From palace officials to kings
The Carolingians were not born into royalty. In the seventh and early eighth centuries the Frankish kingdoms were nominally ruled by the Merovingian dynasty, but real power increasingly lay with the “mayor of the palace”, the chief officer of the royal household. One family held that post again and again, and it later took its name from its most famous member, Charles, or Carolus in Latin.
Charles Martel became the leading figure among the Franks around 718 after years of rivalry and civil war. He campaigned along the Rhine and in Aquitaine and Burgundy, and relied on a loyal body of followers rewarded with land and office. He is best remembered for a victory in 732 (some historians prefer 733) near Tours and Poitiers against a raiding force from Muslim Iberia. Later writers inflated this into a decisive rescue of Christian Europe, but modern historians generally see it as one important clash in a longer series of frontier raids and local wars. Charles died in 741 without ever calling himself king.
Pippin and the papacy
Charles’s son Pippin III, called “the Short”, ruled as mayor first alongside his brother Carloman, who retired to a monastery in 747. In 751 Pippin took the next step. With the reported approval of Pope Zachary and the support of Frankish nobles, he was acclaimed king, and the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was sent to a monastery. A few years later, in 754, Pope Stephen II travelled across the Alps and anointed Pippin and his sons.
The arrangement helped both sides. The Carolingians gained religious sanction for a change of dynasty, and the pope gained a protector against the Lombards in Italy. Pippin defeated the Lombard king and handed over lands in central Italy, the so-called Donation of Pippin of 756, which became a foundation for the later Papal States. This alliance of Frankish power and papal authority shaped European politics for centuries.
Charlemagne’s conquests
Pippin died in 768, and his sons Charles and Carloman shared the kingdom until Carloman died in 771. Charles, known as Charlemagne (“Charles the Great”), then ruled alone and spent much of his reign at war:
- In 774 he conquered the Lombard kingdom in Italy and took the Lombard crown.
- From 772 to 804 he fought a long, harsh series of campaigns against the Saxons, whom he also pressed to accept Christianity. The Royal Frankish Annals report mass executions at Verden in 782, though the details are debated.
- In 778 a Frankish rearguard was ambushed in the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles, an episode that later inspired the epic Song of Roland.
- In the 790s he broke the power of the Avars in the middle Danube region.
By around 800 the Frankish realm covered much of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, northern Italy and parts of northern Spain. It was governed through counts, bishops and travelling royal agents called missi dominici, and by written royal decrees known as capitularies.
Christmas Day, 800
In 799 Pope Leo III was attacked by hostile factions in Rome and appealed to Charlemagne. The king came to Rome late in 800, and an assembly examined the accusations against the pope. Then, on 25 December 800, during Mass in St Peter’s, Leo placed a crown on Charlemagne’s head and the congregation acclaimed him as emperor and Augustus, a title that went back to the Augustan principate more than eight centuries earlier. Historians still debate how much of this was planned in advance. Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard claims he would not have entered the church had he known what the pope intended, but this may be a way of avoiding the appearance that the pope had made him emperor.
The context matters. In Constantinople the throne was held by the empress Irene, and some in the West argued that the imperial office was effectively vacant because a woman ruled. The new title was a claim to revive the empire in the West, but it was awkward. The Byzantines regarded themselves as the legitimate Romans, and only in 812 did their emperor recognise Charlemagne’s imperial title, in a limited form. Charlemagne also dealt with the caliph in Abbasid Baghdad, and the Frankish annals record gifts sent in 802, including an elephant named Abul-Abbas.
Rule, learning and aftermath
Charlemagne’s court at Aachen became a centre of learning. Scholars such as Alcuin of York helped reform schools and church texts, copying of classical and Christian works increased, and a clear handwriting known as Carolingian minuscule spread widely and later influenced printed lowercase letters. Many of the texts we have from antiquity survive because Carolingian monks copied them.
The empire did not last in one piece. Charlemagne died in 814 and was succeeded by his son Louis the Pious. After Louis’s death, his sons divided the realm in the Treaty of Verdun in 843, creating western, central and eastern kingdoms that are often seen as forerunners of France and Germany. The imperial title survived in the West, and it was later revived by the German king Otto I in 962.
The Carolingians do not mark a simple return to ancient Rome. Their power rested on land, loyalty and armies rather than a Roman-style tax system. Yet the story shows how the memory of Rome, after the fall of Rome in the West, remained a source of prestige and legitimacy, even when the political reality was very different.