The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Spot the real Charlemagne
Soldier, scholar, lover, swine – can we ever sift fact from fiction about the King of the Franks? By Mary Wellesley
When he was seven years old, in 755AD, the future Emperor Charlemagne was present at the ritual removal of the body of Saint Germanus (c378-c448AD) to a new tomb. According to a later, ninth-century source, attendants struggled to dislodge the saint’s weighty sarcophagus from its position. At this point, the coffin “moved of its own accord”. As the assembled crowd marvelled at the miracle, the young Charlemagne “slipped down by accident into the hole” where he “soon lost [his]… first tooth”.
The story, like many about Charlemagne – the warrior and politician who unified Europe under his Frankish rule in the eighth century – is an uneasy mix of truth and hagiography.
Modern children await the arrival of a fairy after the loss of a tooth. Charlemagne’s story is perhaps no less outlandish; the challenge for his biographer is knowing how to untangle fact from fiction when the sources can be thin on the ground.
In her impressive new biography, Janet L Nelson meticulously sifts all the available evidence. At the start she notes (a little terrifyingly) that some 7,000 charters survive from his reign. You can believe she has looked at every single one, so thorough and expansive is this work of scholarship. Charlemagne is not actually born until page 67 – this is a biography that seeks to place the man carefully within a larger European context.
And the European context is key because Charlemagne had designs on Europe. Einhard – the emperor’s first biographer – quoted a Greek proverb: “If you have a Frank as a friend, you
won’t have him as a neighbour”. His campaign to subjugate his neighbours was systematic and his friendships – such as those with successive popes – seem to have often been strategic.
Beginning first with the Saxons, then the Lombards, then the people of Bavaria and the Avars (in modern-day Austria and Hungary), he conquered as many of his neighbours as he could. Some campaigns were more successful than others. In 778 he took his army into Spain, taking Pamplona and unsuccessfully besieging Saragossa. On the return journey, as his army crossed the Pyrenees, they were ambushed by Basque forces at Roncesvalles. We get a sense of the Frankish baggage train, lumbering through the mountain passes where they were set upon by the Basque “mountainmen, experts in setting ambushes”. Charlemagne lost many loyal retainers, including Roland – an event later memorialised in the Anglo-Norman poem “La Chanson de Roland”.
In among his military campaigns, he also found time to promote learning and piety. In 787 he addressed a letter to his religious leaders, exhorting them to “advance our churches to a better state and to repair by vigilant study the workshop of learning which now lies almost ruined by the laziness of our predecessors”. In the letter he lamented the “ill-sounding grammatical errors” to be found in the readings for the night office.
There has been some debate about whether this letter is the work of Charlemagne himself, but Nelson argues that it is. If so, it gives us a sense of a man with a scholar’s eye for detail (he was said to have devoted his final days to “correcting books”), as well as a grand vision for his empire. Charlemagne’s story reaches its pinnacle in the year 800 (or 801 according to one source), when he was crowned by Pope Leo III.
For all her careful examination of his military campaigns and political manoeuvrings, Nelson also brings out the human dimension of the story – and there is plenty here. Some details paint her subject in a poor light: he repudiated one of his wives, and his brother and co-heir died in mysterious circumstances. But others make him more relatable. He seems to have had a sense of humour, to have been troubled by the deaths of loyal retainers and to have grieved deeply for the loss of his children.
Nelson refers to her subject as “Charles”, a choice which conveys a sense of him as a man, as distinct from the image of him created in later ages, when he was given the names Karl der Große in Germany and Charles-le-magne in France (which is the origin of his English name). He was white-haired and 6ft 2in, which would have made him very tall for his era. An anonymous Irish poet described him as “king of the Franks, surrounded/ by thousands of tall men, and greatest of them”. He liked to wear long cloaks – he called short cloaks “little napkins” and complained that he could not wear them because “when I go off to empty my bowels, I catch cold because my backside is frozen”.
He lived to be 65; he was the father of 19 children, and the grandfather of at least 11. He had four wives and multiple concubines – some who we know of, and
KING AND EMPEROR: A NEW LIFE OF CHARLEMAGNE
others who are only suggestions in the historical record. On the back page of a charter from 777AD can be found the manumission of “Sigrada, ancilla nostra” (Sigrada, our handmaiden). Nelson allows us to imagine who this Sigrada might have been: a concubine? Or perhaps a particularly faithful maidservant, like a wet-nurse? Some sources framed Charlemagne as a man with a considerable sexual appetite. A story written by a monk at the Abbey of Reichenau in southern Germany, within a decade of Charlemagne’s death, describes a vision of the afterlife in which Charlemagne is tormented by a beast that eats his genitals as a punishment for his licentiousness. It is hard to know whether this is simply a parable for a monastic audience, or has some basis of truth.
Nelson uses literary sources adroitly, supplementing more prosaic charter and annalistic evidence with moving poetry. This is appropriate for the biography of an emperor who patronised art and scholarship. He invited the important scholar, Alcuin of York, to his court. Alcuin is seen by some as the architect of the “Carolingian Renaissance” – a period of intellectual and cultural flowering under the reigns of Charlemagne and, latterly, his son, Louis the Pious. In April 783, Queen Hildegard – Charlemagne’s second wife – died giving birth to a daughter, also named Hildegard, who in turn died not long after. Charlemagne commissioned a verse epitaph, which survives in the church of St Arnulf in Metz. It
He liked to wear long cloaks, calling little cloaks ‘short napkins’ that froze his backside