lombards of Italy, absorbed Bavaria, destroyed the Avars, and waged a merciless thirty-year war to subdue and Christianise the pagan Saxons — a struggle marked by both his greatest atrocity, the massacre of Verden, and his eventual, total success. But he was far more than a conqueror. He gathered scholars from across Europe to his court, sparking the 'Carolingian Renaissance' that revived learning, standardised the Latin script, and preserved much of the classical heritage. On Christmas Day 800 the Pope crowned him Emperor, reviving the Roman imperial title in the West. When he died in 814, he left an empire that soon fragmented — but an idea of a unified Christian Europe, and a template of Western kingship, that endured for a thousand years. He is remembered as the 'Father of Europe.'

"A man should suffer greatly for his lord."

A Frankish commander and, according to his contemporary biographer, warden of the Breton March, Roland was one of the nobles killed when Basque warriors ambushed and destroyed the rearguard of Charlemagne's army in the pass of Roncevaux in 778. Of the historical man almost nothing else is known — a single line in Einhard's biography records his death. But legend made him immortal. Over the following centuries his death was transformed into the 'Song of Roland,' the great epic of the French Middle Ages, which recast the obscure Basque ambush as a glorious Christian last stand against a vast Muslim army — Roland refusing to sound his horn Oliphant for aid until it was too late, dying a martyr's death with his face turned toward Spain. As a legend he became the model of the loyal, valiant Christian knight, celebrated across medieval Europe.

"Better to die free than to live baptised in chains."

The great leader of Saxon resistance to Charlemagne, Widukind was a nobleman of the Westphalian Saxons who for years personified his people's ferocious struggle to keep their independence and their pagan gods. Again and again, whenever Charlemagne withdrew, Widukind returned from refuge among the Danes to raise fresh revolts, burning churches and cutting down Frankish garrisons — most spectacularly the rising of 782 that destroyed a Frankish army and provoked the Massacre of Verden. But the relentless Frankish machine — its campaigns, deportations, and savage laws — ground the Saxons down. In 785 Widukind at last despaired and submitted, accepting Christian baptism with Charlemagne himself as his godfather. He then vanishes from the record. In later ages, especially in Germany, he was transformed into a national hero — a symbol, variously, of Saxon freedom, of resistance to foreign domination, and, more darkly, of Germanic identity.

"Italy has had Lombard kings for two hundred years."

The last king of the Lombards, who had ruled northern Italy for two centuries, Desiderius found himself outmatched by the rising power of the Franks. His pressure on the papacy — and his sheltering of Charlemagne's rivals — gave Charlemagne, allied with the Pope, the pretext to intervene. Desiderius had even briefly been Charlemagne's father-in-law, before Charlemagne repudiated the Lombard princess he had married, deepening the enmity. When Charlemagne crossed the Alps in 773 and besieged the Lombard capital of Pavia, Desiderius held out through a long winter but was starved into surrender in 774. Deposed and stripped of his kingdom, he was confined to a Frankish monastery for the rest of his days, and the Lombard kingdom passed forever into Charlemagne's empire — ending Lombard rule in Italy after more than two hundred years.

"To Charles, most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-giving Emperor — life and victory!"

The Pope who crowned Charlemagne emperor and helped remake the political order of Europe. Leo III faced fierce opposition in Rome, and in 799 he was physically attacked by a faction of the Roman nobility who tried to blind him and cut out his tongue. He escaped and fled north to Charlemagne, who restored him to his throne. In gratitude — and in a calculated act of statecraft that bound the papacy to Frankish power — Leo placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne's head in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800, proclaiming him Emperor of the Romans. Whether the coronation was Leo's initiative or Charlemagne's, it asserted the papacy's role as the maker of emperors and the independence of the Latin Church from Byzantium, a claim of vast and lasting consequence for the relationship between popes and rulers throughout the Middle Ages.

"The voice of the people is often like the raging of madness — do not heed it."

The greatest scholar of his age and the intellectual architect of the Carolingian Renaissance, Alcuin was an English deacon and teacher from York whom Charlemagne recruited to lead the revival of learning in his empire. As head of the palace school at Aachen, Alcuin gathered a brilliant circle of scholars, reformed education, and oversaw the copying and correction of manuscripts that preserved much of classical Latin literature for posterity. He championed the clear new script — Carolingian minuscule — that made texts legible and is the ancestor of modern lower-case letters. As Charlemagne's trusted friend and adviser, he also argued, against the emperor's harsh Saxon policy, that conversion should come through teaching and persuasion rather than the sword and forced tithes — a rare voice of restraint. His work made Charlemagne's reign a cultural as well as a military turning point, saving the learning of antiquity for the future.

"Bavaria is mine by the right of my forefathers."

The last independent duke of Bavaria and Charlemagne's cousin, Tassilo III ruled a powerful and semi-autonomous duchy and long resisted absorption into the Frankish realm, seeking allies among the Lombards and the Avars. For decades he maintained his independence, presiding over a flourishing Bavarian church and court. But Charlemagne, having conquered all around him, was determined to end the last great independent duchy. In 788 he accused Tassilo of treason and of conspiring with the Avars, hauled him before an assembly, and had him condemned to death — then, in a show of mercy, commuted the sentence and forced him into a monastery, absorbing Bavaria directly into the empire. Tassilo was later made to renounce all claims publicly, ending the independence of Bavaria and the line of its ancient dukes.

"I am the falcon of the Quraysh, who crossed the desert and the sea."

The founder of the independent Emirate of Córdoba in Muslim Spain, Abd al-Rahman I was a Umayyad prince who escaped the massacre of his family by the Abbasids and fled across North Africa to al-Andalus, where in 756 he seized power and established a dynasty that would rule for nearly three centuries. He built the great Mosque of Córdoba and made his realm a rival power in the western Mediterranean. It was the complex politics of Muslim Spain — where local rulers invited Frankish intervention against Córdoba — that drew Charlemagne across the Pyrenees in 778, the campaign that ended in the disaster at Roncevaux. Abd al-Rahman consolidated his emirate against all challengers, Christian and Muslim alike, and his state remained a formidable barrier to Frankish expansion into Spain, confining Charlemagne's gains to the narrow Spanish March.

"The empire is a trust from God, to be kept whole."

The only surviving legitimate son of Charlemagne and his heir, Louis the Pious was made King of Aquitaine as a child and led the Frankish campaigns on the Spanish frontier, capturing Barcelona in 801 and establishing the Spanish March. Devout and well-educated, he succeeded his father as emperor in 814. His reign, however, revealed the fragility of Charlemagne's creation. A sincere but often weak ruler, Louis struggled to hold the vast empire together against the ambitions of his own sons, who repeatedly rebelled against him and against one another over the division of the inheritance. The civil wars of his reign and its aftermath fatally weakened the empire, and within a few years of his death it was formally partitioned by the Treaty of Verdun (843) — the division from which France and Germany would ultimately emerge.