Charles the Great – known as Charlemagne – was one of the undoubted titans of the medieval world. Born in c.742, he has been lauded since his death in 814 as the saviour of Christendom: most famously, perhaps, in The Song of Roland, the epic 11th-century poem based on his fight against the Moors (Muslims) of Spain. As the King of the Franks for almost five decades, he expanded the inheritance left to him by his father (Pepin the Short) and grandfather (legendary military leader Charles Martel) to cover a territory that stretched over more than a million square kilometres, from the Ebro to the Elbe, and from the Netherlands to Provence. In doing so, he united much of the continent of Europe for the first time since the fall of Rome, and built an empire (later to become the Holy Roman Empire) that lasted more a millennium, until the abdication of Franz II in 1806.
While many of the central facts of his life and reign are well known, Charlemagne himself seems still to be a remote figure, lost in the mists of time. Though his feats have long been celebrated, no contemporary portrait of him survives, and the absence of written correspondence means that his thoughts and feelings remain largely unknown. Even Einhard, his trusted courtier and secretary, whose biography appeared shortly after his death, complained that he knew little of his subject’s early years.
That void has left Charlemagne’s story open to interpretation, and to a thousand years of myth-making. Today, opinion appears still to be divided. To many, he remains the ‘father of Europe’ – the man who, almost single-handedly, led the continent out of the Dark Ages, and provided the platform on which our modern world is built. Others see something darker, and feel uncomfortable with this tale of a strong man whose version of ‘European union’ was created using brute force against its inhabitants. Where both sides agree, however, is on the remarkable nature of his military accomplishments.
In the first part of our special feature for this issue, Stephen Roberts traces the life of this extraordinary individual; while in the second part, he looks in more detail at Charlemagne’s victory at Pavia, which helped him establish the foundations of the Holy Roman Empire.
This is an extract from a special feature on Charlemagne from the April/May 2026 issue of Military History Matters magazine.
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