Emperor Charlemagne Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire, King Of the Franks 
Charlemagne was born in Aachen,Prussia.1 Charlemagne's father was King Pepin III (The Short) Carolingian Of The Franks & Mayor Of Austrisia and his mother was Countess Berthe De Laon. His paternal grandparents were Mayor Charles Martel (The Hammer) Carolingian Of The Palace Of Austrasia and Duchess Chrotrude De Treves Of Austrasia; his maternal grandparents were Count Claribert I De Laon and Countess Bertrada Gisele Merovigian Of Lorraine & Merorvia. He had three brothers and six sisters, named Carloman, Pepin, Gilles, Gisela, Bertha, Ade, Bertbelle, Rothaide and Gertrude. He died in Aachen,Prussia.General Notes
Charlemagne was probably born in 742 at Aachen. In 768 he and his brother Carloman inherited the Frankish kingdom (most of present-day France and a part of western Germany) from their father PEPIN THE SHORT. The entire kingdom passed to Charlemagne when Carloman died in 771.
Conquests
Charlemagne inherited great wealth and a strong military organization from his father and brother. He used these assets to double the territory under Carolingian control. In 772 he opened his offensive against the SAXONS, and for more than three decades he pursued a ruthless policy aimed at subjugating them and converting them to Christianity. Almost every year Charlemagne attacked one or another region of Saxon territory. Mass executions--4,500 Saxons were executed on a single day in 782--and deportations were used to discourage the stubborn.
The Saxons proved to be a far more difficult enemy than any of the other peoples subjugated by Charlemagne. For example, the LOMBARDS were conquered in a single extended campaign (773-74), after which Charlemagne assumed the title "king of the Lombards." In 788 he absorbed the duchy of Bavaria, and soon thereafter he launched an offensive against the AVAR empire. The Avars succumbed within a decade, yielding Charlemagne a vast hoard of gold and silver. After one disastrous campaign (778) against the Muslims in Spain, Charlemagne left the southwestern front to his son Louis. The latter (later Emperor LOUIS I), with the help of local Christian rulers, conquered Barcelona in 801 and controlled much of Catalonia by 814.
On Christmas Day, 800, Charlemagne accepted the title of emperor and was crowned by Pope LEO III. For several years after he regarded the imperial title as being of little value. Moreover, he intended to divide his lands and titles among his sons, as was the Frankish custom. At his death on Jan. 28, 814, however, only one son, Louis, survived; Louis therefore assumed control of the entire Frankish empire.
Administration
The internal organization of Charlemagne's empire varied from region to region. In much of what is today France, and especially in the south, the old Roman civitates (fortified cities) served as the focus of most important aspects of political, military, religious, and social organization. Both the count of the city, appointed by Charlemagne as his representative, and the bishop made their respective headquarters in the civitas. The count or his agent led the local army, and the walls of the civitates afforded protection for the inhabitants both of the city and the nearby countryside.
In those parts of the empire which had not been part of the Roman world, Charlemagne made an effort to impose a similar system. He divided newly conquered lands into pagi (districts), which were placed under the jurisdiction of counts who exercised the same kind of administrative powers of their counterparts to the west. Charlemagne also sought to establish these new pagi as dioceses. In frontier areas, Charlemagne often established districts that were essentially military in their purpose and organization; these were called marks or marches.
Local customs were everywhere perpetuated by recognition of traditional laws. The laws, some unwritten, of each of the various peoples of the Carolingian empire, such as Salian Franks, Ripuarian Franks, Romans, Saxons, Lombards, Bavarians, Thuringians, and Jews, were codified; if local codes already existed, they were recognized. This judicial autonomy enjoyed by the several peoples of the empire indicates the diversity that not only existed but flourished under Charlemagne. The emperor did, however, legislate to provide a system by which these various peoples could interact.
The central administration of the empire, like the local administrations, was rudimentary. A palatine court followed Charlemagne on his numerous campaigns; during the later years of his life, when he remained at AACHEN, the court stayed there. Charlemagne also sent missi dominici, high-ranking agents of the central government, from the court to see that his orders, often cast in the form of capitularies (ordinances divided into capitula, or chapters), were enforced. As part of his administrative efforts, Charlemagne sought to standardize weights, measures, and coinage. He also made an attempt to control and develop trade. To these ends he strongly encouraged the development of Jewish communities.
Cultural Development
Charlemagne's concern for administration and his interest in seeing the church function effectively led him to encourage a rudimentary educational system based in monasteries. Thus a small group of clerical and lay administrators attained a useful level of literacy. Charlemagne left the development and implementation of this system largely to ALCUIN. The latter's work led to what some scholars have called the Carolingian Renaissance. At Charlemagne's court a group of scholars was gathered that included men from England, Spain, and Italy, as well as native Franks and probably Jews.
Evaluation
Charlemagne has been credited with great political and humanitarian vision and a devout religious bent; as a result, some have been led to think of his military ventures as crusades. In fact, he was a gluttonous and superstitious illiterate, or semiliterate, who had a considerable capacity for brutality. His accomplishments were due mostly to the energy with which he pursued his military goals and the ruthlessness with which he treated any opponents. Nonetheless, his achievements were considerable, and the effect of his conquests was to spread Roman Christianity across central Europe.
Bernard S. Bachrach
Bibliography: Bullough, Donald A., The Age of Charlemagne (1965); Chamberlin, Russell, The Emperor Charlemagne (1986); Fichtenau, Heinrich, The Carolingian Empire (1964; repr. 1979); Ganshof, F. L., Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans. by Bryce and Mary Lyon (1968); Heer, Friedrich, The World of Charlemagne (1975); Lamb, Harold, Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man (1954).
Charlemagne was probably born in 742 at Aachen. In 768 he and his brother Carloman inherited the Frankish kingdom (most of present-day France and a part of western Germany) from their father PEPIN THE SHORT. The entire kingdom passed to Charlemagne when Carloman died in 771.
Conquests
Charlemagne inherited great wealth and a strong military organization from his father and brother. He used these assets to double the territory under Carolingian control. In 772 he opened his offensive against the SAXONS, and for more than three decades he pursued a ruthless policy aimed at subjugating them and converting them to Christianity. Almost every year Charlemagne attacked one or another region of Saxon territory. Mass executions--4,500 Saxons were executed on a single day in 782--and deportations were used to discourage the stubborn.
The Saxons proved to be a far more difficult enemy than any of the other peoples subjugated by Charlemagne. For example, the LOMBARDS were conquered in a single extended campaign (773-74), after which Charlemagne assumed the title "king of the Lombards." In 788 he absorbed the duchy of Bavaria, and soon thereafter he launched an offensive against the AVAR empire. The Avars succumbed within a decade, yielding Charlemagne a vast hoard of gold and silver. After one disastrous campaign (778) against the Muslims in Spain, Charlemagne left the southwestern front to his son Louis. The latter (later Emperor LOUIS I), with the help of local Christian rulers, conquered Barcelona in 801 and controlled much of Catalonia by 814.
On Christmas Day, 800, Charlemagne accepted the title of emperor and was crowned by Pope LEO III. For several years after he regarded the imperial title as being of little value. Moreover, he intended to divide his lands and titles among his sons, as was the Frankish custom. At his death on Jan. 28, 814, however, only one son, Louis, survived; Louis therefore assumed control of the entire Frankish empire.
Administration
The internal organization of Charlemagne's empire varied from region to region. In much of what is today France, and especially in the south, the old Roman civitates (fortified cities) served as the focus of most important aspects of political, military, religious, and social organization. Both the count of the city, appointed by Charlemagne as his representative, and the bishop made their respective headquarters in the civitas. The count or his agent led the local army, and the walls of the civitates afforded protection for the inhabitants both of the city and the nearby countryside.
In those parts of the empire which had not been part of the Roman world, Charlemagne made an effort to impose a similar system. He divided newly conquered lands into pagi (districts), which were placed under the jurisdiction of counts who exercised the same kind of administrative powers of their counterparts to the west. Charlemagne also sought to establish these new pagi as dioceses. In frontier areas, Charlemagne often established districts that were essentially military in their purpose and organization; these were called marks or marches.
Local customs were everywhere perpetuated by recognition of traditional laws. The laws, some unwritten, of each of the various peoples of the Carolingian empire, such as Salian Franks, Ripuarian Franks, Romans, Saxons, Lombards, Bavarians, Thuringians, and Jews, were codified; if local codes already existed, they were recognized. This judicial autonomy enjoyed by the several peoples of the empire indicates the diversity that not only existed but flourished under Charlemagne. The emperor did, however, legislate to provide a system by which these various peoples could interact.
The central administration of the empire, like the local administrations, was rudimentary. A palatine court followed Charlemagne on his numerous campaigns; during the later years of his life, when he remained at AACHEN, the court stayed there. Charlemagne also sent missi dominici, high-ranking agents of the central government, from the court to see that his orders, often cast in the form of capitularies (ordinances divided into capitula, or chapters), were enforced. As part of his administrative efforts, Charlemagne sought to standardize weights, measures, and coinage. He also made an attempt to control and develop trade. To these ends he strongly encouraged the development of Jewish communities.
Cultural Development
Charlemagne's concern for administration and his interest in seeing the church function effectively led him to encourage a rudimentary educational system based in monasteries. Thus a small group of clerical and lay administrators attained a useful level of literacy. Charlemagne left the development and implementation of this system largely to ALCUIN. The latter's work led to what some scholars have called the Carolingian Renaissance. At Charlemagne's court a group of scholars was gathered that included men from England, Spain, and Italy, as well as native Franks and probably Jews.
Evaluation
Charlemagne has been credited with great political and humanitarian vision and a devout religious bent; as a result, some have been led to think of his military ventures as crusades. In fact, he was a gluttonous and superstitious illiterate, or semiliterate, who had a considerable capacity for brutality. His accomplishments were due mostly to the energy with which he pursued his military goals and the ruthlessness with which he treated any opponents. Nonetheless, his achievements were considerable, and the effect of his conquests was to spread Roman Christianity across central Europe.
Bernard S. Bachrach
Bibliography: Bullough, Donald A., The Age of Charlemagne (1965); Chamberlin, Russell, The Emperor Charlemagne (1986); Fichtenau, Heinrich, The Carolingian Empire (1964; repr. 1979); Ganshof, F. L., Frankish Institutions under Charlemagne, trans. by Bryce and Mary Lyon (1968); Heer, Friedrich, The World of Charlemagne (1975); Lamb, Harold, Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man (1954).
[From Ancestry.com 22592.GED]
Charlemagne known as Rex Francorum et Langobardorum. He was born April 2, 742 in Aachen, Neustrie. Between the years 767 and 814, Charlemagne's title after 800 A.D. was Carolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus et pacificus imperator Romanum gubernans imperium, qui est per misericordium Dei rex Francorum et Langobardorum. It was designed to include the Romas in the Frankish empire without centering the Empire upon them. Charlemagne stressed the royal and Frankish bases for his power. Charlemagne was also referred to as Charles.
The Franks, over whom Charlemagne came to reign in the year 768, were originally a loose confederation of Germanic tribes. By the 6th century they had begun to force their way into Gaul (France and Belgium), and there they eventually settled. The modern name of France comes from the word "frank". The Franks ousted the Gallic landowners who were the last remnants of the Roman Empire, conquered the Visigoths in the south of France, and fought other Germanic tribes such as the Burgundians and the Alamanni. The great Frankish leader who unified the confederacy into a powerful entity was Clovis, first of the Merovingian kings. These rulers were replaced several centuries later by the House of St. Arnulf, the family line of Charlemagne.
The Merovingian dynasty developed the Franks into a national entity and made many conquests. However, by the 7th century, the powerful blood of Clovis had been diluted considerably and King Sigibert III of the Merovings was a mere puppet under the control of his Mayor of the Palace. It was from these Mayors of the Palace - senior officers of the royal house - that Charlemagne's ancestors were eventually to become kings.
The following is a description of Charlemagne from his chroniclers: He was tall and stoutly built. His height just 7 times the length of his foot. His head was round, his eyes large and lively, his nose somewhat above the common size, his expression bright and cheerful. His health was excellent. He frequently rode and hunted and enjoyed swimming. His capital city of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle) was partly chosen because of its hot springs, where Charles swam daily in the great bath.
Charlemagne was the King of Franks 767-814, and Emperor of the West from Dec. 25, 800 ; King of the Francs (767-814) ; and Emperor of the Occident (800-814). Charlemagne succeeded his father, Pepin Le Bref, in 768 and reigned with his brother Carloman. Between 782 and 785 hardly a year passed without confrontation with the Saxons. In 772, during the first major expedition, the Irminsul was destroyed. That year also saw the beginning of a 30 year war against the Saxons as the Francs ravaged the Saxon land by steel and by fore.
In 773, the Francs routed the Lombards who sought refuge in Pavia. Gerberge and her children then took refuge in Verona where Charles took them prisoners. Didier's son, Adalgise, successfully escaped the assaults and spent the rest of his life in Constantinople. On June 5, 774, Charles reclaimed the title of King of the Lombards and of the Francs as he triumphantly entered Pavia. In 775 the castle of Siegburg and the castle of Eresburg were reorganized. Near Hoxter, a large number of Westphalian Saxons were slaughtered in the Sachsen-graben. In 777, at Paderborn, an assembly inaugurated the ecclesiastical organization of Saxony, which divided the country into
missionary zones. In 777, Charles had been visited by Solaman, Ibn-al-Arabi, who had turned against his master, the Emire Abd-al-Rahman and offered Charles the cities entrusted to his care.
In 778, Charles crosses the Pyrenees, occupies Pampelune, and marched on Sarabossa. But upon learning that the Saxons had once more rebelled and were crossing the Rhine, he turned back. On August 15, the rear guard, under the command of the Seneschal Eginhard, the Count of the Palace Anselm, and of Roland, Duke of the Marche of Brittany, was attacked by Basques or Gascons forces. In the meantime, the Saxons ravaged the Frankish holdings from Cologne to the Moselle. In 779 and 781, Widukind, a Westphalian noble, defeated the
Frankish armies in the Sutel mountains. Charlemagne is reputed to have 4,500 Saxons beheaded in Verdun. In 782, the country was divided into counties administered by Saxon. At Attigny, in 785, Widukind and his son-in-law, Abbi, submittted to Charlemagne who enforced their baptism and became their Godfather. In December 795, Hadrian I was succeeded by Pope Leon III. By 797, Saxony was conquered. In a brilliant military campaign (773-774), he put an end to the Lombard Dynasty and took the title King of the Lombards. He conquered Bavaria (781-788) and then the land of the Avares (792-799), a people related to the Huns. 797 proved to be a year of diplomacy. In the early part of the year, several Sarasin chiefs ( Zata and Abdallah) gave homage to Charlemagne at Aix and Gerona, Caserres and Vich became occupied by the Francs. While in Aix, Charlemagne also received the ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, Constantin VI, arriving with offers of friendship. In Heerstall, later in the year, the Huns made peace. Charlemagne also received the ambassodor from Alfonzo, King of Galicia and of the Asturias. On April 25, 799, the Feast of St. Mark, the Pope is assailed by aristocrats loyal to Byzantium in front of the Church of St. Stephen and Sylvester. He was thrown in the monastery of St. Erasmus, but escaped and sought refuge under the Duke of Spoleto.
On Dec. 23, 800 , according to the Liber Pontificalis, the Pope was cleared of all charges brought by the rebellious aristocrats. Charlemagne's task was to determine the appropriate punishment for those who had perpetrated the assault on the Holy Father. On Dec. 25, 800, Pope Leon III, crowned him Emperor of the Occident. This was made possible because the Emperor Constatin VI had effectively been dethroned by his mother, Irene, who had him blinded and then proclaimed herself the "Basileus". Unfortunately a throne occupied by a woman according to Nomen Imperatoris, is a vacant one. The day after the crowning, Pope Leon III proclaimed the year ONE of the Empire, and the money was stamped with the Pope's image on one side and that of Charlemagne on the other.
On the death of his 3rd wife, Charles lived with no less than 3 concubines who bore him numerous children. This pagan kingly behavior gave rise to criticism from the Church. The relaxed morality of Charles himself extended to some members of his large family. Two of his daughters lived in "sin" without any comment from their father, but as soon as Louis the Pious inherited the crown, he banished these sisters to appease the Church.
Charles died after complications following a winter cold. He was buried in the cathedral at Aachen, in a sacrophagus taken from an ancient Roman site somewhere in Italy. A golden shrine was placed over his tomb, with an image of Charles and the simple inscription (translated): Within this tomb is laid the body of the Christian Emperor Charlemagne, who guided the kingdom of the Franks with distinction and ruled in with success for 47 years.
He had a total of 10 spouses of which five were lawful. He was the King of Franks 768-814 as was also known as Charles the Great or Carlus Magnus.
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The battle of the Pyrenees is the subject of one of the most well-known medieval epics, "The Song of Roland". The following is taken from the introduction to "The Song of Roland", in "Medieval Epics", translated by W.S. Merwin, Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1963.
Some time near the end of July, Charles Martel (Charles the King, Charles the Emperor, Charles the Great, Charlemagne) turned his army north toward the Pyrenees and France. The year was 778. He was thirty-six years old and he was not used to failure, but even the royal chroniclers would have difficulty in trying to describe his ambitious summer campaign in Spain as though it had been a success.
It had not been hastily conceived. Suleiman, the Moorish governor of Barcelona, had visited Charles in the spring of 777 to urge him to cross the Pyrenees, and the request, and Charles' response to it, were both influenced by dynastic and religious promptings which had histories of their own.
Suleiman was a member of the Abassid dynasty, descended from an uncle of Mohammed. Earlier in the century the Abassids had overthrown the reigning Umayyad dynasty and assassinated every member of it except one, Abdur Rahman, who had escaped to Spain and established himself there as the Emir. Suleiman's hatred of Rahman was understandable, and it had already led him to seek and to obtain the protection of his Christian neighbor, King Pepin of France, Charles' father.
There were other reasons why Charles would have been sympathetic to Suleiman. He was himself a member of a young dynasty, a matter of subtle importance in a world governed to a great degree by tradition. And then, Abdur Rahman, as the last representative of the Umayyads, stood for the family which, half a century before, had commanded the great Moorish invasion of France. At that time the apparently invincible Umayyads had forced their way as far north as Tours before Charles' grandfather, Charles Martel, turned them back. It was the Umayyads whom Charles' father, Pepin, had fought and at last driven from France.
But doubtless none of these considerations would have impelled Charles to cross the Pyrenees if it had not been for a more powerful and obvious motive: his own ambition. In the first nine years of his reign he had conquered Aquitaine, beaten the Saxons and the Lombards, and become the official guardian of Christendom, whose boundaries he had extended to the north and east. An expedition into Spain would give him a chance to unify the different parts of his realm in a common effort, and incidentally to conquer the as yet unsubjected Basque provinces. Suleiman probably stressed the apparent fact that Rahman was a menace to Charles' southern frontier, and very possibly he would have told the French king that if he were to attack Rahman now he could not help succeeding, that the Abassids themselves were raising an army of Berbers to send against the Umayyad, and that the people of Spain were on the point of rebellion. The exact details of the embassage and the terms of the agreement that was reached are not known. But by Easter 778 Charles was in Poitou with an immense army recruited from every part of his kingdom: it included Goths, contingents from Septimania and Provence, Austrasians, Neustrians, Lombards, Burgundians, and Bavarians. After Easter he crossed the western end of the Pyrenees, through the Basque country, at the head of half his army. He sent the other half around the eastern end of the mountains. They were to meet before Saragossa.
Just what happened that summer was carefully obscured in the accounts and will never be known. Certainly there were no great triumphs. The Christian natives of Spain did not hasten to overthrow the tolerant Moorish rule and welcome the Franks; on the contrary, the Christians of the kingdom of Asturias preferred their own independence to the presence of a foreign army however dear to the Pope. It is also possible that they were in league with Rahman. At any rate they resisted the Franks. The Christian city of Pampelona refused entry to Charles and had to be stormed; it was the only city in the entire campaign which was actually taken. The native rebellion against Rahman never amounted to much and Suleiman himself had a falling out with his Moorish allies on the African continent. When the Frankish army assembled before Saragossa the city defied it, despite Suleiman's diplomatic efforts; it is not known how hard Charles tried to take it, but he had no siege machinery, and he failed. By some time in July he had received the formal surrender of a few cities -- a gesture which may have owed as much to his alliance with Suleiman as it did to his own army -- and he had gained some hostages, and little else. There is no way of knowing just why he abandoned the campaign so early in the summer. It is possible that he saw nothing to be gained by staying, in the circumstances, and was simply cutting his losses. Supplies may have run dangerously low. It is conceivable that the campaign had turned out far worse than the accounts would lead us to suppose, and that the army was in fact retreating. Even if that were so it cannot have been a rushed or disorderly retreat: in August the army stopped at Pampelona long enough to raze the walls of the city to punish the inhabitants for their resistance, and no doubt to weaken the Spanish side of the frontier. It has been suggested (by Fawtier) that if Charles had not been in a hurry, for some reason, he would have paused long enough to celebrate the important feast of the Dormition of the Virgin on August 15th. At any event he did not do so, but pushed on into the Pyrenees.
What happened next is one of the great riddles. In the earliest history of Charles' expedition, the one included in a chronicle known as the Annales Royales, there is no reference to any military action whatever in the Pyrenees. All later writers on the subject have agreed that the author had something of importance to be silent about. Of such importance, in fact, that his immediate successors evidently felt that mere silence would not serve to conceal it, and set about explaining it. The original Annales were rewritten and expanded roughly a quarter of a century after they were first compiled. It was long thought that the rewriting was done by Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, and though it is now certain that the changes are not his, the second edition of the chronicle is still referred to as the Annales dites d'Einhard. In this work there is a brief and contradictory account of something which happened on the way back from Spain. The Basques, it says here, from positions at the tops of the mountains attacked the rear guard and put the whole army in disorder; the Franks were caught at a disadvantage and did badly; most of the commanders of the different sections of the army were killed, and the enemy, helped by the nature of the terrain, managed to carry off the baggage and escape. There is a reference, too, to the bitterness of Charles' grief.
Then there is Einhard's own account. In the first place he is more ingenious than his predecessors at making it sound as though the Spanish campaign had been a success; then, having built up the picture, he sets against it the Pyrenean ambush on the way back as a relatively minor mishap. It was the treacherous Gascons, he says; they waited until the army was spread out in a long line in the gorges, and then they rushed down and threw the baggage train and the rear guard into confusion. There was a battle in the valley and the Franks were thrown back. The Gascons killed their opponents, the rear guard, to a man, seized the baggage, and scattered under cover of night. Their flight was made easier by their light armor and the nature of the terrain. And then Einhard says, "In this battle Egginhard the royal seneschal, Anselm the Count of the Palace, and Hruodland, the Warden of the Breton Marches, were killed, with very many others." It is one of the only two glimpses in history of the knight whose name would come to evoke one of the richest bodies of legend in the Middle Ages, and one of its greatest poems. The other is a coin, worn, but still displaying on one side the name Carlus, and on the reverse, Rodlan.
One final mention of the battle, by the chroniclers, is of interest. While the army was making its way back from Spain, Charlemagne's wife, in France, gave birth to a son, Louis, who would be his heir. Sixty years after the battle Louis' own biographer, a writer known as The Astronome, in speaking of it said that the names of those who fell in that action were so well known that there was no need to repeat them.
Of all the battles of the period, this one probably has excited most curiosity, and almost nothing about it is definitely known. It is not mere historical interest in the sources of the Roland story which still draws the speculation of scholars to what scanty evidence has come down to our times. In this case the theories of how the legend developed from the event are even more than usually dependent upon a notion of what the event was: a bitter but militarily unimportant misfortune, on the one hand, or one of the critical defeats of Charlemagne's reign, on the other.
Bedier, one of the great students of medieval literature in modem times and the editor of the Oxford text of La Chanson de Roland, propounded the theory of the development of the legend which was generally accepted for years. The battle, he believed, was a minor event which had been remembered in the area near the battlefield and had become a local legend; from those beginnings it had been retold and developed in monasteries and pilgrim sanctuaries along the route leading to Santiago de Compostella, in Spain; the route crossed the Pyrenees at Roncevaux -- the Roncesvalles associated with the Roland story. Bedier, incidentally, was convinced that a number of the French chansons de geste developed in more or less the same way and may have been written by monks, or at least in collaboration with monks. With reference to the Roland, in particular, he cites the fact that the pass at Roncevaux was commended for admiration (complete with a monumental cross said to be Carolingian and other relics claiming descent from Roland and the battle) by the monks at Roncevaux in the twelfth century; he points out that one variant of the Roland legend is contained in a twelfth-century guide written for the benefit of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella.
Bedier's theory was published just before World War I. It was subjected to criticism in the following decades by a number of scholars; one of the most interesting countertheories was put forward by Fawtier (La Chanson de Roland) in 1933. Fawtier analyzes the chroniclers' references to the battle and bases his conclusions, in great part, on the weaknesses in their accounts. The chroniclers, he insists, cannot have it both ways. Was it merely a massacre of the rear guard, or did it in fact involve the whole army and "throw it into disorder"? He poses some other interesting questions. Why, for instance, should the baggage train have been at the rear of the march, when it was usual to have it in the middle, especially in mountain country? Why should so many of the leaders of the different sections of the army have been in the rear guard (of course the legend itself, with its story of the Ganelon-Roland dispute, answers this one, but the legend in its final form came much later and a great part of it is concerned with the peculiar drama of this very situation). How many of these details, and how much of the picture of the lightning raid from the mountain tops may have been attempts to minimize and explain away a terrible defeat which had happened while Charles himself was in command?
In Fawtier's view, the battle, whether it took place at Roncevaux or elsewhere, was one of the great disasters of Charlemagne's career. The army, hurrying into the Pyrenees, was caught in a classical ambush: the van was blocked, the rear was then attacked, and the Franks had to fight their way forward, section by section, suffering losses so appalling that Charles never really managed to reassemble the survivors on the other side of the mountains, and instead set about hastily reorganizing the strong points in Aquitaine as though he expected further troubles from Spain. In fact the magnitude of the defeat was one of the things about the action which caught the popular imagination and contributed to the growth of the legend around the heroic figure of the doomed commander of the rear guard, Hruodland, Rodlan, Roland.
The legend may have grown in the region around Roncevaux, but it was elaborated in other parts of the kingdom too. By the late eleventh century, when the poem was written, it was possible for the poet to display, without fear of correction, an ignorance of the geography of Spain and, for that matter, of southern France, which indicates not only that he himself came from somewhere far from that part of the world, but also that the story and its heroes had long been familiar in places remote from the original battlefield. An audience at Roncevaux might just have been able to go along with the poet's assumption that Cordoba was near the hill city of Saragossa, which in turn was on the sea; it is unlikely that, even in the Middle Ages when simple experience was so meek an authority, they would have heard without a murmur that Narbonne and Bordeaux both lay on the same road north from Roncevaux. Furthermore, this shows a total ignorance of the Santiago pilgrim route and its monasteries, an interesting fact in view of the theory that the poem was composed in one of those places, on that route.
In Fawtier's opinion the story of the defeat was carried across France by its veterans, and in various localities, as it took on the character of legend through repetition, it was cast, in whole or in part, into the form of ballads. It is true that none of these survive, but then very little of the popular literature of the time has survived. The monks had nothing to do with the composition of La Chanson de Roland itself (although two other, later variants of the legend were composed by clerics). On the contrary, it was the legend, and perhaps the poem itself, which prompted the ecclesiastics at Roncevaux to exploit the pass as a pilgrim attraction -- an enterprise which may have contributed to the poem's preservation.
There has been considerable controversy as to just when La Chanson de Roland was written. It must have been some time in the latter half of the eleventh century, but it is not possible to be much more definite than that. The poem apparently was already well known in 1096 when, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II made use of it in his appeal to the chivalry of France to follow in the steps of Charlemagne and send an army against Islam. Many of the crusaders who responded to Urban's summons, and many who came later, must have been following an image of themselves which derived, at least in part, from the legendary last battle of the now transfigured Hruodland.
The poem, in its original form, has not survived. Modern knowledge of it is confined to six different versions, whose separate relations to the original are not plain. There is, for instance, a twelfth century German translation by a Bavarian priest named Konrad. There is a Norse translation of the thirteenth century. There is a version in Franco-Italian, in the library of San Marco in Venice, which ends differently from the others. And there are three versions in French. One of them, known as Recension 0, or the Oxford version, has survived in a single copy, Digby Mss 23, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is supposed that it was a jongleur's copy of the poem. It is the oldest of all the versions, the most beautiful, and must have been much the closest to the original. Bedier's famous edition of the poem is based on the Oxford version, which Bedier compares at all points with the others.
[From Ancestry.com 22592.GED]
Charlemagne known as Rex Francorum et Langobardorum. He was born April 2, 742 in Aachen, Neustrie. Between the years 767 and 814, Charlemagne's title after 800 A.D. was Carolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus et pacificus imperator Romanum gubernans imperium, qui est per misericordium Dei rex Francorum et Langobardorum. It was designed to include the Romas in the Frankish empire without centering the Empire upon them. Charlemagne stressed the royal and Frankish bases for his power. Charlemagne was also referred to as Charles.
The Franks, over whom Charlemagne came to reign in the year 768, were originally a loose confederation of Germanic tribes. By the 6th century they had begun to force their way into Gaul (France and Belgium), and there they eventually settled. The modern name of France comes from the word "frank". The Franks ousted the Gallic landowners who were the last remnants of the Roman Empire, conquered the Visigoths in the south of France, and fought other Germanic tribes such as the Burgundians and the Alamanni. The great Frankish leader who unified the confederacy into a powerful entity was Clovis, first of the Merovingian kings. These rulers were replaced several centuries later by the House of St. Arnulf, the family line of Charlemagne.
The Merovingian dynasty developed the Franks into a national entity and made many conquests. However, by the 7th century, the powerful blood of Clovis had been diluted considerably and King Sigibert III of the Merovings was a mere puppet under the control of his Mayor of the Palace. It was from these Mayors of the Palace - senior officers of the royal house - that Charlemagne's ancestors were eventually to become kings.
The following is a description of Charlemagne from his chroniclers: He was tall and stoutly built. His height just 7 times the length of his foot. His head was round, his eyes large and lively, his nose somewhat above the common size, his expression bright and cheerful. His health was excellent. He frequently rode and hunted and enjoyed swimming. His capital city of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle) was partly chosen because of its hot springs, where Charles swam daily in the great bath.
Charlemagne was the King of Franks 767-814, and Emperor of the West from Dec. 25, 800 ; King of the Francs (767-814) ; and Emperor of the Occident (800-814). Charlemagne succeeded his father, Pepin Le Bref, in 768 and reigned with his brother Carloman. Between 782 and 785 hardly a year passed without confrontation with the Saxons. In 772, during the first major expedition, the Irminsul was destroyed. That year also saw the beginning of a 30 year war against the Saxons as the Francs ravaged the Saxon land by steel and by fore.
In 773, the Francs routed the Lombards who sought refuge in Pavia. Gerberge and her children then took refuge in Verona where Charles took them prisoners. Didier's son, Adalgise, successfully escaped the assaults and spent the rest of his life in Constantinople. On June 5, 774, Charles reclaimed the title of King of the Lombards and of the Francs as he triumphantly entered Pavia. In 775 the castle of Siegburg and the castle of Eresburg were reorganized. Near Hoxter, a large number of Westphalian Saxons were slaughtered in the Sachsen-graben. In 777, at Paderborn, an assembly inaugurated the ecclesiastical organization of Saxony, which divided the country into
missionary zones. In 777, Charles had been visited by Solaman, Ibn-al-Arabi, who had turned against his master, the Emire Abd-al-Rahman and offered Charles the cities entrusted to his care.
In 778, Charles crosses the Pyrenees, occupies Pampelune, and marched on Sarabossa. But upon learning that the Saxons had once more rebelled and were crossing the Rhine, he turned back. On August 15, the rear guard, under the command of the Seneschal Eginhard, the Count of the Palace Anselm, and of Roland, Duke of the Marche of Brittany, was attacked by Basques or Gascons forces. In the meantime, the Saxons ravaged the Frankish holdings from Cologne to the Moselle. In 779 and 781, Widukind, a Westphalian noble, defeated the
Frankish armies in the Sutel mountains. Charlemagne is reputed to have 4,500 Saxons beheaded in Verdun. In 782, the country was divided into counties administered by Saxon. At Attigny, in 785, Widukind and his son-in-law, Abbi, submittted to Charlemagne who enforced their baptism and became their Godfather. In December 795, Hadrian I was succeeded by Pope Leon III. By 797, Saxony was conquered. In a brilliant military campaign (773-774), he put an end to the Lombard Dynasty and took the title King of the Lombards. He conquered Bavaria (781-788) and then the land of the Avares (792-799), a people related to the Huns. 797 proved to be a year of diplomacy. In the early part of the year, several Sarasin chiefs ( Zata and Abdallah) gave homage to Charlemagne at Aix and Gerona, Caserres and Vich became occupied by the Francs. While in Aix, Charlemagne also received the ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, Constantin VI, arriving with offers of friendship. In Heerstall, later in the year, the Huns made peace. Charlemagne also received the ambassodor from Alfonzo, King of Galicia and of the Asturias. On April 25, 799, the Feast of St. Mark, the Pope is assailed by aristocrats loyal to Byzantium in front of the Church of St. Stephen and Sylvester. He was thrown in the monastery of St. Erasmus, but escaped and sought refuge under the Duke of Spoleto.
On Dec. 23, 800 , according to the Liber Pontificalis, the Pope was cleared of all charges brought by the rebellious aristocrats. Charlemagne's task was to determine the appropriate punishment for those who had perpetrated the assault on the Holy Father. On Dec. 25, 800, Pope Leon III, crowned him Emperor of the Occident. This was made possible because the Emperor Constatin VI had effectively been dethroned by his mother, Irene, who had him blinded and then proclaimed herself the "Basileus". Unfortunately a throne occupied by a woman according to Nomen Imperatoris, is a vacant one. The day after the crowning, Pope Leon III proclaimed the year ONE of the Empire, and the money was stamped with the Pope's image on one side and that of Charlemagne on the other.
On the death of his 3rd wife, Charles lived with no less than 3 concubines who bore him numerous children. This pagan kingly behavior gave rise to criticism from the Church. The relaxed morality of Charles himself extended to some members of his large family. Two of his daughters lived in "sin" without any comment from their father, but as soon as Louis the Pious inherited the crown, he banished these sisters to appease the Church.
Charles died after complications following a winter cold. He was buried in the cathedral at Aachen, in a sacrophagus taken from an ancient Roman site somewhere in Italy. A golden shrine was placed over his tomb, with an image of Charles and the simple inscription (translated): Within this tomb is laid the body of the Christian Emperor Charlemagne, who guided the kingdom of the Franks with distinction and ruled in with success for 47 years.
He had a total of 10 spouses of which five were lawful. He was the King of Franks 768-814 as was also known as Charles the Great or Carlus Magnus.
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The battle of the Pyrenees is the subject of one of the most well-known medieval epics, "The Song of Roland". The following is taken from the introduction to "The Song of Roland", in "Medieval Epics", translated by W.S. Merwin, Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1963.
Some time near the end of July, Charles Martel (Charles the King, Charles the Emperor, Charles the Great, Charlemagne) turned his army north toward the Pyrenees and France. The year was 778. He was thirty-six years old and he was not used to failure, but even the royal chroniclers would have difficulty in trying to describe his ambitious summer campaign in Spain as though it had been a success.
It had not been hastily conceived. Suleiman, the Moorish governor of Barcelona, had visited Charles in the spring of 777 to urge him to cross the Pyrenees, and the request, and Charles' response to it, were both influenced by dynastic and religious promptings which had histories of their own.
Suleiman was a member of the Abassid dynasty, descended from an uncle of Mohammed. Earlier in the century the Abassids had overthrown the reigning Umayyad dynasty and assassinated every member of it except one, Abdur Rahman, who had escaped to Spain and established himself there as the Emir. Suleiman's hatred of Rahman was understandable, and it had already led him to seek and to obtain the protection of his Christian neighbor, King Pepin of France, Charles' father.
There were other reasons why Charles would have been sympathetic to Suleiman. He was himself a member of a young dynasty, a matter of subtle importance in a world governed to a great degree by tradition. And then, Abdur Rahman, as the last representative of the Umayyads, stood for the family which, half a century before, had commanded the great Moorish invasion of France. At that time the apparently invincible Umayyads had forced their way as far north as Tours before Charles' grandfather, Charles Martel, turned them back. It was the Umayyads whom Charles' father, Pepin, had fought and at last driven from France.
But doubtless none of these considerations would have impelled Charles to cross the Pyrenees if it had not been for a more powerful and obvious motive: his own ambition. In the first nine years of his reign he had conquered Aquitaine, beaten the Saxons and the Lombards, and become the official guardian of Christendom, whose boundaries he had extended to the north and east. An expedition into Spain would give him a chance to unify the different parts of his realm in a common effort, and incidentally to conquer the as yet unsubjected Basque provinces. Suleiman probably stressed the apparent fact that Rahman was a menace to Charles' southern frontier, and very possibly he would have told the French king that if he were to attack Rahman now he could not help succeeding, that the Abassids themselves were raising an army of Berbers to send against the Umayyad, and that the people of Spain were on the point of rebellion. The exact details of the embassage and the terms of the agreement that was reached are not known. But by Easter 778 Charles was in Poitou with an immense army recruited from every part of his kingdom: it included Goths, contingents from Septimania and Provence, Austrasians, Neustrians, Lombards, Burgundians, and Bavarians. After Easter he crossed the western end of the Pyrenees, through the Basque country, at the head of half his army. He sent the other half around the eastern end of the mountains. They were to meet before Saragossa.
Just what happened that summer was carefully obscured in the accounts and will never be known. Certainly there were no great triumphs. The Christian natives of Spain did not hasten to overthrow the tolerant Moorish rule and welcome the Franks; on the contrary, the Christians of the kingdom of Asturias preferred their own independence to the presence of a foreign army however dear to the Pope. It is also possible that they were in league with Rahman. At any rate they resisted the Franks. The Christian city of Pampelona refused entry to Charles and had to be stormed; it was the only city in the entire campaign which was actually taken. The native rebellion against Rahman never amounted to much and Suleiman himself had a falling out with his Moorish allies on the African continent. When the Frankish army assembled before Saragossa the city defied it, despite Suleiman's diplomatic efforts; it is not known how hard Charles tried to take it, but he had no siege machinery, and he failed. By some time in July he had received the formal surrender of a few cities -- a gesture which may have owed as much to his alliance with Suleiman as it did to his own army -- and he had gained some hostages, and little else. There is no way of knowing just why he abandoned the campaign so early in the summer. It is possible that he saw nothing to be gained by staying, in the circumstances, and was simply cutting his losses. Supplies may have run dangerously low. It is conceivable that the campaign had turned out far worse than the accounts would lead us to suppose, and that the army was in fact retreating. Even if that were so it cannot have been a rushed or disorderly retreat: in August the army stopped at Pampelona long enough to raze the walls of the city to punish the inhabitants for their resistance, and no doubt to weaken the Spanish side of the frontier. It has been suggested (by Fawtier) that if Charles had not been in a hurry, for some reason, he would have paused long enough to celebrate the important feast of the Dormition of the Virgin on August 15th. At any event he did not do so, but pushed on into the Pyrenees.
What happened next is one of the great riddles. In the earliest history of Charles' expedition, the one included in a chronicle known as the Annales Royales, there is no reference to any military action whatever in the Pyrenees. All later writers on the subject have agreed that the author had something of importance to be silent about. Of such importance, in fact, that his immediate successors evidently felt that mere silence would not serve to conceal it, and set about explaining it. The original Annales were rewritten and expanded roughly a quarter of a century after they were first compiled. It was long thought that the rewriting was done by Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, and though it is now certain that the changes are not his, the second edition of the chronicle is still referred to as the Annales dites d'Einhard. In this work there is a brief and contradictory account of something which happened on the way back from Spain. The Basques, it says here, from positions at the tops of the mountains attacked the rear guard and put the whole army in disorder; the Franks were caught at a disadvantage and did badly; most of the commanders of the different sections of the army were killed, and the enemy, helped by the nature of the terrain, managed to carry off the baggage and escape. There is a reference, too, to the bitterness of Charles' grief.
Then there is Einhard's own account. In the first place he is more ingenious than his predecessors at making it sound as though the Spanish campaign had been a success; then, having built up the picture, he sets against it the Pyrenean ambush on the way back as a relatively minor mishap. It was the treacherous Gascons, he says; they waited until the army was spread out in a long line in the gorges, and then they rushed down and threw the baggage train and the rear guard into confusion. There was a battle in the valley and the Franks were thrown back. The Gascons killed their opponents, the rear guard, to a man, seized the baggage, and scattered under cover of night. Their flight was made easier by their light armor and the nature of the terrain. And then Einhard says, "In this battle Egginhard the royal seneschal, Anselm the Count of the Palace, and Hruodland, the Warden of the Breton Marches, were killed, with very many others." It is one of the only two glimpses in history of the knight whose name would come to evoke one of the richest bodies of legend in the Middle Ages, and one of its greatest poems. The other is a coin, worn, but still displaying on one side the name Carlus, and on the reverse, Rodlan.
One final mention of the battle, by the chroniclers, is of interest. While the army was making its way back from Spain, Charlemagne's wife, in France, gave birth to a son, Louis, who would be his heir. Sixty years after the battle Louis' own biographer, a writer known as The Astronome, in speaking of it said that the names of those who fell in that action were so well known that there was no need to repeat them.
Of all the battles of the period, this one probably has excited most curiosity, and almost nothing about it is definitely known. It is not mere historical interest in the sources of the Roland story which still draws the speculation of scholars to what scanty evidence has come down to our times. In this case the theories of how the legend developed from the event are even more than usually dependent upon a notion of what the event was: a bitter but militarily unimportant misfortune, on the one hand, or one of the critical defeats of Charlemagne's reign, on the other.
Bedier, one of the great students of medieval literature in modem times and the editor of the Oxford text of La Chanson de Roland, propounded the theory of the development of the legend which was generally accepted for years. The battle, he believed, was a minor event which had been remembered in the area near the battlefield and had become a local legend; from those beginnings it had been retold and developed in monasteries and pilgrim sanctuaries along the route leading to Santiago de Compostella, in Spain; the route crossed the Pyrenees at Roncevaux -- the Roncesvalles associated with the Roland story. Bedier, incidentally, was convinced that a number of the French chansons de geste developed in more or less the same way and may have been written by monks, or at least in collaboration with monks. With reference to the Roland, in particular, he cites the fact that the pass at Roncevaux was commended for admiration (complete with a monumental cross said to be Carolingian and other relics claiming descent from Roland and the battle) by the monks at Roncevaux in the twelfth century; he points out that one variant of the Roland legend is contained in a twelfth-century guide written for the benefit of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella.
Bedier's theory was published just before World War I. It was subjected to criticism in the following decades by a number of scholars; one of the most interesting countertheories was put forward by Fawtier (La Chanson de Roland) in 1933. Fawtier analyzes the chroniclers' references to the battle and bases his conclusions, in great part, on the weaknesses in their accounts. The chroniclers, he insists, cannot have it both ways. Was it merely a massacre of the rear guard, or did it in fact involve the whole army and "throw it into disorder"? He poses some other interesting questions. Why, for instance, should the baggage train have been at the rear of the march, when it was usual to have it in the middle, especially in mountain country? Why should so many of the leaders of the different sections of the army have been in the rear guard (of course the legend itself, with its story of the Ganelon-Roland dispute, answers this one, but the legend in its final form came much later and a great part of it is concerned with the peculiar drama of this very situation). How many of these details, and how much of the picture of the lightning raid from the mountain tops may have been attempts to minimize and explain away a terrible defeat which had happened while Charles himself was in command?
In Fawtier's view, the battle, whether it took place at Roncevaux or elsewhere, was one of the great disasters of Charlemagne's career. The army, hurrying into the Pyrenees, was caught in a classical ambush: the van was blocked, the rear was then attacked, and the Franks had to fight their way forward, section by section, suffering losses so appalling that Charles never really managed to reassemble the survivors on the other side of the mountains, and instead set about hastily reorganizing the strong points in Aquitaine as though he expected further troubles from Spain. In fact the magnitude of the defeat was one of the things about the action which caught the popular imagination and contributed to the growth of the legend around the heroic figure of the doomed commander of the rear guard, Hruodland, Rodlan, Roland.
The legend may have grown in the region around Roncevaux, but it was elaborated in other parts of the kingdom too. By the late eleventh century, when the poem was written, it was possible for the poet to display, without fear of correction, an ignorance of the geography of Spain and, for that matter, of southern France, which indicates not only that he himself came from somewhere far from that part of the world, but also that the story and its heroes had long been familiar in places remote from the original battlefield. An audience at Roncevaux might just have been able to go along with the poet's assumption that Cordoba was near the hill city of Saragossa, which in turn was on the sea; it is unlikely that, even in the Middle Ages when simple experience was so meek an authority, they would have heard without a murmur that Narbonne and Bordeaux both lay on the same road north from Roncevaux. Furthermore, this shows a total ignorance of the Santiago pilgrim route and its monasteries, an interesting fact in view of the theory that the poem was composed in one of those places, on that route.
In Fawtier's opinion the story of the defeat was carried across France by its veterans, and in various localities, as it took on the character of legend through repetition, it was cast, in whole or in part, into the form of ballads. It is true that none of these survive, but then very little of the popular literature of the time has survived. The monks had nothing to do with the composition of La Chanson de Roland itself (although two other, later variants of the legend were composed by clerics). On the contrary, it was the legend, and perhaps the poem itself, which prompted the ecclesiastics at Roncevaux to exploit the pass as a pilgrim attraction -- an enterprise which may have contributed to the poem's preservation.
There has been considerable controversy as to just when La Chanson de Roland was written. It must have been some time in the latter half of the eleventh century, but it is not possible to be much more definite than that. The poem apparently was already well known in 1096 when, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II made use of it in his appeal to the chivalry of France to follow in the steps of Charlemagne and send an army against Islam. Many of the crusaders who responded to Urban's summons, and many who came later, must have been following an image of themselves which derived, at least in part, from the legendary last battle of the now transfigured Hruodland.
The poem, in its original form, has not survived. Modern knowledge of it is confined to six different versions, whose separate relations to the original are not plain. There is, for instance, a twelfth century German translation by a Bavarian priest named Konrad. There is a Norse translation of the thirteenth century. There is a version in Franco-Italian, in the library of San Marco in Venice, which ends differently from the others. And there are three versions in French. One of them, known as Recension 0, or the Oxford version, has survived in a single copy, Digby Mss 23, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is supposed that it was a jongleur's copy of the poem. It is the oldest of all the versions, the most beautiful, and must have been much the closest to the original. Bedier's famous edition of the poem is based on the Oxford version, which Bedier compares at all points with the others.
[From Ancestry.com 22592.GED]
Charlemagne known as Rex Francorum et Langobardorum. He was born April 2, 742 in Aachen, Neustrie. Between the years 767 and 814, Charlemagne's title after 800 A.D. was Carolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus et pacificus imperator Romanum gubernans imperium, qui est per misericordium Dei rex Francorum et Langobardorum. It was designed to include the Romas in the Frankish empire without centering the Empire upon them. Charlemagne stressed the royal and Frankish bases for his power. Charlemagne was also referred to as Charles.
The Franks, over whom Charlemagne came to reign in the year 768, were originally a loose confederation of Germanic tribes. By the 6th century they had begun to force their way into Gaul (France and Belgium), and there they eventually settled. The modern name of France comes from the word "frank". The Franks ousted the Gallic landowners who were the last remnants of the Roman Empire, conquered the Visigoths in the south of France, and fought other Germanic tribes such as the Burgundians and the Alamanni. The great Frankish leader who unified the confederacy into a powerful entity was Clovis, first of the Merovingian kings. These rulers were replaced several centuries later by the House of St. Arnulf, the family line of Charlemagne.
The Merovingian dynasty developed the Franks into a national entity and made many conquests. However, by the 7th century, the powerful blood of Clovis had been diluted considerably and King Sigibert III of the Merovings was a mere puppet under the control of his Mayor of the Palace. It was from these Mayors of the Palace - senior officers of the royal house - that Charlemagne's ancestors were eventually to become kings.
The following is a description of Charlemagne from his chroniclers: He was tall and stoutly built. His height just 7 times the length of his foot. His head was round, his eyes large and lively, his nose somewhat above the common size, his expression bright and cheerful. His health was excellent. He frequently rode and hunted and enjoyed swimming. His capital city of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle) was partly chosen because of its hot springs, where Charles swam daily in the great bath.
Charlemagne was the King of Franks 767-814, and Emperor of the West from Dec. 25, 800 ; King of the Francs (767-814) ; and Emperor of the Occident (800-814). Charlemagne succeeded his father, Pepin Le Bref, in 768 and reigned with his brother Carloman. Between 782 and 785 hardly a year passed without confrontation with the Saxons. In 772, during the first major expedition, the Irminsul was destroyed. That year also saw the beginning of a 30 year war against the Saxons as the Francs ravaged the Saxon land by steel and by fore.
In 773, the Francs routed the Lombards who sought refuge in Pavia. Gerberge and her children then took refuge in Verona where Charles took them prisoners. Didier's son, Adalgise, successfully escaped the assaults and spent the rest of his life in Constantinople. On June 5, 774, Charles reclaimed the title of King of the Lombards and of the Francs as he triumphantly entered Pavia. In 775 the castle of Siegburg and the castle of Eresburg were reorganized. Near Hoxter, a large number of Westphalian Saxons were slaughtered in the Sachsen-graben. In 777, at Paderborn, an assembly inaugurated the ecclesiastical organization of Saxony, which divided the country into
missionary zones. In 777, Charles had been visited by Solaman, Ibn-al-Arabi, who had turned against his master, the Emire Abd-al-Rahman and offered Charles the cities entrusted to his care.
In 778, Charles crosses the Pyrenees, occupies Pampelune, and marched on Sarabossa. But upon learning that the Saxons had once more rebelled and were crossing the Rhine, he turned back. On August 15, the rear guard, under the command of the Seneschal Eginhard, the Count of the Palace Anselm, and of Roland, Duke of the Marche of Brittany, was attacked by Basques or Gascons forces. In the meantime, the Saxons ravaged the Frankish holdings from Cologne to the Moselle. In 779 and 781, Widukind, a Westphalian noble, defeated the
Frankish armies in the Sutel mountains. Charlemagne is reputed to have 4,500 Saxons beheaded in Verdun. In 782, the country was divided into counties administered by Saxon. At Attigny, in 785, Widukind and his son-in-law, Abbi, submittted to Charlemagne who enforced their baptism and became their Godfather. In December 795, Hadrian I was succeeded by Pope Leon III. By 797, Saxony was conquered. In a brilliant military campaign (773-774), he put an end to the Lombard Dynasty and took the title King of the Lombards. He conquered Bavaria (781-788) and then the land of the Avares (792-799), a people related to the Huns. 797 proved to be a year of diplomacy. In the early part of the year, several Sarasin chiefs ( Zata and Abdallah) gave homage to Charlemagne at Aix and Gerona, Caserres and Vich became occupied by the Francs. While in Aix, Charlemagne also received the ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, Constantin VI, arriving with offers of friendship. In Heerstall, later in the year, the Huns made peace. Charlemagne also received the ambassodor from Alfonzo, King of Galicia and of the Asturias. On April 25, 799, the Feast of St. Mark, the Pope is assailed by aristocrats loyal to Byzantium in front of the Church of St. Stephen and Sylvester. He was thrown in the monastery of St. Erasmus, but escaped and sought refuge under the Duke of Spoleto.
On Dec. 23, 800 , according to the Liber Pontificalis, the Pope was cleared of all charges brought by the rebellious aristocrats. Charlemagne's task was to determine the appropriate punishment for those who had perpetrated the assault on the Holy Father. On Dec. 25, 800, Pope Leon III, crowned him Emperor of the Occident. This was made possible because the Emperor Constatin VI had effectively been dethroned by his mother, Irene, who had him blinded and then proclaimed herself the "Basileus". Unfortunately a throne occupied by a woman according to Nomen Imperatoris, is a vacant one. The day after the crowning, Pope Leon III proclaimed the year ONE of the Empire, and the money was stamped with the Pope's image on one side and that of Charlemagne on the other.
On the death of his 3rd wife, Charles lived with no less than 3 concubines who bore him numerous children. This pagan kingly behavior gave rise to criticism from the Church. The relaxed morality of Charles himself extended to some members of his large family. Two of his daughters lived in "sin" without any comment from their father, but as soon as Louis the Pious inherited the crown, he banished these sisters to appease the Church.
Charles died after complications following a winter cold. He was buried in the cathedral at Aachen, in a sacrophagus taken from an ancient Roman site somewhere in Italy. A golden shrine was placed over his tomb, with an image of Charles and the simple inscription (translated): Within this tomb is laid the body of the Christian Emperor Charlemagne, who guided the kingdom of the Franks with distinction and ruled in with success for 47 years.
He had a total of 10 spouses of which five were lawful. He was the King of Franks 768-814 as was also known as Charles the Great or Carlus Magnus.
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The battle of the Pyrenees is the subject of one of the most well-known medieval epics, "The Song of Roland". The following is taken from the introduction to "The Song of Roland", in "Medieval Epics", translated by W.S. Merwin, Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1963.
Some time near the end of July, Charles Martel (Charles the King, Charles the Emperor, Charles the Great, Charlemagne) turned his army north toward the Pyrenees and France. The year was 778. He was thirty-six years old and he was not used to failure, but even the royal chroniclers would have difficulty in trying to describe his ambitious summer campaign in Spain as though it had been a success.
It had not been hastily conceived. Suleiman, the Moorish governor of Barcelona, had visited Charles in the spring of 777 to urge him to cross the Pyrenees, and the request, and Charles' response to it, were both influenced by dynastic and religious promptings which had histories of their own.
Suleiman was a member of the Abassid dynasty, descended from an uncle of Mohammed. Earlier in the century the Abassids had overthrown the reigning Umayyad dynasty and assassinated every member of it except one, Abdur Rahman, who had escaped to Spain and established himself there as the Emir. Suleiman's hatred of Rahman was understandable, and it had already led him to seek and to obtain the protection of his Christian neighbor, King Pepin of France, Charles' father.
There were other reasons why Charles would have been sympathetic to Suleiman. He was himself a member of a young dynasty, a matter of subtle importance in a world governed to a great degree by tradition. And then, Abdur Rahman, as the last representative of the Umayyads, stood for the family which, half a century before, had commanded the great Moorish invasion of France. At that time the apparently invincible Umayyads had forced their way as far north as Tours before Charles' grandfather, Charles Martel, turned them back. It was the Umayyads whom Charles' father, Pepin, had fought and at last driven from France.
But doubtless none of these considerations would have impelled Charles to cross the Pyrenees if it had not been for a more powerful and obvious motive: his own ambition. In the first nine years of his reign he had conquered Aquitaine, beaten the Saxons and the Lombards, and become the official guardian of Christendom, whose boundaries he had extended to the north and east. An expedition into Spain would give him a chance to unify the different parts of his realm in a common effort, and incidentally to conquer the as yet unsubjected Basque provinces. Suleiman probably stressed the apparent fact that Rahman was a menace to Charles' southern frontier, and very possibly he would have told the French king that if he were to attack Rahman now he could not help succeeding, that the Abassids themselves were raising an army of Berbers to send against the Umayyad, and that the people of Spain were on the point of rebellion. The exact details of the embassage and the terms of the agreement that was reached are not known. But by Easter 778 Charles was in Poitou with an immense army recruited from every part of his kingdom: it included Goths, contingents from Septimania and Provence, Austrasians, Neustrians, Lombards, Burgundians, and Bavarians. After Easter he crossed the western end of the Pyrenees, through the Basque country, at the head of half his army. He sent the other half around the eastern end of the mountains. They were to meet before Saragossa.
Just what happened that summer was carefully obscured in the accounts and will never be known. Certainly there were no great triumphs. The Christian natives of Spain did not hasten to overthrow the tolerant Moorish rule and welcome the Franks; on the contrary, the Christians of the kingdom of Asturias preferred their own independence to the presence of a foreign army however dear to the Pope. It is also possible that they were in league with Rahman. At any rate they resisted the Franks. The Christian city of Pampelona refused entry to Charles and had to be stormed; it was the only city in the entire campaign which was actually taken. The native rebellion against Rahman never amounted to much and Suleiman himself had a falling out with his Moorish allies on the African continent. When the Frankish army assembled before Saragossa the city defied it, despite Suleiman's diplomatic efforts; it is not known how hard Charles tried to take it, but he had no siege machinery, and he failed. By some time in July he had received the formal surrender of a few cities -- a gesture which may have owed as much to his alliance with Suleiman as it did to his own army -- and he had gained some hostages, and little else. There is no way of knowing just why he abandoned the campaign so early in the summer. It is possible that he saw nothing to be gained by staying, in the circumstances, and was simply cutting his losses. Supplies may have run dangerously low. It is conceivable that the campaign had turned out far worse than the accounts would lead us to suppose, and that the army was in fact retreating. Even if that were so it cannot have been a rushed or disorderly retreat: in August the army stopped at Pampelona long enough to raze the walls of the city to punish the inhabitants for their resistance, and no doubt to weaken the Spanish side of the frontier. It has been suggested (by Fawtier) that if Charles had not been in a hurry, for some reason, he would have paused long enough to celebrate the important feast of the Dormition of the Virgin on August 15th. At any event he did not do so, but pushed on into the Pyrenees.
What happened next is one of the great riddles. In the earliest history of Charles' expedition, the one included in a chronicle known as the Annales Royales, there is no reference to any military action whatever in the Pyrenees. All later writers on the subject have agreed that the author had something of importance to be silent about. Of such importance, in fact, that his immediate successors evidently felt that mere silence would not serve to conceal it, and set about explaining it. The original Annales were rewritten and expanded roughly a quarter of a century after they were first compiled. It was long thought that the rewriting was done by Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, and though it is now certain that the changes are not his, the second edition of the chronicle is still referred to as the Annales dites d'Einhard. In this work there is a brief and contradictory account of something which happened on the way back from Spain. The Basques, it says here, from positions at the tops of the mountains attacked the rear guard and put the whole army in disorder; the Franks were caught at a disadvantage and did badly; most of the commanders of the different sections of the army were killed, and the enemy, helped by the nature of the terrain, managed to carry off the baggage and escape. There is a reference, too, to the bitterness of Charles' grief.
Then there is Einhard's own account. In the first place he is more ingenious than his predecessors at making it sound as though the Spanish campaign had been a success; then, having built up the picture, he sets against it the Pyrenean ambush on the way back as a relatively minor mishap. It was the treacherous Gascons, he says; they waited until the army was spread out in a long line in the gorges, and then they rushed down and threw the baggage train and the rear guard into confusion. There was a battle in the valley and the Franks were thrown back. The Gascons killed their opponents, the rear guard, to a man, seized the baggage, and scattered under cover of night. Their flight was made easier by their light armor and the nature of the terrain. And then Einhard says, "In this battle Egginhard the royal seneschal, Anselm the Count of the Palace, and Hruodland, the Warden of the Breton Marches, were killed, with very many others." It is one of the only two glimpses in history of the knight whose name would come to evoke one of the richest bodies of legend in the Middle Ages, and one of its greatest poems. The other is a coin, worn, but still displaying on one side the name Carlus, and on the reverse, Rodlan.
One final mention of the battle, by the chroniclers, is of interest. While the army was making its way back from Spain, Charlemagne's wife, in France, gave birth to a son, Louis, who would be his heir. Sixty years after the battle Louis' own biographer, a writer known as The Astronome, in speaking of it said that the names of those who fell in that action were so well known that there was no need to repeat them.
Of all the battles of the period, this one probably has excited most curiosity, and almost nothing about it is definitely known. It is not mere historical interest in the sources of the Roland story which still draws the speculation of scholars to what scanty evidence has come down to our times. In this case the theories of how the legend developed from the event are even more than usually dependent upon a notion of what the event was: a bitter but militarily unimportant misfortune, on the one hand, or one of the critical defeats of Charlemagne's reign, on the other.
Bedier, one of the great students of medieval literature in modem times and the editor of the Oxford text of La Chanson de Roland, propounded the theory of the development of the legend which was generally accepted for years. The battle, he believed, was a minor event which had been remembered in the area near the battlefield and had become a local legend; from those beginnings it had been retold and developed in monasteries and pilgrim sanctuaries along the route leading to Santiago de Compostella, in Spain; the route crossed the Pyrenees at Roncevaux -- the Roncesvalles associated with the Roland story. Bedier, incidentally, was convinced that a number of the French chansons de geste developed in more or less the same way and may have been written by monks, or at least in collaboration with monks. With reference to the Roland, in particular, he cites the fact that the pass at Roncevaux was commended for admiration (complete with a monumental cross said to be Carolingian and other relics claiming descent from Roland and the battle) by the monks at Roncevaux in the twelfth century; he points out that one variant of the Roland legend is contained in a twelfth-century guide written for the benefit of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella.
Bedier's theory was published just before World War I. It was subjected to criticism in the following decades by a number of scholars; one of the most interesting countertheories was put forward by Fawtier (La Chanson de Roland) in 1933. Fawtier analyzes the chroniclers' references to the battle and bases his conclusions, in great part, on the weaknesses in their accounts. The chroniclers, he insists, cannot have it both ways. Was it merely a massacre of the rear guard, or did it in fact involve the whole army and "throw it into disorder"? He poses some other interesting questions. Why, for instance, should the baggage train have been at the rear of the march, when it was usual to have it in the middle, especially in mountain country? Why should so many of the leaders of the different sections of the army have been in the rear guard (of course the legend itself, with its story of the Ganelon-Roland dispute, answers this one, but the legend in its final form came much later and a great part of it is concerned with the peculiar drama of this very situation). How many of these details, and how much of the picture of the lightning raid from the mountain tops may have been attempts to minimize and explain away a terrible defeat which had happened while Charles himself was in command?
In Fawtier's view, the battle, whether it took place at Roncevaux or elsewhere, was one of the great disasters of Charlemagne's career. The army, hurrying into the Pyrenees, was caught in a classical ambush: the van was blocked, the rear was then attacked, and the Franks had to fight their way forward, section by section, suffering losses so appalling that Charles never really managed to reassemble the survivors on the other side of the mountains, and instead set about hastily reorganizing the strong points in Aquitaine as though he expected further troubles from Spain. In fact the magnitude of the defeat was one of the things about the action which caught the popular imagination and contributed to the growth of the legend around the heroic figure of the doomed commander of the rear guard, Hruodland, Rodlan, Roland.
The legend may have grown in the region around Roncevaux, but it was elaborated in other parts of the kingdom too. By the late eleventh century, when the poem was written, it was possible for the poet to display, without fear of correction, an ignorance of the geography of Spain and, for that matter, of southern France, which indicates not only that he himself came from somewhere far from that part of the world, but also that the story and its heroes had long been familiar in places remote from the original battlefield. An audience at Roncevaux might just have been able to go along with the poet's assumption that Cordoba was near the hill city of Saragossa, which in turn was on the sea; it is unlikely that, even in the Middle Ages when simple experience was so meek an authority, they would have heard without a murmur that Narbonne and Bordeaux both lay on the same road north from Roncevaux. Furthermore, this shows a total ignorance of the Santiago pilgrim route and its monasteries, an interesting fact in view of the theory that the poem was composed in one of those places, on that route.
In Fawtier's opinion the story of the defeat was carried across France by its veterans, and in various localities, as it took on the character of legend through repetition, it was cast, in whole or in part, into the form of ballads. It is true that none of these survive, but then very little of the popular literature of the time has survived. The monks had nothing to do with the composition of La Chanson de Roland itself (although two other, later variants of the legend were composed by clerics). On the contrary, it was the legend, and perhaps the poem itself, which prompted the ecclesiastics at Roncevaux to exploit the pass as a pilgrim attraction -- an enterprise which may have contributed to the poem's preservation.
There has been considerable controversy as to just when La Chanson de Roland was written. It must have been some time in the latter half of the eleventh century, but it is not possible to be much more definite than that. The poem apparently was already well known in 1096 when, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II made use of it in his appeal to the chivalry of France to follow in the steps of Charlemagne and send an army against Islam. Many of the crusaders who responded to Urban's summons, and many who came later, must have been following an image of themselves which derived, at least in part, from the legendary last battle of the now transfigured Hruodland.
The poem, in its original form, has not survived. Modern knowledge of it is confined to six different versions, whose separate relations to the original are not plain. There is, for instance, a twelfth century German translation by a Bavarian priest named Konrad. There is a Norse translation of the thirteenth century. There is a version in Franco-Italian, in the library of San Marco in Venice, which ends differently from the others. And there are three versions in French. One of them, known as Recension 0, or the Oxford version, has survived in a single copy, Digby Mss 23, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is supposed that it was a jongleur's copy of the poem. It is the oldest of all the versions, the most beautiful, and must have been much the closest to the original. Bedier's famous edition of the poem is based on the Oxford version, which Bedier compares at all points with the others.
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Ancestor Pedigree Chart
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*There are earlier generations for the ancestor(s) indicated. See their page(s) for details (click name)
- b.13 AUG 582 in Heristal,Neustria d.16 AUG 641 in Horenberg Monastery,Wasenwald
- b.~ 0607 in Austrasia d.0685 in Andenne Monastery
- b.0586 in Old Saxony d.> 0611
- b.0635 in Heristal,Liege,Belgium d.16 DEC 714 in Jupile-on-the-Meuse
- b.0564 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0639
- b.~ 0613 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0698 in Austrasia
- b.~ 0591 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0652
- b.0689 in Heristal,Belgium d.22 OCT 741 in Quierzy,France
- b.~ 0654 in Heristal,Neustria d.~ 0705 in Orp-le-Grand,Brabant
- b.0714 in Austrasia d.24 SEP 768 in St Denis,France
- b.~ 0615 in Austrasia
- b.0640 in Austrasia,France d.0677
- b.0665 in Austrasia d.0713 in Mettlack,France
- b.0596 in Austrasia d.0690 in Metz,Austrasia
- b. in Treves
- b.~ 0690 in Moselle,Austrasia d.0720
- b.~ 0666 in Bavaria,GERMANY
- b.2 APR 742 in Aachen,Prussia d.28 JAN 812/813 in Aachen,Prussia
- b.13 AUG 582 in Heristal,Neustria d.16 AUG 641 in Horenberg Monastery,Wasenwald
- b.~ 0607 in Austrasia d.0685 in Andenne Monastery
- b.0586 in Old Saxony d.> 0611
- b.0645 in Bavaria,GERMANY d.WFT Est. 664-751
- b.0564 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0639
- b.~ 0613 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0698 in Austrasia
- b.~ 0591 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0652
- b.~ 0690 in Laon,Aisne,France d.0747 in FRANCE
- b.0634 d.0657
- b.0640 d.0691
- b.0635 d.0680
- b.0670 in Burgundy,France d.0720
- b.~ 0607 in Austrasia d.0685 in Andenne Monastery
- b.0650 d.3 JUN 692
- b.~ 0613 in Landen,Liege,Belgium d.0698 in Austrasia
- b.~ 0720 in Laon,Austrasia d.12 JUL 783 in Choisy,Burgogne,France
- b.~ 0660 in FRANCE
- b.~ 0695 in Laon,Aisne,France
- b.~ 0660 in FRANCE
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Charlemagne and Desiderata were married in a religious ceremony in 0770.2
Charlemagne and Hildegarde were married in a religious ceremony about 0772 in Aix-la-Chappelle (Aachen),FRANCE.3 They had four sons and seven daughters, named Charles, Lothar, Pepin I, The Pious, Adelaide, Ermentrude, Alpaide, Bertha, Gisela, Hildegarde and Rothilde.
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Children
King Charles Carolingian Of Neustrasia, Duke Of Ingelheim
Charles was born in 0772 in Aachen,Prussia.
Princess Adelaide Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire
Adelaide was born in 0773 in Aachen,Prussia.2 She died at the age of 1 in 0774.2
Princess Ermentrude Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire
Ermentrude was born in 0774 in France (Mother of the twelve sons at one birth).2 She died at the age of 36 in June 0810.2
Princess Alpaide Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire
Alpaide was born about 0775. She died after 0852.4
Princess Bertha Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire
Bertha was born in 0775 in Aachen,Rhineland,Prussia.2 2
Prince Lothar Carolingian Of The Franks
Lothar was born in August 0778 in Casseneuil,Lot-et-Garonne,France.2 He died at the age of 1 in 0779.2
Princess Gisela Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire
Gisela was born in August 0778 in Milano,Lombardy,Italy.2 She died at the age of 36 in 0814.2
King Pepin I Carolingian Of Lombardy/Italy
Pepin I was born in Aachen,Rheinland,Germany.5 He died in Milan,Italy.6
Emperor Louis I (The Pious) Carolingian Of The Holy Roman Empire, King Of Aquitaine
Louis I, known as The Pious, was born in Chasseneuil,France.7 He died in Near Ingelheim,Rhinehessen,Hesse,Germany.8
Charlemagne and Fastrada were married in a religious ceremony in 0783.2 They had two daughters named Hiltrude and Theotrada.
They had a daughter named Adaltrude.
They had two sons named Drogo and The Bastard.
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Children
Hugo (The Bastard) Carolingian Of Saint Quentin
Hugo, known as The Bastard, was born in 0802 in Aachen,Rhineland,Prussia.2 2
They had a daughter named Rothild.
1 LDS Website @ 1838839
2 Ancestry.com 134070.GED
3 {ausbert.FTW}
4 Rootsweb WorldConnect Website @ athertonb database
5 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 2, Ed. 1, Tree #1822, Date of Import: Apr 30, 1996
6 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 1, Ed. 1, Tree #1142, Date of Import: Apr 27, 1996
7 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 1, Ed. 1, Tree #0986, Date of Import: Apr 27, 1996
8 {Louis I ancesters.FTW}
Further sources/citations:
World Family Tree Vol. 5, Ed. 1 @ Tree #1563, {ausbert.FTW}, World Family Tree Vol. 5, Ed. 1 @ Tree #1563, LDS Website @ 1838839, LDS Website @ 1838839
2 Ancestry.com 134070.GED
3 {ausbert.FTW}
4 Rootsweb WorldConnect Website @ athertonb database
5 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 2, Ed. 1, Tree #1822, Date of Import: Apr 30, 1996
6 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 1, Ed. 1, Tree #1142, Date of Import: Apr 27, 1996
7 Br²derbund WFT Vol. 1, Ed. 1, Tree #0986, Date of Import: Apr 27, 1996
8 {Louis I ancesters.FTW}
Further sources/citations:
World Family Tree Vol. 5, Ed. 1 @ Tree #1563, {ausbert.FTW}, World Family Tree Vol. 5, Ed. 1 @ Tree #1563, LDS Website @ 1838839, LDS Website @ 1838839
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