The Roman Empire lasted for some five hundred years—or one thousand if one includes the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. This means that it changed radically over the period during which it existed.
In terms of religion, Rome was originally pagan and gradually became Christianized. Thus one had more religious diversity in the Roman Empire than under Charlemagne, under whom Christianity was consistently the state religion.
The Roman Empire was far larger and more diverse than the Frankish one. It spanned what would now be over 13 modern countries. It had two official languages: Latin was used in the west, Greek was used in the east, and various other local languages were in use throughout the empire. It was ethnically diverse, with a wide range of cultural traditions. Charlemagne's empire was much smaller and ethnically Frankish. People spoke either Latin or Frankish, with Latin being the language of government and the church.
Slave ownership was widespread in the Roman Empire, with slaves providing much of the labor in agriculture and other economic activities. By contrast, the Franks had a feudal systems with serfs or peasants working land owned by nobles. The economy was far less sophisticated and the empire far poorer. While the Roman Empire was a great and wealthy power, the Franks were a relatively small and poor group by comparison.
Charlemagne’s empire relied on the resources of the Catholic Church, including Church estates and the educated clergy; clerics ran the rudimentary imperial administration. Unlike the Roman empire with its huge bureaucracy, the Carolingian empire did not have a substantial military or administrative apparatus. There was no extensive taxation system to finance a large standing army, and so the Carolingians had to rely on feudal vassals and a peasant militia.
The Roman empire, on the contrary, had such a taxation system, but it disappeared along with the Roman empire itself, and when some Merovingian kings tried to revive it in 6th century, they failed miserably: both the Gallo-Roman and the Frankish population refused to pay. Lacking substantial income from taxes, the Carolingian empire depended instead on external expansion and military booty. Charlemagne’s armies took substantial wealth home from Northern Italy when they defeated the Lombard kingdom, and they also took wealth from the Avar kingdom in Central Europe, which they destroyed. When the expansion ended after the death of Charlemagne, the Carolingian aristocracy started to fight over Charlemagne’s inheritance and ended up dividing the empire.
Unlike the Roman empire, Charlemagne’s lands had no well-developed system of monetary circulation or exchange system, nor were they well integrated into the international trade system. Mediterranean trade was in steep decline, due to the wars between the Muslim world and Christian Europe. The surviving Eurasian trade networks relied on Eastern European rivers such as the Volga and the Silk Road. The Vikings, who were often hostile to the Carolingians, controlled much of this international trade. The Roman empire, in contrast, had participated actively in the Indian Ocean trade, which included India, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, and East Africa. While this Indian Ocean trade was still thriving during the Early Middle Ages, the Carolingian empire did not have direct access to it.
Education and culture in Charlemagne’s time were rather primitive and limited compared to the situation in the Roman Empire. Most Carolingian people were illiterate. However, Carolingian politicians, including Charlemagne himself, were generally more open to innovation and understood the political and social significance of education and culture much better than the Roman emperors. Unlike the Roman imperial rulers, Charlemagne had an active and conscious educational policy; he promoted the creation of cathedral and monastic schools across the Empire and cultivated educators, such as Alcuin, who played an important role at his court. Under Charlemagne, scholars, scribes, and archivists resumed work on transcribing and collecting ancient manuscripts, and introduced a new way of writing with divisions between the words to made reading much easier. Historians even refer to this modest but innovative and deliberate cultural revival as the Carolingian Renaissance.
One massive difference is the length of time that these two empires lasted for. What was key in the Charlemagne empire was the way in which the personality of Charlemagne held it all together. When he died, so did his empire. In the Roman Empire, by contrast, although of course emperors were incredibly important, at the same time, when one emperor died the empire itself continued.
Under Charlemagne, there was no real centralized state, simply a collection of counts held in sway by fear, obligation, or mutually beneficial arrangements. There was little uniformity in law, no imperial policy, and ultimately Charlemagne ruled by force of arms and personality. One similiarity might be the de facto existence of a state religion- Charlemagne compelled all conquered people to embrace Christianity.
One difference was the "international" versus local trade. During the Roman Republic and Empire, trade spread all around the Mediterranean, into the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. By Charlemagne's time, that had all but disappeared. As Western Europe went feudal, the only trade that existed, if it existed at all, was between geographically local areas.
It was feudal. The Carolingians were not one united empire with a bureaucratic system and a standing army. Instead, they were a feudal empire with lords who had real power.
It had more of a Germanic form of law. It allowed things like wergeld as compensation for wrongfully killing someone.
It was more dependent on the Catholic Church for its legitimacy. Of course, the Roman Empire was Christian by the end, but that wasn't really what bound it together or gave it its identity.
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