Pépite

France · The foundations

Charlemagne, the emperor who was learning to write

Charlemagne never really learned to write. But he made a whole empire write — laws, poems, gospels — in a script so legible that our lower-case letters still descend from it.

The start of the lesson

The next 6 cards, the four questions and the review are in the app.

Picture a king arriving in an ox-cart, a ploughman up front. This is Childéric, the last Merovingian: the title and the hair are all he has left. In 751 he is shorn. The real boss is the mayor of the palace, Pépin.

0 years
of reign, if you believe Éginhard (ch. 15)
Do the sum yourself: October 768 to January 814 makes 45 years and 4 months. Éginhard counted the first year and the last (Sot, 2015).
Rome, the basilica of Saint PeterChristmas 800

A crown in the pope’s hands, and a crowd that already knows what to shout.

Pope Leo crowns Charles, and the crowd hails him Augustus. Éginhard swears he would never have set foot inside had he known. Levillain doesn’t buy it: Charles had accepted two days earlier. What annoyed him was the order — crowned before acclaimed.

The word
Augustus
The title of the Roman emperors. There was none left in the West; the only living one sat in Constantinople, and she was a woman.

To a Frankish annalist, a throne held by a woman was an empty throne.

Who tells us this? Éginhard, a little fellow the court nicknames Nardulus, ‘little Nard’. He writes his Life of Charlemagne long after his hero’s death, on a model he never names: Suetonius. An admirer, then.

  • Same plan
    Family, wars, private life, portrait, omens, death, will: Suetonius’s order, chapter after chapter (Halphen).
  • Same hour of death
    ‘At the third hour of the day’: a detail added to imitate Suetonius on the death of Augustus (ch. 30, n. 186).
  • Same omens
    Eclipses, a black spot on the sun, a collapsing gallery: the whole of chapter 32 is put together from bits of the Lives of Augustus, Caligula and Claudius.
  • Same way of measuring him
    Seven times the length of his foot, the best swimmer of his day: a height that echoes Tiberius’s and Augustus’s in Suetonius (ch. 22).

The next 6 cards, the four questions and the review are in the app.

What you will be able to answer

  • According to Éginhard, what did Charlemagne keep under the pillow of his bed?
  • Éginhard wrote his Life of Charlemagne during the emperor’s lifetime, as an eyewitness to every chapter.
  • Put these moments in order.
  • Charlemagne is the Latin Carolus ___, ‘Charles the Great’.

Sources

Every date, every figure and every quote in this lesson was verified in these sources.

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