CHARLEMAGNE

CHARLEMAGNE, Emperor (742–814). The son of Pippin I, King of the Franks, Charlemagne (the name means “Charles the Great”) succeeded his father in 771 and was crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III at Rome on Christmas Day, 800. In some respects the founder of modern Western Europe, Charlemagne was a remarkably able military leader, at his death leaving an Empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the borders of modern Poland, and from northern Italy to the mouths of the Rhine. His legislation laid the foundations for the later rise of the European universities, the dominance of the Benedictine order of monks, and provided for a widespread revival of Latin learning that, though short-lived, still provided a memory that would begin to flower two centuries later.

Western Europe itself lives, in a sense, on his memory. It was Charlemagne, both in his policies and his actual coronation, who marked the decisive move on the part of the newly baptized nations of the West to break away from the suzerainty of Byzantium (q.v.)-titular in fact, if not in theory. The political and cultural schism fostered by the Carolingians (q.v.) foreshadowed the ecclesiastical rupture that would come two and a half centuries later. While the last political echo of Charlemagne’s Empire died with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919, his legacy endures. It is surely no accident, though probably not deliberate, that the founding members of the early European Economic Community corresponded essentially (less southern Italy) with the territories of his 9th-c. kingdom.