CHARLEMAGNE,

born April 2, c. 742 died Jan. 28, 814, Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, Austrasia also called Charles I, byname Charles The Great, French Charles Le Grand, Latin Carolus Magnus, German Karl Der Grosse king of the Franks (768814) and king of the Lombards (774814), who united by conquest nearly all the Christian lands of western Europe and ruled as emperor (800814). (He is reckoned as Charles I of both the Holy Roman Empire and France.) Besides expanding his political power, he also brought about a cultural revival in his empire, called the Carolingian Renaissance. A brief account of the life and works of Charlemagne follows; for a full biography, see Charlemagne. A member of the Carolingian dynasty and the son of Pepin III the Short, Charlemagne acceded to the Frankish throne in 768, gaining sole control upon the death of his brother in 771. He conquered the Lombards and the pagan Saxons, whom he Christianized. His continued expansion of the Frankish state, his close alliance with the papacy, and the papal desire for a western emperor to counter Byzantium resulted in the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. His court at Aix-la-Chapelle became an intellectual, political, and administrative centre after 794. After death his body was borne in a sarcophagus to the church that he had had built. It remained there undisturbed until its formal translation in 1165 on the occasion of Charles's canonization at the request of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa by the antipope Paschal III. The popular cult of Charlemagne was fairly widely observed in Germany and France during the Middle Ages, so that he is now regarded as having been informally beatified. Legend fastened on Charles as soon as he was dead. It helped to create an image that neither he nor his successors could match. His reign overshadowed the future, and most of the problems that his successors had to face were implicit in the legacy that he left them. Additional reading Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni Imperatoris: The Life of Charlemagne, trans. from Latin by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow and Edwin H. Zeydel (1972, reissued 1985), is the famous biography by one of Charlemagne's closest collaboratorsa character analysis rather than an account of events. Donald A. Bullough, The Age of Charlemagne, 2nd ed. (1973, reissued 1980), is a modern presentation for the general reader by a good specialist. D.A. Bullough, Europae Pater: Charlemagne and His Achievement in the Light of Recent Scholarship, The English Historical Review, 85:59105 (1970), reports on contemporary scholarship. Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire (1957, reprinted 1991; originally published in German, 1949), is a broad treatment. Wolfgang Braunfels (ed.), Karl der Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, 3rd ed., 5 vol. (196768), is an international compendium of 74 contributions by various experts (mostly in German with some articles in French, English, and Italian). Friedrich Heer, Charlemagne and His World (1975), provides a well-illustrated life for the general reader. Robert Folz, Coronation of Charlemagne (1974; originally published in French, 1964), contains a history of his antecedents and a study of his influence on both contemporaries and successors. Susan E. Farrier, The Medieval Charlemagne Legend: An Annotated Bibliography (1993), lists more than 2,700 titles concerning Charlemagne and his era, as well as the legend. Peter Classen The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica