For as long as humanity has been capable of passing down its history, it has revered legends, figures of time-shrouded myth whose deeds are as grand as their appetites. All of our hearts swell at the prospect of conquest, whatever shape it takes, but these singular men and women seized that desire and stamped it with such force into the metal of our history that their immortality is virtually assured. Perhaps we would do well to forget them. Perhaps, if we were unaware of how brightly their stars burned, some among us would not be driven by the need to eclipse them, regardless of the destruction such would sew. But we'd have as much luck wishing away the sun as erasing our giants. For even in death, they have but to extend their hands and we find ourselves being welcomed into their destinies. This truth is exquisitely explored in Richard Winston's engaging biography.
The son of kings and the forger of an empire, Charlemagne is one of the foremost figures of our age. An illiterate man with a passion for knowledge, he was a creature of contradictions, of enlightenment and devastation, who rallied the men of his far flung province of the fallen Roman Empire and, over 47 years of rule, created a new imperium upon the ashes of the old. The conquerer of Europe, he caused popes to bow to his will and to craft crowns so that he might place them on his brow, acts motivated by glory, surely, but also from a desire to restore the order of what had been centuries lost in the death of old Rome. That he was successful where others had failed speaks to luck, but also to a once-in-a-generation will to leave behind a world better than the one he had found.
Charlemagne fought the Saxons and the Lombards, the Saracens and the Bavarians, but war was not his legacy. That was rooted in the idea of a united Europe, a continent that could set aside its disagreements and work in concert towards a common goal. Moreover, it was invested into the scriptoria he created, places of learning that could restore at least some of the wisdom of the fallen ancients and bestow upon the subsequent generations the capacity to build towards a world not consumed by war, but progress. These were mighty goals Charlemagne worked towards during his long reign, but fate prevented them from coming to fruition as he'd hoped. For with the passing of his eldest sons, men in whom he'd rested his hopes for a continuation of his dreams, his empire fall to Louis, King of the Franks, a pious but unwise man whose squandering of Charlemagne's efforts plunged the continent into centuries of intellectual darkness.
This is the tale Mr. Winston tells in Charlemagne, a lyrical account of the life and times of the most powerful European figure to emerge from the ruins of Rome. Drawing from Einhard's contemporary account of the emperor's life, as well as what other sources remain from the eighth century, the author paints an irresistible portrait of a singular mind, one as shaped by conquest as it was by metaphysics. Though little remains of Charlemagne's youth, and though it is difficult to corroborate the exact nature of his various deeds, a pattern of behavior emerges across the whole of the man's life, one that speaks to a complex nature that would be as well-suited to the cut and thrust of our century as it was to the tribalism of his own. From the manner in which he treated his wives to the esteem with which he held knowledge, we are made witnesses to the man more than we are the warrior, the spirit more than the deeds, a reality which is sure to frustrate those interested in military history but that pleases those others who find themselves fascinated by the minds of giants.
Charlemagne, for all its delightful prose, is a largely sympathetic account of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Mr. Winston is far harsher on the emperor's contemporaries than he is on Charlemagne himself. Perhaps Charles the Great was a man above all others, an unyielding spire of morality lashed by a seething sea of corrupted souls, but this seems far too simplistic given what we know of humanity which is much more liable to produce individuals of gray morality than of purely white and black. The only spot of criticism Mr. Winston levels at Charlemagne is the mercilessness with which he treats the Saxons who, time and time again, rise in rebellion against him, but even this seems muted compared to his paeans to Charlemagne's successes.
Notwithstanding its vagaries and its sympathies, Charlemagne is a vivid and lively document that teaches us as much about the man as it does about fate. For the readers of this chronicle will not be able to walk away unaffected by Mr. Winston's conclusion that, had Charlemagne's eldest sons lived, the subsequent 13 centuries of history would have unfolded quite differently. In peace, the schools Charlemagne founded would have had time to build on their learning, to spur on the intellectual flowering that only occurred centuries later. Instead, Louis' unsuitableness caused many of Charlemagne's reforms to wither on the vine, a tragic fact that caused Europe to devolve back into the post-Roman gloom that had already consumed it for 400 years.
Imagine a world without the Middle Ages, without irreason and theocracy. Imagine a Renaissance that began five centuries earlier in Charlemagne's Europe rather than Italy's city states. Imagine if industrialism came to Europe in the 13th century, not the 18th. We would today be among the stars.
Well worth the read, as much for the dream as for the man... (4/5 Stars)
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