Charlemagne history lesson

History is an odd thing, there are some people we know their names and they were pivotal to history, but we don’t know why. That was Charlemagne for me. I know he was a king somewhere after the fall of Rome and before the Protestant Reformation, but that’s a span of 1000 years to place him in.  Here’s our Charlemagne history lesson as I slowly learned more about the Middle Ages.

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Who is Charlemagne?

Charlemagne was the King of France from the late 700s to early 800s.  He was also the last Roman Emperor.

How can he be that if the Roman Empire fell 300 years earlier, you ask?  I’m glad you asked that.

Charlemagne lesson resources

Hi, Future Ticia 2023 here, when we went through history our final time I wrote our history curriculum and I searched out lots of resources for my material in addition to referencing Mystery of History 2.

And no, it’s not an actual textbook, it’s a collection of notes, random anecdotes, resources, and quiz questions. It’s not suitable for sharing… yet.

All that to say, here are my Charlemagne history lesson resources:

• Britannica
• History Channel
• Mystery of History 2

And here is my French Middle Ages history playlist. It starts off with Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel. Or maybe father, I need to go check my notes, and Future Ticia 2023, wants to get lunch, so she’s not going to do that.

Charlemagne history lesson

I just realized before I can really cover Charlemagne, I should probably have covered his grandfather and father, but I don’t have a fun map activity, so I’ll just tell you they were interesting and they’ll get briefly mentioned come Christmas when I talk about Saint Boniface.

Charlemagne jointly ruled with his brother at first, but with the not at all mysterious death of his brother Charlemagne became sole ruler of the Franks.

Charlemagne looked out over his kingdom and thought, I need more.  So he marched East towards the Germanic tribes and the Alps. (I drew this on my giant European map while the kids drew theirs on a map I’d printed from Wondermaps).

In an act of daring he traversed the Alps and in an odd series of events ended up becoming king of part of Italy through a very careful treaty with the Pope, who also ruled large parts of Italy at that time.

Have you ever seen the map of the world?  You can see the Papal state rise and shrink in Italy

From there he headed over to the Germanic tribes and conquered large portions of them recreating a portion of the Western Roman empire at which point the pope crowned him “Holy Roman Emperor,” thus becoming the first HRE (insert obligatory joke: It was not holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire).

{Side note, there’s a lot of politics hidden in that act.  It’s a subtle statement Empress Irene over at the Byzantine Empire is NOT heir to the Roman Empire, it’s also a renunciation of her religious beliefs, AND it shows the Pope has the authority to make and unmake kings and emperors and is of higher authority than the kings}

Now while all of this is going on there’s also a minor rebellion going on back at Aquitaine, one of his sons puts that down, and the capital gets moved there.

In the meantime, there’s Saracens in Spain.  Ostensibly Spain has been Islamic for the past several hundred years, and more of Europe would have been but Charlemagne’s Grandfather stopped that flat.  A group approaches Charlemagne to help them out against Abd-Al-Rhaman, and Charlemagne decides to help them out.

Unfortunately for Charlemagne, his campaign was not successful and he had to hightail it back to France before making another attempt.  He tried several times to successfully conquer Spain, but never could.

What the history of Charlemagne teaches us

Charlemagne believed firmly in education.  He insisted every monastery have a free school.  He established the Carolingian handwriting (print writing) which we still use today.  He was an impressive administrator.

He also set up the template for both the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire which later became Germany.

Oh and he inspired Napoleon to recreate his kingdom and the glory of his empire a few hundred years later.

 This was part of our Mystery of History 2 lessons, for more ideas for that time of history check out my pinterest board:

** Charlemagne statue found here, picture was cropped and writing was added