Frankish Empire · c. 748–814

Charlemagne: Facts About the Father of Europe

By William Souef · Published August 19, 2026

Building an empire out of a kingdom

Charlemagne inherited half a Frankish kingdom in 768 and the whole of it in 771 when his brother died. What he did with it was relentless: annual campaigning seasons for four decades. He annexed the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy in 774 at the pope's request, campaigned into Muslim Spain (where the rearguard disaster at Roncesvalles in 778 became, three centuries later, the Song of Roland), absorbed Bavaria, and destroyed the Avar state on the Danube.

The longest and ugliest war was against the Saxons of northern Germany — over thirty years of campaign, revolt and reprisal, with forced baptism as policy and mass execution as punishment. The Verden massacre of 782, in which the Frankish annals themselves record thousands of captives put to death, is not a hostile source's invention. Any honest account of Charlemagne holds this beside the schools and the manuscripts: the same reign produced both.

Christmas Day 800

By 800 Charlemagne ruled more of Europe than anyone since the Western Roman emperors, and the imperial title in the West had been vacant since 476. The occasion was a papal crisis: Pope Leo III, driven from Rome by enemies who accused him of serious crimes, appealed to Charlemagne, who came to Rome and presided over Leo's exculpation. Two days later, at Christmas Mass in St Peter's, Leo placed a crown on his head and the congregation acclaimed him Emperor of the Romans.

Einhard reports that Charlemagne was displeased — that he would have stayed away had he known. Historians read this variously as genuine irritation, later spin, or both: the title was immensely valuable, but receiving it from the pope's hands set a precedent that emperors depended on popes, a question that would poison European politics for centuries. It also annoyed Constantinople, where a Roman emperor already existed and regarded the western title as usurpation.

The Carolingian Renaissance, and what survived him

Charlemagne's most durable achievement was administrative and intellectual rather than military. He gathered scholars from across Europe — Alcuin of York the most influential — to run a palace school, standardise Latin, correct liturgical texts, and above all copy manuscripts. The new clear script developed in his scriptoria, Carolingian minuscule, was so legible that Renaissance humanists later mistook it for ancient Roman writing and revived it; modern lowercase type descends from it directly. A large share of surviving classical Latin literature exists because Carolingian monks copied dying late-antique manuscripts.

The empire itself proved fragile. Charlemagne died at Aachen in January 814 and was succeeded by his son Louis the Pious, whose sons fought each other and divided the inheritance at Verdun in 843 into western, middle and eastern realms. Those lines are the distant ancestors of France and Germany, and the middle kingdom's fragments — Lorraine, Burgundy, the Low Countries, northern Italy — became Europe's contested seam for the next thousand years. Charlemagne is called the Father of Europe in a literal sense: both of Europe's cultural unity and of its most persistent division.

Frequently asked questions

Was Charlemagne really illiterate?

Not illiterate — Einhard, who knew him, says he could read and spoke Latin fluently alongside his Frankish tongue, and understood Greek. What he apparently never mastered was writing by hand: Einhard describes him keeping tablets under his pillow to practise forming letters, having started too late in life. For a ruler of that era, being able to read at all was unusual.

Was Charlemagne French or German?

Neither, because neither existed. He was a Frank, ruling a realm spanning what later became both countries, and his court was at Aachen in modern Germany while his dynasty's heartland lay in modern France and Belgium. Both nations claimed him as a founder in the nineteenth century, which says more about nineteenth-century nationalism than about the eighth century.

Why was being crowned emperor by the pope a problem?

Because it implied the pope had the authority to make emperors — and therefore, potentially, to unmake them. Einhard says Charlemagne was displeased and would have avoided the ceremony had he known. The question of whether imperial power came from God directly or through the papacy became one of the central political conflicts of medieval Europe.