BOOKS
The man and the legend
David Crane celebrates the genuinely pious emperor
who united medieval Europe by fire and swordKing and Emperor:
A New Life of Charlemagne
by Janet L. Nelson
Allen Lane, £25, pp. 660
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any
idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s
endorsement — ‘a masterclass in the prac-
tice of history’ — is as good a description
of this brilliant new biography of Charle-
magne as we are likely to get.
The broader contours of the life will be
familiar to many readers, but what we have
here — pace Janet Nelson — is less the ‘old-
fashioned’ biography that she claims but
a wonderfully generous sharing of knowl-
edge that combines the conversational tones
of the ideal classroom with the intensity of
the trained anatomist, poised, knife in hand,
to reveal the musculature beneath the skin.
Of course, the one thing that the anato-
mist cannot do is to bring the corpse back
to life; but Nelson needs no reminder of
that. There are historians who would argue
that a biography of Charlemagne is sim-
ply not possible; and while her book goes
a long way to refute the idea, she is the
first to recognise that the moment one
begins ‘to feel at home’ with him is the
moment ‘to feel wary’. His values and pri-
orities ‘are not ours’, she warns: ‘The expe-
rience of finding the early Middle Ages
strange... is, for readers as well as writers of
books about the period, the beginning of
wisdom.’
It is not just the ‘cultural distance’ that
is the challenge — the absolute ‘otherness’
of a man who was equally at home ravag-
ing Europe or thrashing out the theolog-
ical niceties of the ‘Adoptionist’ heresy
— but the nature of the evidence about
Charlemagne’s life. Within 20 years of the
emperor’s death, Einhard had written his
enduringly readable Vita Karoli Magni;
but for the modern historian, suspicious of
Einhard’s bias and his silences, and starved
of the kind of direct insights that a later
period might produce, the answers have
to be sought among the charters, letters,
capitularies, papal records, annals — ‘offi-
cial’ and ‘independent’ — and surviving
physical remains that provide the patchy
and sometimes ‘treacherous’ evidence.
And what a life it was! Charles, the son
of Pippin and the grandson of Charles
Martel, was born in 748 into a warrior fam-
ily that over three generations had moved
from being the power behind the Frank-
ish throne to the throne itself. In 751 his
father deposed and tonsured the last of an
increasingly irrelevant line of Merovingian
kings, and on his death in 768 — following
an infallible Pippinid recipe for fraternalstrife — divided his kingdom between his
two sons, Charles and Carloman.
The convenient death of Carloman just
three years later, and the rather more sinis-
ter disappearance of his wife and sons from
all records — the Princes in the Tower
come to Nelson’s mind — solved that prob-
lem; and the reunification of the Frank-
ish kingdom was only the beginning of
a programme of territorial expansion that
would extend Charles’s power southward
to the Spanish March and the foot of Italy
and eastward to the Danube and the fring-
es of the Byzantine empire.
If Charles had been nothing but
a supremely successful warlord his name
would hardly resonate in the way it does;
and yet there is no hiding from the fact that
war was at the heart of his reign, conquest
its driving force, and plunder — particu-
larly the fabulous riches of the Avars —
not just an important economic resource
but the crucial glue that bound an empire
obsessed with ‘loyalty’ together.
There was nothing chivalrous about
these wars either: razing, burning, pillaging,
slaughter, compulsory mass conversions
and migrations were the order of the day.
And perhaps nothing so vividly enforces
a sense of strangeness than that all this
coexisted with a deep and genuine piety.Nobody who has seen Charles’s church at
Aachen could doubt that there was anoth-
er, astonishingly rich side to the Carolin-
gian court world. But it perhaps still needs
stressing that there was nothing hypocriti-
cal about his faith, nothing contradictory
in the directions of his political and reli-
gious agendas, or insincere in his devotion
to justice.
Nor was there anything that a contem-
porary (and it is his impact on his own
times and not a teleological view that
Nelson is interested in here) could baulk
at in the Lateran mosaic, which shows St
Peter, flanked on one side by Pope Leo
III and on the other, banner in hand, by
Charles himself. He is no longer just
the ‘Rex Frankorum’ of 768, but, since
Christmas Day 800, Carolus serenissimus
augustus, ‘crowned by God, great peace-
making emperor governing the Roman
empire and also by God’s mercy king of
the Franks and of the Lombards’.
It is a fine drumroll of a title, and a fit-
ting way to sign off a life lived on a giant
scale. Six foot three tall, the father of
19 children by a succession of wives and
discarded mistresses, the hammer of the
Saxons, the Lombards and the Avars, the
creator of Aachen — there was nothing in
his private or public life small about Karl
der Grosse.
Whether his empire was already in ter-
minal decline before his death divides his-
torians. Whether, finally, anything else can
bring Charles the man rather than Char-
lemagne the legend into the kind of focus
a biographer strives after, Nelson herself
doubts. ‘I have made a journey towards the
Other,’ she concludes. ‘I have not found
him — that would be ridiculously too much
to hope for. But perhaps I have got nearer
to him — and encouraged new generations
of historians to get nearer still.’
Good luck to them, because an equal-
ly fitting, if less modest, postscript might
have been found in the final rhetorical
words given to ‘Karlus’ in Alcuin’s De
Rhetorica: ‘Who would dare say that we
have talked in vain?’‘Th e ex per ien ce of fin ding th e
early Middle Ages strange is the
beginning of wisdom’BOOKS & ARTS