742
Charlemagne is born
Karl was the oldest son of Pepin the Short and Bertha Bigfoot (or Broad Foot or Goose Foot; medieval nicknames were not meant to flatter). Pepin was the de facto ruler of the Kingdom the Franks; as major domo, or “Mayor of the Palace”, he was officially the servant of the ineffectual Merovingian dynasty. With the consent of the papacy, Pepin ended this fiction with a palace coup in 751 that deposed Childeric III and established a new Carolingian dynasty. When Pepin died on campaign in 768, his sons Karl and Carloman were named kings; after his brother’s death, Karl was undisputed ruler of a territory roughly corresponding to present-day France and Germany.
Karl is considered the greatest of the medieval European rulers, and the father of a united Europe, deserving of his title, Karl “the Great”, Carolus Magnus or Charlemagne. He expanded his kingdom by wars with Saxons on his eastern border, Muslims on the Spanish border and Lombards in northern Italy. The Avar invasions of central Europe were crushed and Charlemagne pushed his domain toward the Danish lands and the Balkans as well. He inspired the Carolingian Renaissance by inviting scholars, architects and artists to his court at Aachen and demanding literacy training for his nobles and their children. He insisted on church reform, standardising canon law in his lands, and sent out watchdog commissions to ensure compliance with his commands.
On Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III, thus setting up the Frankish empire as a rival to the claims of the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople. This is sometimes referred to as the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, but that is more properly reserved for another, later dynasty.
When Charlemagne died in 814, his four wives and numerous concubines had produced at least sixteen children but the throne descended to his son Louis the Pious, an earnest but not quite capable king. In the next generation Charlemagne’s huge empire had been split into three.