Charlemagne (Charles the Great) was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800.
It is one of the most important dates in the Middle Ages, the beginning of a new era in European history. The man thus charged with the task of restoring order and unity out of the chaos which had followed the downfall of Christian Rome was already an emperor in fact, though not in name.
When his ally Pope Leo III placed the crown on Charles’s head-unexpectedly, it was said, while he knelt in prayer-this heir to the Caesars already ruled lands stretching from Denmark to Rome and from the Atlantic to the Danube.
Charlemagne was born in 742 the grandson of Charles Martel who, 10 years before, had saved Christendom from the Saracens at the Battle of Tours in France. At the age of 26 he inherited the kingdom of the Franks and set out to bring order to Western Europe and Christianity to heathen tribes. At the time of his death in 814 he had extended his rule from the Baltic Sea to the Pyrenees and from the coast of Brittany eastwards across Germany and Italy to the lower valley of the Danube.
Although he never learned to write, Charlemagne did much to encourage education and the arts. After his death the Frankish empire broke into pieces. About 130 years later the Holy Roman Empire was again revived and lasted with dwindling power until its extinction in 1806. But the fragmentation of Western Europe persisted through the centuries with continual outbreaks of warfare up to the end of the Second World War.’
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