Best Books on the Carolingian Empire and Charlemagne

Charlemagne is the man who built Europe. That is an overstatement in the way that all shorthand is an overstatement, but it contains more truth than most. When Charlemagne died in 814 after ruling the Frankish kingdom for 46 years, he had united most of western continental Europe under a single ruler for the first time since the western Roman Empire collapsed in 476. He had done it through sustained military campaigning that lasted most of his adult life. And he had created an administrative and ecclesiastical framework that his successors dismantled but that left lasting marks on how the continent organized itself. If you want to understand why France, Germany, and the Low Countries developed the way they did, why the Catholic Church exercised the power it did in medieval Europe, and why European rulers kept invoking Rome for a thousand years, the Carolingian period is where those patterns crystallize. ## Who Charlemagne Was He was born around 742, probably in what is now Belgium or western Germany. He inherited the Frankish kingdom jointly with his brother Carloman in 768 and became sole ruler when Carloman died two years later under circumstances that contemporaries noted but did not investigate too carefully. He spent the next three decades in almost continuous warfare: against the Saxons in a campaign that lasted thirty years and involved mass forced conversions and the massacre of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782; against the Avars in the eastern Danube basin; against the Lombards in Italy, whose king he deposed; against Muslim rulers in northern Spain, which gave the later medieval imagination the legend of Roland. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned him Emperor of the Romans in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The coronation was politically complex. Charlemagne later claimed he was surprised by it, which almost certainly was not true, but the claim reflected genuine ambiguity about what the title meant and how it affected his relationships with both the Pope and the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople who already held a prior claim to the Roman imperial title. ## The Best Books to Read **Charlemagne: Father of a Continent** by Alessandro Barbero is the most readable scholarly biography in English. Barbero is an Italian medieval historian who writes with unusual narrative drive. The book covers the military campaigns, the court at Aachen, the administrative reforms, the intellectual program of the Carolingian Renaissance, and the personal life of a man who had multiple wives and concubines and a complex relationship with his daughters. Barbero is honest about both Charlemagne's achievements and the coercion that underlay them. **The Two Lives of Charlemagne** is a translation of the two major contemporary sources: Einhard's biography, written by a courtier who knew Charlemagne personally, and Notker the Stammerer's later collection of anecdotes. Einhard modeled his text on Suetonius and gives a portrait that is sympathetic but not hagiographic. Notker is more legendary but captures how Charlemagne was remembered by the generation after his death. Reading both together gives you the historical person and the myth simultaneously. **The Carolingian World** by Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Simon MacLean is the scholarly overview for readers who want institutional depth alongside narrative. The book covers the entire Carolingian period from Pepin the Short through the dissolution of the empire after Louis the Pious, with detailed chapters on government, the Church, the aristocracy, and peasant life. It is the best guide to how the empire actually functioned as a political system. ## The Carolingian Renaissance One of the less well-known aspects of the Carolingian period is the sustained effort to revive Latin literacy and classical learning at the court and in the monasteries. Charlemagne brought scholars from across Europe to Aachen, most notably Alcuin of York, and established a palace school. The reform of Latin orthography and the development of Carolingian minuscule script, the clear, legible handwriting style that replaced the cramped scripts of the early medieval period, were products of this program. Almost everything we have of classical Latin literature survives because Carolingian monks copied it. The texts of Virgil, Cicero, and Livy that Renaissance humanists rediscovered in the fifteenth century had been preserved in ninth-century scriptoria operating under Carolingian patronage. This is not a trivial contribution. It means that the intellectual heritage of the Roman world survived the early medieval period specifically because of a royal program of cultural conservation. ## The Division of the Empire Charlemagne's empire did not survive him by long in its unified form. His son Louis the Pious was a weaker ruler who faced repeated rebellions from his own sons. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the empire among three of Louis's grandsons along lines that roughly prefigured the later boundaries of France, Germany, and a middle kingdom that eventually fragmented into Burgundy, Lorraine, and northern Italy. The division is significant not just as a political event but as a cultural one. The different trajectories of the western and eastern Frankish kingdoms produced different vernacular languages, different institutional arrangements for royal power, and different relationships with the papacy. The history of medieval Europe is substantially a history of the Carolingian inheritance being divided, contested, and renegotiated over the following centuries. ## Further Reading For more books on medieval European history, browse the full [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.