Biography of Charlemagne | Germanic monarch.

(Charles I the great; Aachen, 742 - Aix-la-Chapelle, 814) Germanic monarch who restored the Empire in Western Europe. Son of the King of the Franks, Pepin the short, inherited the throne on the death of his father (768) and completed it with the eastern territories granted to his brother Carlomán, died this in the year 771.

Charlemagne (oil from Alberto Durero)

Its expansive policy continued with the conquest and annexation of the Lombard Kingdom (North of Italy), performed in the 774, through an Alliance of the Franks with the papacy. Dominated Italy (although still trends particularist, especially strong in the southern Duchies of Spoleto and Benevento), Charlemagne concentrated their energies on the conquest of Saxony (Northern Germany), company that demanded eighteen successive between the years 772 and 804 campaigns.

Charlemagne was thus the most important Kingdom of the Europe of his time. but to keep it had to continually fight: sometimes against rebellion or resistance internal and others to secure the borders against foreign enemies. The latter include the war against the Avars in the eastern border, which led him to dominate the current territories of Hungary, Croatia and part of Serbia; and also an unsuccessful attempt to enter Spain, aborted by the defeat inflicted upon him the Basques in the battle of Roncesvalles (778), but who did at least to create a Hispanic brand under the Frank Kingdom, that went from Pamplona to Barcelona.

The geographical expansion of the Kingdom of Charlemagne corresponded to all of what are now France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg, and the greater part of Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia. A predecessor of European unity has been considered thus. No monarch had gathered in his hand a vast territory since the fall of the Roman Empire (476); so it is not surprising that the idea of imperial restoration opened way, linked to the stable Alliance that Charlemagne remained with the papacy.

The Christmas day of year 800 Pope León III crowned Charlemagne Emperor, thus beginning a new Germanic Empire, that perviviría until the beginning of the 19th century. Although the continuity of this Empire with the Roman Empire, disappeared three centuries before, was a fiction, the restoration of the imperial idea meant an aspiration to a universal power over the Princes of the various kingdoms that would be the temporal counterpart of the supremacy of the Pope in the spiritual. This unique partnership and complementarity of the emperor with the Pope would lead to a struggle for supremacy between both powers, that would last throughout the middle ages.

The Empire of Charlemagne in the year
his crowning (800)

In an age characterized by the high degree of violence and anarchy, that dominated the social life, the Carolingian Empire was a great deal of political and administrative organization. Although there was a fixed capital (the capital of the Empire was where the emperor was found with his court), the German city of Aachen fulfilled these roles almost permanently. From there, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at whose front was an educated cleric, directed matters both civil and ecclesiastical; control of the territory was in the hands of the counts, except in the border marks, organised militarily; and some envoys of the Emperor (missi dominici) supervised the Administration in every corner of the territory.

The Christian religion was a cultural element of integration, stability and social order, which the emperor was responsible for cultivating: it protected the monasteries and attempted to spread the Christian faith to the North (to impose it by force to the Saxons). However, that great territorial conglomerate did not survive long. The own Charlemagne had foreseen that upon his death, the Empire was distributed among his three sons; but the death of two of them delayed fragmentation until the moment he died the only surviving successor, Louis the pious, who also divided the Empire among his three sons (Treaty of Verdun, 843). Carolingia dynasty continued in front of the Empire until the beginning of the 10th century, and in the throne of France, until the 987.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas