SOURCE: Thorpe, Lewis. Introduction to Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, translated and edited by Lewis Thorpe, pp. 1-45. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1969.

[In the following excerpt, Thorpe examines the biographies of Charlemagne and Einhard and comments on the latter's reticence to write anything negative about his subject.]

1. CHARLEMAGNE, KING AND EMPEROR

THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE

Charles the Great, King of the Franks and later ruler of the Carolingian Empire, may at first sight seem comparable with that other famous medieval figure, Arthur of Britain, for in both cases the fictional hero into which each later developed tends to obscure the original historical personage. Of the real Arthur we know very little, although most historians and students of literature accept that he was a Romano-British guerrilla leader who lived in the district called Strathclyde in the first half of the sixth century. The fact that the literary Charlemagne is the central figure of a vast series of epic poems written in France in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and of a corpus of derived literature in Germany, Italy and elsewhere, must not encourage us to think that of him, too, considered as a real person, we know as little as we do of the historical Arthur. In effect, our knowledge of Charles the Great is both extensive and detailed.

In the present book it is of the historical Charles that we shall be thinking and not of the legendary Charlemagne. It is, however, customary to speak of the historical king and emperor as Charlemagne, and to this habit we must defer. Charlemagne is the form to which the oblique case of his Latin name, Carolus Magnus, was reduced two hundred years and more after his death, in the French chansons-de-geste. Could he hear us using it, Charles would no doubt laugh his quiet laugh, measure a few thousand of the Aquitani with his sword¹ and send the ringleaders to spend the remainder of their lives in remote monasteries: for he was a Frank and, if he spoke Latin and understood a little Greek, his own language was Frankish and his blood Teutonic.

Our knowledge of the life and reign of Charlemagne is obtained from a long series of contemporary documents, only the most important of which can be mentioned here. We possess in particular three series of chronicles, called the Annales regni Francorum, covering the period 741-829; a revision of these Annales regni Francorum, for 741-801; and the Annales Mosellani, or Moselle Annals, for 703-797. There is also a number of other annals of lesser importance, those of Murbach, Lorsch, Saint-Amand, Fulda, Salzburg, etc. Secondly, we have the corpus of some eighty capitularies of Charlemagne, the Capitularia regni Francorum. There is, thirdly, the correspondence of the Carolingian kings and emperors: the Codex Carolinus, containing the letters which they exchanged with the popes, and the more general Epistolae Aevi Carolini. We possess a long series of Latin lives of such contemporary figures as Adalhard, Alcuin, Liudger, Sturm, Wigbert and Willehad, with the two biographies of Charlemagne's successor, Lewis the Pious, by Thegan, Bishop of Trier, and the so-called Limousin Astronomer. To these must be added such works as the Liber de Episcopis Mettensibus, or History of the Bishops of Metz, by Paul the Deacon, and the anonymous Gesta Abbatum Fontanellensium, or annals of the abbots of Fontenelle. Lastly we have two biographies, or pseudobiographies, of Charlemagne himself: the Vita Caroli by Einhard, written between 829 and 836; and the much more discursive and anecdotal De Carolo Magno, written for Charles the Fat, in 883-4, some seventy years after Charlemagne's death, by the Monk of Saint Gall. These last two documents form the subject of this book.

THE MILITARY CAMPAIGNS

Charlemagne was born c. 742 as the eldest son of Pepin the Short and his wife Bertrada. He had a younger brother, Carloman, who was born c. 751, and there had been a third brother, Pepin, who had died as a child. There was also a sister, Gisela, born in 757. Until 754 Pepin the Short was Mayor of the Palace under Childeric III, the last of the Merovingian kings. In the winter of 753-4 and the following spring, Pope Stephen II travelled slowly from Rome to Saint Denis, outside Paris, and there, on 28 July 754, with his own hands, crowned Pepin the Short as King of the Franks and appointed his two sons Charlemagne and Carloman as his joint heirs. By this single act the Pope at once deposed Childeric III and put an end to the Merovingian dynasty, brought into being as its replacement the dynasty of the Carolingian kings and emperors, and sought for himself an ally against the emperors in Constantinople and the Longobards in northern Italy. After his coronation King Pepin the Short lived for a further fourteen years. Immediately before his death at Saint Denis on 24 September 768, he divided his lands between his two sons.

To understand the military aims and achievements of Charlemagne, it is necessary to have a clear conception of the extent of these territories.² They stretched from the River Saal on the eastern borders of Thuringia and the River Danube on the southern frontier of the Bavarian Nordgau almost to the northern shores of modern Holland; from the River Lech and the Graian Alps in the south-east to the entire Atlantic seaboard of modern France, excluding Brittany; from the Frisian Islands in the north to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean in the south. In terms of modern countries they included much of Germany, most of Holland, the whole of Belgium and Switzerland, and almost the whole of France. In contemporary terms, from east to west, they included the Bavarian Nordgau, Thuringia, Hesse, Alamania (= Swabia), Austrasia, Frisia, Burgundia, Provincia, Septimania, Neustria and Aquitania. To the north they were bordered by the lands of the Saxons, to the east by Bavaria, to the south-east by the kingdom of the Longobards, which ran from the Alps to the southern frontier of Tuscany, and to the south, over the Pyrenees, by the Emirate of Cordova.

The centre and south of this vast area was given to Carloman: Alamania, Burgundia, Provincia, Septimania and eastern Aquitania. To Charlemagne was apportioned a great half-circle running westwards from Ratisbon on the Danube and from the River Saal, through the Bavarian Nordgau, Thuringia, Hesse, Austrasia and Frisia to the North Sea, and then southwards through Neustria and western Aquitania to the Pyrenees.

The disparity of personality and experience between the two brothers at the moment of their succession was very great. Charlemagne was about twenty-six and, although he had never held great authority, he had been associated with his father in most of the events of the last few years of his life. Carloman was a boy of about seventeen. Both born of the same parents, Charlemagne is supposed to have been a love-child, while Carloman was legitimate. As we see him through the accounts of later writers who were for the most part his dependants, Charlemagne was a man of limitless energy, great resolution and considerable personal strength; Carloman, seen through the prejudiced eyes of these same writers, appears to have been peevish, given to self-pity and the easy victim of the flatterers who surrounded him.

The period immediately following 768 was largely occupied by problems which the two young kings, and Charlemagne in particular, had inherited from their father, but to these Charlemagne added a domestic complication of his own and his mother's making. During the last years of the reign of King Pepin, Aquitaine had been in revolt. In 769 a certain Hunold led a new rising of the Aquitanians of the south-west in Saintonge and Poitou. Charlemagne moved with his army towards the southern reaches of his inheritance, met his brother Carloman at Moncontour and was refused assistance by him. The revolt of the Aquitanians was put down, but Charlemagne never saw his brother again. With the help of their mother Bertrada, relations were patched up between them, for an open quarrel would have been of no advantage to either of the Frankish kings. Then, to what must have been the considerable relief of Charlemagne, Carloman died suddenly in December 771. His vassals immediately did homage to Charlemagne and the entire territory of Pepin the Short was thus united once more under one ruler. Charlemagne then turned to face new difficulties in the east. In 770, at the persuasion of his mother and to the great annoyance of Pope Stephen III, he had married the daughter of Desiderius, King of the Longobards; a year later he dismissed his young wife and in her place married the Swabian Hildigard; on the death of Carloman in 771, that King's widow Gerberga and her young sons joined Charlemagne's repudiated wife at the court of this same Desiderius in Pavia; after a brief period of alliance with Rome, Desiderius quarrelled with Pope Stephen III; and to aggravate all these circumstances, which were difficult enough for Charlemagne in all conscience, Desiderius saw a deadly threat to his own Longobard kingdom in the junction of the dead Carloman's territories with those of his formidable brother. Charlemagne assembled his forces at Geneva, crossed the Alps and in October 773 began to besiege Pavia, the capital of Desiderius and his Longobard kingdom. The city fell in June 774, Desiderius was deposed and Charlemagne added a new territory to those which he already possessed. During the siege of Pavia, he moved on to Rome, met Pope Hadrian I, the successor to Stephen III, and renewed the Donation of Pepin by which the Frankish kings confirmed to the popes the possession of all territories nominally under their sway.

With the revolt in Aquitaine crushed, Carloman dead and his lands engulfed, Desiderius beaten and his Longobard kingdom captured, and with relations established on a firm footing with the Papacy, Charlemagne had already turned to face a long series of most bloodthirsty wars with the Saxons in the north. These were to continue intermittently from 772 until 804, for a period of more than thirty years. The major campaigns were those of 772, 775, 776, 779, 782, 783, 784-5, 794, 796, 797-8 and 804. It is impossible for us to follow all these wars in detail. In 772 Charlemagne crossed the River Eder and the River Diemel and destroyed the Irminsul, the sacred pillar of wood, ‘the all-sustaining pillar’ of the Saxons. In 775 he crossed the River Weser and attacked the Ostphalians. After the campaign of 776 he occupied much of Westphalia. In 779 he beat Witikind at Bochult, called a general assembly at Lippspringe and divided part of Saxonia into mission districts. In 782 the Saxons rebelled against this Cartulary of Charlemagne and nearly five thousand were massacred at Verden. From then on year after year saw new revolts and rebellions, new massacres, temporary submissions, vast deportations. In 794 Charlemagne deported seven thousand Saxons, in 797 every third household, in 798 sixteen hundred leaders. In 797 he issued the second Saxon Cartulary. Only in 804 was Saxonia finally conquered and pacified.

During this long period of the Saxon wars, Charlemagne had many military preoccupations elsewhere. In 775-6 Rotgaud, the Longobard Duke of Friuli, aggravated beyond endurance by the territorial claims of Charlemagne's ally, Pope Hadrian I, revolted but was killed in battle. In 778 Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, penetrated as far south as Saragossa, which he failed to take, destroyed the walls of Pamplona and, as he moved back into Aquitania, suffered the defeat to his rearguard known as the battle of Roncevaux. Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria, who had been in revolt against Pepin the Short years before and whose wife Liutberga was one of the daughters of Desiderius, the deposed King of the Longobards, conspired with his brother-in-law, Areghis, but was finally forced to surrender and, like Desiderius before him, sent to a monastery in 788. As Charlemagne and his armies forced their way ever deeper into the lands of the Saxons, they gradually began to join battle with peoples who lived even farther to the east, the Abotrites, the Wiltzes, the Sorbs, the Avars, the Wends and, more to the south, the Slavs. In the west the Carolingian leader Audulf won a victory against the Bretons in 786, as did Wido in 799, and a year later the Breton leaders met at Tours and offered their allegiance to Charlemagne; but by 811 they were in revolt once more. In the north Godefrid, King of the Northmen, who had watched the successive reduction of the Saxons and the Abotrites, and then the fighting with the Wiltzes, built an immense earthen rampart called the Danework south of the River Eider, from the Baltic to the North Sea. In 808 he mounted a campaign against the Franks, and in 810 he sent a huge fleet to ravage the Frisian Islands. Charlemagne, who was then nearly seventy, marched northwards to meet Godefrid at Verden, but before the two forces could join battle the Danish leader was murdered. It was Charlemagne's last expedition.

DIPLOMACY AND ADMINISTRATION

From the joint accession in 768 until this final campaign against Godefrid the Northman in 810, the reign of Charlemagne was one long and never-ending series of warlike enterprises. In the midst of all this military activity, and largely because of it, he was at the same time engaged in diplomatic relations with the rulers of many other lands. Irene, joint ruler of the Empire in Constantinople, in 781 proposed a marriage between her infant son, the Emperor Constantine VI, and Charlemagne's daughter Rotrude, but this was eventually broken off six years later. From 789 to 796 Charlemagne was in correspondence with Offa, King of Mercia; and Eardulf, King of Northumbria, visited him as a fugitive in Nimeguen in 808. His relations with Harun-al-Rachid are mentioned in some detail by Einhard and the Monk of Saint Gall: he sent envoys to Bagdad in 797 and 807, and messengers from Harun arrived at Ivrea in 801 and Aachen in 807. In 803 the Emperor Nicephorus I, who had succeeded the Empress Irene in the previous year, sent an embassy to Charlemagne. In the course of the single year 810 Charlemagne concluded peace treaties with Nicephorus I, with El Hakem the Cruel, Emir of Cordova, and with Hemming, King of the Danes, who had succeeded to his father Godefrid.

Four times Charlemagne visited Rome: in 774, during the siege of Pavia, when he was welcomed by Pope Hadrian I; in 781, when Hadrian crowned the two young princes, Pepin and Lewis, as Kings of the Longobards and the Aquitanians; in 787, when Charlemagne spent Easter with the Pope; and in 800 when, on Christmas Day, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Emperor.

All this activity, both military and civil, spread over territory so extensive in days when travelling was so difficult, demanded a complicated administrative machine at the centre, if it was to be successful. In the years following his coronation Charlemagne devoted his attention largely to administrative problems. Each year saw new additions to the code of laws contained in the corpus of capitularies. Most of the reforms concerned the administration of justice; but at the same time the military system was changed radically. Charlemagne could not afford a standing army: but now the obligation of periodic military service was moved from the individual to the land held. The production of a suitably armed soldier for a specified period was henceforth the responsibility of the holder or holders, few or numerous, of a given piece of land, who chose, paid and equipped their nominee. New edicts were announced to provincial assemblies by Charlemagne's missi dominici, or royal commissioners, pairs of unpaid emissaries, of high rank, one a churchman, one a layman, sent out on circuit to a given neighbourhood. Failure to observe the edicts was tried by local law-courts, consisting of seven scabini or jurymen, elected for life; and the equity of the decisions of the scabini was supervised by the local count. In 802 Charlemagne reduced to writing the various national codes. All of this must have seemed much better to the court official writing it down on parchment in Aachen than it did to the individual of some far-flung township in the Carolingian Empire. The laws were often inequitable and unjust; the scabini did not understand the laws and were, in any case, afraid of the local count; the missi were busy men, who had heavy commitments and responsibilities at home and could ill afford these long excursions on circuit; the provincial assemblies listened to the new edicts, signified their assent without too much effort of comprehension, and then, on the departure of the missi, continued to act exactly as they had always acted before; so many men of talent were needed at the centre to set out and promulgate the laws that there were too few men of talent left on the periphery to see that they were observed; and those who planned the laws were often out of touch with reality. These are problems common to all centralized governments.

THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE

Charlemagne himself was illiterate: Einhard describes his rather pathetic attempts to learn to write, but concludes that, ‘although he tried very hard, he had begun too late in life and he made little progress’.³ His own language was Frankish; as we have seen, he spoke Latin well and understood some Greek.⁴ He learned the elements of grammar from Peter the Deacon, and Alcuin taught him rhetoric, dialectic, mathematics and astrology. His respect for learning and the liberal arts seems to have been genuine and deep-rooted. The Monk of Saint Gall describes at length Charlemagne's interest in church liturgy and music, and his careful insistence on the proper chanting of the responses and the reading of the lessons, but he may well be transferring to the Emperor some of his own personal enthusiasms. Gradually, as the years passed, Charlemagne assembled at his court in Aachen many of the most learned men of Europe. In 781 he met again in Parma the Englishman Alcuin, who had previously visited his court. From 782 to 796 Alcuin was at Aachen, and from then until his death in 804 he lived in his abbey of Saint Martin in Tours. Some time before the conquest of the Longobard kingdom in 785, Charlemagne had come into contact with Paul the Deacon, Peter of Pisa and Paulinus, later of Aquileia. Einhard, a Frank born in the Maingau, moved to the Palace School in Aachen in 791. These men, and others like them, were the mainsprings of the Carolingian Renaissance. During his years at Aachen, Alcuin organized the Palace School. Under Alcuin the school became an important factor in national life; it developed into a well defined and highly favoured institution. Any magnate might send his sons, nor were humble antecedents allowed to exclude a boy of talent. Plebeian or patrician, it mattered nothing to Charles: he singled out the most proficient with rare impartiality and promoted them to vacant offices or preferments. Alcuin taught in person and enlisted all the other literati in the service. The King set the fashion of taking lessons, and all his family were put to school. Being a court affair, the school accompanied the royal household in its wanderings. It was not hampered by elaborate paraphernalia. Alcuin sent envoys far and wide to purchase books for his pupils, but the library which he gathered must have been both small and portable. The primers of the elementary subjects—orthography, grammar, rhetoric and dialectic—were written by himself. They are extant and printed in his works.⁵ Theology was seen as the centre of all learning. Students who had shown marked ability were sent out to become the abbots of Frankish monasteries. Great monastic schools were developed at Fulda and Tours, and later at Corbie, Saint Wandrille, Saint Gall and elsewhere. Latin was restored as a literary language, spelling was revised and penmanship remodelled on the old uncial letters. As H. W. Garrod wrote: ‘The debt of literature to the Carolingian copying-schools may be best brought home to us by a very simple consideration. If we set aside Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius and Silius Italicus, together with the tragedies of Seneca and parts of Statius and Claudian, we owe the preservation of practically the whole of Latin poetry to the schools at the time of Charlemagne. These same scholars have preserved to us, except for Varro, Tacitus and Apuleius, practically the whole of the prose literature of Rome.’⁶ Einhard tells us that Charlemagne also ordered the old sagas of the Frankish peoples to be written out, and that he began a grammar of his native tongue.⁷

The two lives by Einhard and the Monk of Saint Gall both contain references to the thermal baths at Aachen, the cathedral modelled on San Vitale in Ravenna, the Imperial palace and the great bridge constructed over the River Rhine at Mainz. These show yet another side of Charlemagne's immense creative activity.

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Opinions vary still today as to the precise importance to us all of the long reign of Charlemagne. Would the history of the Christian church in Europe in the later Middle Ages and throughout the world in more recent times have been radically different had Charlemagne not fought his long series of wars against the Saxons and other peoples? Had Alcuin and his fellow scholars not achieved all that they did at Aachen and in the monasteries fostered and founded by Charlemagne, should we be without the rich literatures of medieval France and Germany? Without the Carolingian Renaissance would that other and much greater Renaissance, which lasted from Petrarch to Rabelais, Thomas More and Erasmus, have been possible? In a recent book Professor Donald Bullough has assembled an admirable collection of photographs of the buildings, manuscripts, reliquaries and other artistic productions of the Carolingian era.⁸ Without these would the history of European architecture and fine art be completely different? Is the Empire which Charlemagne built up with such effort and which fell to pieces so soon after his death to be seen as an earlier form of the Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, or of the group of Common Market countries in Europe in our own century? The answer probably is that all these things would have existed without Charlemagne, but that they would not be as we know them today. Certainly the achievements and personality of Charlemagne loom very large in the thinking of most modern Europeans. As a symbol of this thinking the Prix Charlemagne is awarded periodically to the woman or man who is considered to have done most to further the cause of a united Europe. As a further tribute, from 26 June until 19 September 1965, the Tenth Exhibition of the Council of Europe, organized in the Rathaus, Cathedral and Museum of the town of Aachen by Professor Wolfgang Braunfels, had as its subject Charlemagne; and some seven hundred objects connected with the great Emperor were lent to that Exhibition from public and private collections in Europe, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.

2. EINHARD THE FRANK

We possess a considerable amount of information about Einhard, the author of the Vita Caroli or the Life of Charlemagne. In his introduction he tells us that Charlemagne was his master and patron, and that he had seen with his own eyes the happenings which he describes. His two immediate reasons for writing were the personal knowledge which he possessed of Charlemagne, and the debt of gratitude which he owed to this remarkable king and emperor, who had helped him to continue his education and with whom he had long lived on friendly terms. Apart from the plan which he proposes for his work, the text itself has no really personal touches. Of Charlemagne's birth and childhood he claims to have no knowledge (Ch.4). He will shape his biography in this way: ‘First of all I shall describe his achievements at home and abroad, then his personal habits and enthusiasms, then the way in which he administered his kingdom and last of all his death, omitting from all this nothing which ought to be known or, indeed, which is worthy of being recorded’ (Ch.4).

In his reticence, Einhard does not even name himself. This is remedied by a prologue written for The Life of Charlemagne by Walahfrid Strabo, Abbot of Reichenau,⁹ and by information provided by other ninth-century writers who knew Einhard personally. He was a man of comparatively noble birth.¹⁰ He was born in the Maingau.¹¹ His parents were called Einhart¹² and Engilfrit,¹³ and during the abbacy of Baugolf (779-802) he was sent to be educated in the monastery of Fulda, in Hesse, some sixty miles north-east of Frankfurt, of which institution his father and mother were benefactors. A number of manuscripts written by Einhard while he was at Fulda still exist in the monastery and two of them are dated 19 April 788 and 12 September 791. Soon after 791 he was sent by Abbot Baugolf to the Palace School of Charlemagne at Aachen.¹⁴ By his intelligence, wisdom and probity,¹⁵ virtues which are rarely found united in the same man at any period in history, he soon made his mark at court, and became the adviser and personal friend of Charlemagne. Of the freedom with which Charlemagne came to discuss his affairs with Einhard, Walahfrid Strabo tells us in his prologue; and in his own introduction Einhard writes of ‘the friendly relations which I enjoyed with him and his children from the moment when I first began to live at his court’. He seems to have been a man of many talents. In one of his letters to Charlemagne, Alcuin calls Einhard by the nickname Bezaleel, which the Emperor apparently used for him.¹⁶ This nickname is repeated by Walahfrid Strabo in a poem written in 829, long after the death of Charlemagne.¹⁷ Alcuin himself had been given the name Flaccus and the two scholars and their friends addressed Charlemagne as David. If the name Bezaleel is to be taken at all seriously, it may imply that Einhard was skilled in metal work, wood-carving and the cutting of gems. From documents at Fontanelle and Fulda it has been argued that Angisus, who became Abbot of Saint-Germer-de-Flay in 807, had previously been in charge of public works at Aachen under the direction of Einhard;¹⁸ and that Ratger, the third Abbot of Fulda (802-817), sent one of his monks called Brun to Aachen to be instructed by Einhard in the arts.¹⁹

Einhard seems to have been a very small man. Walahfrid Strabo calls him an ‘homuncio’ in his prologue, and in his poem of 829 he uses the word ‘homullus’. In one of his poems Alcuin refers to Einhard as ‘Nardulus’ and ‘parvulus’:²⁰ he reminds his readers that, despite its lack of size, the bee makes fine honey; and that, for all its smallness, the pupil of the eye rules all our bodily functions.²¹ As early as 796, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, had compared Einhard to a busy ant.²²

After the death of Charlemagne in 814, Einhard remained in high favour with his successor, Lewis the Pious, a fact which clearly astonished Walahfrid Strabo.²³ It was at this period that he seems to have married Imma, the sister of Bernhard, Bishop of Worms and Abbot of Weissenburg.²⁴ His married state did not prevent Lewis from making him abbot of a long series of monasteries, Saint Pierre and Saint Bavon in Ghent, for example, Saint Servais in Maestricht and Saint Wandrille at Fontanelle. In 815 he was given a grant of lands at Michlinstat and at Mulinheim, later to be known as Seligenstadt, ‘the city of the Saints’, from the church which Einhard built there and the relics of Saint Marcellinus and Saint Peter which he had carried there. Gradually as the years passed his health began to fail. In letters dated 829 and 830 he wrote of pains in his stomach and his back, and in this latter year he left Aachen and went to live in Seligenstadt. Imma died in 836. The death of Einhard himself occurred on 14 March 840.

3. THE VITA CAROLI OF EINHARD

There are in existence four works written by Einhard, all of them in Latin: the Vita Caroli, … a series of seventy-one letters, called the Einharti Epistolae, which, as far as they can be dated, run from 814 to 840; the De translatione et miraculis sanctorum suorum Marcellini et Petri; and a book dedicated to Servatus Lupus, the Libellus de adoranda Cruce.

It is thought that The Life of Charlemagne was written between 829 and 836,²⁵ for it is first mentioned by this same Servatus Lupus, later Abbot of Ferrières (840-62), in a letter which he wrote at some unspecified moment between these two dates. This means, in all probability, that Einhard composed it after he had left Aachen and when he was living in comparative peace in Seligenstadt.

As we have seen, in his introduction Einhard states his aims: they are to write the public history of Charlemagne and to describe the Emperor's life and his day-to-day habits, omitting nothing which is relevant and yet remaining as succinct as possible. Walahfrid Strabo writes of ‘the scrupulousness of the truth which he offered to the enquiring reader’; and Einhard himself says: ‘I am very conscious of the fact that no one can describe these events more accurately than I, for I was present when they took place and, as they say, I saw them with my own eyes. What is more, I cannot be absolutely sure that these happenings will in fact ever be described by anyone else.’ The Life of Charlemagne is, then, something with which we are most familiar in our own day: the memoirs of a former public servant who is now in retirement. It has already been made clear that in one way Einhard differs fundamentally from the writers of modern memoirs, for, far from explaining at inordinate length his own personal contribution to affairs of state during the period of contemporary history which he is describing, he does not even mention his own name. He was at Aachen from some time after 791 until the Emperor's death in 814; and he stayed on in high position at the Imperial Court, under Lewis the Pious, from 814 until 830. This gives a span of some forty years, during which he could have been closely connected with all public events and with all domestic happenings in the lives of the two Emperors. In 791 Charlemagne was forty-nine: Ch.13-17 of Book II, nearly everything in Book III, and the whole of the description of the Emperor's last years and death, together with the last will and testament, are therefore based upon such personal information as Einhard acquired during the twenty-three years which he spent in the service of Charlemagne. As Louis Halphen points out,²⁶ this was not the Charlemagne of the heroic period, the war in Italy, the war in Spain and the more exacting episodes of the wars against the Saxons. On the other hand, Einhard may well have had access to official documents which concerned events of the period 749-91, from the deposition of Childeric III until his own coming to court, and he would have been free to talk with older men who had lived through these events. That he used source-books is clear enough. Perhaps a third of what he has to say about the wars and foreign policy of Charlemagne is taken from the Annales regni Francorum, which were drawn up in their final form during the reign of Lewis the Pious.²⁷ At least five of his statements resemble closely comparable passages in the Liber de Episcopis Mettensibus by Paul the Deacon.²⁸ It is thought that the details which he gives in Ch.1-2 concerning the fall of the Merovingians and the rise of Pepin the Short may come from a lost source-book. As secretary to Lewis the Pious, he would be able to draw from the Imperial archives the details given in Bk. II, Ch.16 and 18, about Charlemagne's diplomatic relations with foreign potentates. If one accepts that he composed The Life of Charlemagne at Seligenstadt between the years 829 and 836, he wrote much of it from memory. He may have been using notes which he had compiled previously; some of his sources he may have had with him; of the last will and testament given in Ch.33 he may have possessed a transcript.

Four things immediately strike one about The Life of Charlemagne, more particularly in view of what has been written in the previous paragraph: it is occasionally inaccurate in its data, and, in a number of ways, it seems deliberately to obscure the truth, always in favour of Charlemagne; the author never addresses us in person, except in the introduction; in view of the remarkable series of events which Einhard has to recount for us, his biography is extremely short; and, when viewed as a work of art, especially by those accustomed to considering the great masterpieces of European literature, in their correct sequence, over the last two thousand years, there is a strange perfection about it which becomes all the more unexpected when we remember that it was written in Seligenstadt in the 830s.

… On at least three occasions Einhard seems to feel a need to leave the reader without information which he was clearly in a position to give. In Bk. I, Ch.2-3, and Bk. III, Ch.18, he is unwilling to analyse the political relations between Charlemagne and his brother Carloman; in a similar way, in Bk. II, Ch.6 and 11, and Bk. III, Ch.18, we are left very much in the dark as to Charlemagne's treatment of his first wife and her father, Desiderius the Longobard; and in Bk. II, Ch.11, Einhard is vague in the account of the Bavarian war of 787 and Charlemagne's relationship with Duke Tassilo. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these cases may have been, one suspects that on Charlemagne's side there was at least as much wrong as right, and that Einhard would have done little good to his hero's cause if he had revealed what he must have known about the fate of Carloman's wife Gerberga and her two sons, of Charlemagne's first wife and her father Desiderius and of Duke Tassilo. It has been suggested that Einhard's refusal in Bk. II, Ch.4, to write about Charlemagne's early years may have been caused in part by the obvious embarrassment of the fact that the Emperor was seventy or seventy-two at his death in 814 and that his parents Pepin the Short and Bertrada were not married until 750. It is odd that, in Bk. III, Ch.20, Einhard will not give the name of Charlemagne's mistress, the mother of Pepin the Hunchback, for in the Liber de Episcopis Mettensibus by Paul the Deacon, from which, as we have seen, he takes some of his material, she is clearly named as Himiltrude. He is similarly reticent in Bk. III, Ch.19, about the indiscretions of Charlemagne's daughters.²⁹ The truth is, as he tells us in his introduction, that Einhard is writing a panegyric or what the Romans would have called an encomium of Charlemagne, and this in the lifetime of Charlemagne's son, Lewis the Pious, who had given to him the very lands in Seligenstadt in which he was living as he wrote. We must be warned that his information is not always reliable and that he will occasionally omit matters which it suits him to suppress, but we should not be surprised to find this in ‘a book which perpetuates the memory of the greatest and most distinguished of men’.

In the twenty-three years which Einhard spent at Charlemagne's court he was on friendly terms with the Emperor. He seems, however, to have received very little material reward for his services, and it may well be that his role has been exaggerated. It was not until 815, the year after Charlemagne's death, that began the long list of abbeys and personal properties which were made over to him.³⁰ Twice at least he had played an apparently important part in the carrying out of Imperial policy. In 806 he was sent by Charlemagne on a mission to Pope Leo III. In 813 he was one of those who persuaded Charlemagne to crown his son Lewis the Pious as his co-emperor and heir. From his nickname Bezaleel and the fact that Angisus worked under him at Aachen, it has been maintained that he must have had some responsible role in the building of the cathedral and the royal palace in that town.³¹ That Einhard should not mention himself elsewhere in his narrative is perhaps not surprising, in view of the fact that he had written a personal introduction to the work. It remains true that in Bk. III, Ch.28, when he discusses the attack made upon the Pope's person, he does not allude to the fact that he had himself visited Leo III. When, in Bk. III, Ch.30, the ‘council of the Frankish leaders’ is convened and the decision made to crown Lewis, Einhard could have referred to his own role in this important event, but he fails to do so. Again in Bk. II, Ch.17, and Bk. III, Ch.26, when he describes the building of the cathedral at Aachen, and in Bk. III, Ch.22, when he refers to the construction of Charlemagne's palace, he makes no comment on his own activities.

The brevity of The Life of Charlemagne, the clarity and the general excellence of Einhard's Latin style compared with that of the other German Latinists of the time and the neat and satisfying way in which his biography is set out all bring us to a new consideration. R. B. Mowat wrote of Einhard's ‘genuine literary talent’.³² Louis Halphen has been equally admiring.³³ The truth is that Einhard was following a model, or rather a series of twelve models. It is known that a manuscript of the De vita Caesarum of Suetonius existed in the library of the monastery of Fulda at the time when Einhard studied there. He had clearly read this work with great attention and his Vita Caroli follows so closely the life of Augustus in particular, both in form and in wording, that he may well have had a transcription with him when he was writing his own work at Seligenstadt, unless, as is possible, he knew much of Suetonius by heart. As Louis Halphen writes, ‘il l'a suivi si fidèlement, il a repris en outre, à son tour, avec une telle servilité les expressions familières à l'historien latin que sa Vie de Charlemagne apparaît souvent plus comme la treizième “vie des Césars” que comme une oeuvre originale’.³⁴ Philipp Jaffé was one of the first to study this debt in close detail. In the preface to his edition of the Vita Caroli, he listed some thirty-two passages in which Einhard owes clear debts either of subject matter or vocabulary to the De vita Caesarum, no fewer than twenty of these being to the life of Augustus.³⁵ To say that Einhard is following his models so faithfully and with such slavish imitation that The Life of Charlemagne is virtually a thirteenth chapter added to the twelve which Suetonius left to us is perhaps an overstatement, but in length, shape, sequence of material and even in expression there is undoubtedly a most striking similarity. This in part explains the literary excellence of The Life of Charlemagne. It also explains certain weaknesses. We might have hoped for something longer, but each of the twelve lives written by Suetonius was one chapter only in a book. In each of his Lives Suetonius follows a fixed pattern, and Einhard has thought it necessary to arrange his material in the same rigid way. Finally, in his portrayal of Charlemagne's character and personal habits, Einhard painted a picture which is false in that it resembles so closely those of the twelve Caesars. ‘It is likely enough that he was over-anxious to find resemblances between Charlemagne and Augustus where such resemblances were either very remote, or even non-existent. His picture of Charlemagne's habits and disposition, where it differs from other pictures, seems to differ from them precisely in those respects in which it agrees most with the Suetonian portrait of Augustus.’³⁶

The Life of Charlemagne has been called ‘the most striking result of the Classical Renaissance so diligently fostered at the court of Charlemagne by the Emperor himself’,³⁷ and French critics have maintained that as a biography there is nothing to compare with it between the works of Suetonius himself and Le livre des saintes paroles et des bonnes actions de Saint Louis by Joinville. In his preface Einhard protests that he is ‘but little versed in the tongue of the Romans’. Modern critics, on the contrary, see Alcuin and his contemporaries as ‘mere fumblers and botchers’ of Latin³⁸ when compared with Einhard. These are words of high praise and deep condemnation. Perhaps the safest conclusion for the reader of a modern translation, warned as he is against certain imperfections of subject matter and unaware as he must be of the excellence of Einhard's Latin style, is that of Louis Halphen who called Einhard's biography ‘une oeuvre sans laquelle notre connaissance de la personne même de Charlemagne resterait bien incomplète’.³⁹

.....

We possess eighty or more manuscripts of the Vita Caroli. Some sixty of these were used by G. H. Pertz in his monumental edition of 1829. In 1867 Philipp Jaffé abandoned the vast critical apparatus of Pertz and published a single manuscript, MS. Paris, Bibl. Nat., fonds latin 10758, copied in the ninth or tenth century. In 1880 appeared the edition of G. Waitz, who succeeded in reducing the eighty-odd extant manuscripts to three basic families and produced a critical version based upon twenty of them. This was revised by O. Holder-Egger in 1911. The editions published by H. W. Garrod and R. B. Mowat in 1915 and by Louis Halphen in 1938 3rd edition 1947, are both based primarily on the Paris manuscript used by Jaffé and on MS. Vienna, Bibl. Pal. 510, with variants from other manuscripts.

This new translation is a rendering into modern English of MS. Paris, Bibl. Nat., fonds latin 10758, as published by Philipp Jaffé in 1867, some hundred years ago. …

Notes

1. cf. Charlemagne, by the Monk of Saint Gall, Bk. II, Ch.12 (p. 153).

2. See map on page 43 in Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, translated and edited by Lewis Thorpe, Middlesex, England; Penguin Books, 1969.

3. The Life of Charlemagne, by Einhard, Ch.25 (p. 79).

4. ibid.

5. H. W. C. Davis, Charlemagne, the Hero of Two Nations, 1899, edition of 1925, p. 169.

6. H. W. Garrod, Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, 1915, p. xli.

7. The Life of Charlemagne, by Einhard, Ch.29 (p. 82).

8. The Age of Charlemagne, D. Bullough, 1965.

9. It is clear from the wording that Walahfrid Strabo wrote his prologue after Einhard's death in 840. He himself died in 849, so that the prologue was composed at some time in that decade.

10. See Walahfrid Strabo's prologue, p. 49. See also the Epitaphium Einhardi, written by Rhabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda (822-42), where Einhard is called ‘vir nobilis’ (v, 3).

11. See Walahfrid Strabo's prologue, p. 49. The date of Einhard's birth is not known. By inference it was c. 770, for he was sent to study at Fulda after 779 and he died in 840.

12. Rhabanus Maurus, Epitaphium Einhardi, v, 4.

13. She and her husband are named as benefactors in one of the eighth-century manuscripts in the Monastery of Fulda: ‘Ego Einhart et coniux mea Engilfrit donamus et tradimus … quicquid in Urithorpfe proprietatis habemus … ’

14. See Walahfrid Strabo's prologue, p. 49.

15. ibid. p. 49.

16. Ep. ad regem 85: ‘Beseleel, vester immo et noster familiaris adiutor … ’ cf. Exodus, XXXI, 2-5: ‘See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship.’ Thomas Hodgkin wrote of Einhard that ‘ … he seems to have held a position in Charles's cabinet like that of a modern First Commissioner of Works … ’, Italy and her Invaders, 744-774, Vol. VII, 1899, p. 293. In Vol. VIII, p. 136, of the same work, Hodgkin gives a list of twenty of these nicknames used at Charlemagne's court. Louis Halphen refuses to accept most of this, ‘Einhard, historien de Charlemagne’, Ch. III of Études critiques sur l'histoire de Charlemagne, 1921, pp. 73-6.

17. De Einharto Magno, vv, 1-3:

    Nec minor est magni reverentia patris habenda
    Beseleel, faber primum qui percepit omne
    Artificum precautus opus …

18. ‘ … exactor operum regalium in Aquisgrani palatio regio sub Heinhardo abbate … ’ Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium in G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Vol. II, p. 293.

19. ‘ … ad Einhartum variarum artium doctorem peritissimum … Catalogus abbatum Fuldensium, III, p. 162.

20. Carmen 242, vv, 7-8:

    Sic regit ipse domum totam sibi Nardulus istam.
    ‘Nardule’, dic lector pergens: ‘tu parvule, salve’.

21. ibid. vv, 4-6:

    Mel apis egregium portat tibi corpore parvo.
    Parva quidem res est oculorum, cerne, pupilla;
    Sed regit imperio vivacis corporis actus.

22. Carmina Theodulfi, III, i, vv, 155-6:

    Nardulus, huc illuc di currat perpete gressu,
    Ut, formica, tuus pes redit itque frequens.

23. See his prologue, p. 50.

24. A document of Lewis the Pious, dated 815, is the first to refer to this marriage: ‘ … fideli nostro Einhardo nec non et coniugi suae Immae’, Codex Laureshamensis, I, 44.

25. This date is much debated. In a catalogue of manuscripts possessed by the monks of Reichenau a copy is listed under ‘the eighth year of the reign of the Emperor Lewis’, that is Lewis the Pious, i.e. 821; but this entry is now thought to be a later addition, made after the death of Einhard. Louis Halphen goes so far as to suggest that the Reichenau manuscript was in reality the one divided into chapters by Walahfrid Strabo, and to which he added his prologue, between 840 and 849, when he was Abbot of that house. (See Louis Halphen, Eginhard. Vie de Charlemagne, éditée et traduite par L.H., Classiques de l'Histoire de France au Moyen Age, 3rd edition, 1947, p. viii, n. 1.)

26. op cit. in n. 25, p. vii.

27. ibid. pp. vii-viii, for this and the following details. See also the same author, op. cit. in n. 16, p. 81, etc.

28. These are the opening sentences on Pepin the Short in Ch.2 and 15, the details given about Hildigard in Ch.18 and about the mother of Pepin the Hunchback in Ch.20 and the statement concerning Charlemagne's command of the Latin language in Ch.25.

29. It is known that Rotrude had an illegitimate son Lewis, later Abbot of Saint Denis, and that Bertha had several illegitimate children.

30. ‘815 Jan. 11, Aquisgrani palatio regio. Einhartus et eius coniux Imma a Ludovico I imperatore locum Michlinstat in silva Odenewalt et villam Mulinheim superiorem in pago Moynecgowe dono accipiunt.’ Diploma Ludovici, Codex Laureshamensis, I, 44.

31. Louis Halphen, op. cit. in n. 16, plays down all this. Just as he sees little or no proof of Einhard's artistic skills in the quotations given in nn. 18, 19, etc., so he maintains that the mission to Leo III was not important, and that Einhard's role in the events of 813 was greatly exaggerated by later writers, e.g. Ermoldus Nigellus in his poem In honorem Hludowici.

32. op. cit. in n. 6, p. xxvi.

33. ‘Grâce à cette méthode, il a été à même d'écrire une oeuvre très nettement supérieure au point de vue de la forme à tout ce que le moyen âge occidental avait jusqu'alors produit en ce genre. Qu'on compare cette biographie bien ordonnée, en dépit de quelques gaucheries, d'un style ferme et relativement correct, aux vies de saints antérieures, et l'on mesure le chemin parcouru.’ op. cit. in n. 25, p. xii.

34. ibid. p. xi.

35. Philipp Jaffé, Einharti vita Caroli, preface, p. 501, n. 2, p. 502, n. 1 and p. 503, n. 1, in Bibhotheca Rerum Germanicarum, Vol. IV, Monumenta Carolina, 1867, reprinted 1964.

36. H. W. Garrod, op. cit. in n. 6, p. xxix.

37. A. J. Grant, Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of Saint Gall, 1922, p. xvi.

38. H. W. Garrod, op. cit. in n. 6, p. xxxii.

39. op. cit. in n. 25, p. xiii. For all that, Louis Halphen is a severe critic of Einhard. His chapter entitled ‘Einhard, historien de Charlemagne’, in Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de Charlemagne, 1921, pp. 60-103, sets out to establish that ‘qu'on semble même avoir jusqu'ici beaucoup exagéré l'importance du témoignage d'Einhard comme historien de Charlemagne’ (p. 61). …