[476 - 843] The Frankish Empire

Our story begins in the year 476. The great Roman eagle, whose shadow had stretched across the known world for centuries, has fallen in the West. The last emperor is gone. What is left is a mosaic of shattered provinces, a world where the stone-paved roads of the Caesars are cracking, and the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the sword. In the lands east of the Rhine, a region the Romans never truly tamed, a new power is stirring. They are not a single people, but a confederation of fierce Germanic tribes, bound by a common language and a thirst for land. They call themselves the Franks. In this chaotic world, strength was the only currency that mattered. And no one understood this better than a young, ruthless king who came to power in 481. His name was Clovis, of the Merovingian clan. The Merovingians claimed descent from a mythical sea-beast, and their kings were distinguished by their long, uncut hair, a symbol of their sacred right to rule. But Clovis’s power came not from myth, but from cold, hard steel and a brilliant political mind. He smashed his rivals, Frankish and Roman alike, uniting the tribes under his single, bloody banner. But his most decisive victory was not on the battlefield. The lands he conquered were filled with Gallo-Romans, sophisticated subjects who followed the Catholic Christianity of the fallen Empire. Clovis and his Franks were pagans. The chasm was immense. Then, during a desperate battle against the Alemanni tribe, with his warriors falling around him, Clovis did the unthinkable. He cried out to the God of his Christian wife, Clotilde, promising to be baptized if he was granted victory. The tide of battle turned. Clovis kept his word. His baptism in 496, along with 3,000 of his warriors, was a masterstroke. Overnight, he was no longer a barbarian conqueror to the Gallo-Roman elites; he was a brother in faith, a protector of the Church. This alliance between Frankish sword and Roman cross would define Europe for the next thousand years. The Merovingian dynasty, founded in blood and faith by Clovis, ruled for over two centuries. But the Frankish tradition of dividing the kingdom among a king’s sons was a recipe for perpetual civil war. Brother fought brother, and the royal line weakened. The long-haired kings became, in the eyes of history, the *rois fainéants*—the "do-nothing kings." They reigned, but they did not rule. Real power seeped into the hands of an official known as the *Major Domus*, the Mayor of the Palace. He was the kingdom’s chief administrator, its top general, the power behind the throne. And by the early 8th century, one man held this office with an iron grip: Charles, an illegitimate son of a previous Mayor. He was a man of boundless energy and military genius. History would not remember him as Charles the Mayor, but as Charles Martel—Charles the Hammer. The Hammer fell in 732. A massive Umayyad army, fresh from conquering Spain, was pushing north from the Pyrenees, raiding deep into the Frankish heartland. To many, their advance seemed unstoppable. Near the city of Tours, Charles Martel assembled a disciplined army of Frankish infantry. They formed a great square on a wooded hill, a wall of shields and spears, waiting for the seemingly invincible cavalry of the invaders. For days the armies watched each other. Then, the attack came. The Umayyad horsemen crashed against the Frankish square again and again, but it would not break. Accounts tell of how the disciplined Franks stood "like a wall of ice." The battle was a savage, grinding affair, but at its end, the Umayyad emir lay dead, and his army retreated, never to threaten the Frankish heartlands again. Charles Martel was hailed as the savior of Christendom, a man whose power was now absolute in all but name. It was his son, Pepin the Short, who dared to ask the question that had been on everyone’s mind. In 751, he sent an envoy to the Pope in Rome with a simple, loaded query: "Is it right that a powerless ruler should continue to bear the title of king?" The Pope, beset by enemies in Italy and desperately needing a strong protector, gave the answer Pepin wanted. The last Merovingian king had his sacred long hair shorn and was packed off to a monastery. Pepin was anointed King of the Franks, beginning a new dynasty: the Carolingians, named for his mighty father. The bond between Frankish power and the Papacy was now sealed. And this brings us to the giant of the age, the man whose reign was the pinnacle of Frankish power, a figure so immense he became a legend in his own lifetime: Pepin’s son, Charles the Great, or as he is known to history, Charlemagne. Ascending the throne in 768, Charlemagne was a physical colossus, standing over six feet tall in an age when most men were a foot shorter. He was driven by a restless, seemingly inexhaustible energy. For over 45 years, he was constantly at war, personally leading his armies on more than 50 campaigns. He fought the Lombards in Italy, the Avars in the east, and for more than thirty brutal years, he waged a relentless war of conquest and conversion against the pagan Saxons in the forests of northern Germany. His methods were merciless; the Massacre of Verden in 782, where he allegedly ordered the execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners in a single day, shows the brutal side of his holy war. By 800, his empire stretched from the North Sea to central Italy, from the Atlantic to the plains of Hungary. But Charlemagne was more than a warlord. He was a brilliant administrator. To govern his vast, multilingual empire, he relied on a system of counts who administered local districts. To keep them honest, he created the *missi dominici*—the "envoys of the lord." These teams, usually a bishop and a nobleman, traveled the empire, holding court, checking accounts, and reporting directly back to Charlemagne. He sought to create a new Christian Roman Empire, with its cultural and political heart not in Rome, but in his capital at Aachen, in modern-day Germany. There, he built a magnificent palace chapel, an octagonal masterpiece of stone and marble that still stands today, a bold statement of Carolingian power. He gathered the brightest scholars from across Europe, like the Englishman Alcuin of York, to reform education and the clergy. They standardized scripts, creating a new, clear form of handwriting known as Carolingian minuscule. Look at the lowercase letters on this page; they are the direct descendants of the script revived in Charlemagne’s court. This cultural rebirth, the Carolingian Renaissance, pulled Europe from its darkest age. For the vast majority of the population, perhaps over 90 percent, life remained a hardscrabble existence. They were peasants, living in small villages of wood and wattle-and-daub huts, their lives governed by the seasons and the demands of their local lord. They wore simple tunics of undyed wool and subsisted on a diet of coarse bread, porridge, and whatever vegetables they could grow. Their world was small, often no larger than the distance they could walk in a day. Yet even for them, Charlemagne’s reign brought a measure of peace and stability unknown for generations. The climax of his life, and of the era, came on Christmas Day, in the year 800. While kneeling in prayer at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III suddenly placed a golden crown upon Charlemagne’s head and declared him Emperor of the Romans. The crowd roared its approval. A Germanic king, a Frank, was now the successor to Augustus Caesar. The political center of Europe had decisively shifted north, from the Mediterranean to the heartlands of the Rhine. Yet this new empire, forged by the will of one extraordinary man, was fragile. It was too vast, its peoples too diverse. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, was a good man, but he lacked his father’s commanding presence. After his death, his three sons engaged in a bitter civil war for their inheritance. Finally, in 843, at Verdun, they agreed to split the empire. The Treaty of Verdun carved Charlemagne’s great creation into three kingdoms. One part, West Francia, would one day become France. Another, the volatile Middle Kingdom, would be a battleground for centuries. And the third, East Francia, formed the core of what would eventually become the Kingdom of Germany. The unified Frankish Empire was no more, but from its ashes, the nations of medieval Europe, and the story of Germany itself, had just begun.