THE MAN WHO MADE EUROPE
Allen Lane 704pp £30
The Week Bookshop £24.99 (incl. p&p)
“Few names resonate in Europe like that of Charlemagne,” said Levi Roach in the Literary Review. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the great medieval ruler built up “one of the largest land empires in the continent’s history”. He was already fêted during his lifetime as pater Europae (“father of Europe”), and the legend of “Charles the Great” (as Charlemagne means in Old French) has lingered in European memory ever since. In the 12th and 13th centuries, this “man for all seasons” was held up as “Europe’s first crusader”. In the 19th and 20th centuries, he was seen as a proto-nationalist. More recently, he has become “the poster boy of the European project”. Yet for all Charlemagne’s prestige, English-language biographies have been in short supply, which makes this book, by the eminent medieval historian Janet L. Nelson, a “welcome” addition. Formidably researched but also “deeply human”, King and Emperor is a “superb” biography.
“What a life it was,” said David Crane in The Spectator. Charles, son of Pippin, was born in 748 into a warrior family that had “moved from being the power behind the Frankish throne to the throne itself”. When Pippin died in 768, he divided his kingdom between Charles and his brother Carloman – an “infallible” recipe for strife. Handily, though, Carloman died of natural causes three years later; rather more sinisterly, his wife and sons then followed suit. Charles spent the next four decades dramatically expanding his territory, said Dan Jones in The Sunday Times: by his death in 814, it encompassed an area roughly equivalent to France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Slovenia. In 800, he earned the “most precious reward”: Pope Leo III crowned him Holy Roman Emperor. Charles wasn’t just a ruthless expansionist, said Noel Malcolm in The Daily Telegraph. “Freakishly” tall (he was well over six foot), he was a “hands-on ruler”, a patron of the arts and a keen huntsman and swimmer. “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.” Experts will rightly hail this as a major work, but some of its features may tax the patience of non-medievalists: the “little side debates with other historians”; the untranslated Latin terms. Those who “stay the course” will learn a huge amount, however, 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”.