KING AND EMPEROR
A NEW LIFE OF CHARLEMAGNE
In AD 800 the Frankish king Charles the Great was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. ‘Having succeeded his father, Pippin the Short, as co-king of the Franks in 768,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday
Times, ‘he spent the next 46 years extending his rule over an area roughly equivalent to modern France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia.’ He also ‘promoted the liberal arts, patronised great scholars such as the Englishman Alcuin of York, and built a palace-cathedral complex at Aachen that manifested his exalted vision of his own rule’. Jones concluded that ‘for readers who already know a lot about him, or appreciate the sight of a scholar with their sleeves rolled up, there is plenty to savour’, but the ‘occasional flashes of colour amid the scholarly heavy lifting’ mean that this is ‘a book for the university library rather than the sun lounger’.
Noel Malcolm, in his Daily
Telegraph review, made much the same point. ‘For non-medievalists (of whom I am one) it will be a bit of a bumpy ride’, but ‘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’. For David Aaronovitch in the Times, Nelson ‘understands the era and is romanced by it... Yet she also clearly sees her subjects as she writes about them, walking around in front of her. At the outset she describes the 6ft 2in Charlemagne as “a man of flesh-and-blood, a family man who had at least nine sexual partners [and] fathered at least 19 children”.’