Charlemagne (MED0061)

Charlemagne and the Frankish army

Between 768 and 814 Charlemagne campaigned in almost every year of his reign. He was neither a conqueror by temperament nor a tactician of genius: he was, more precisely, the organiser of a war machine that could take the field every spring and return every autumn, repeatedly, for four decades. It was that continuity — not any single decisive victory — that produced the largest territorial bloc in Europe since Rome.

An army assembled each spring

Frankish forces were not standing. Each year free men of sufficient means were summoned to a muster point, required to appear armed and equipped at their own expense, and to bring three months of provisions. The capitularies regulate in detail who had to own what: a man holding twelve mansi was to appear in a mail coat. Such a system favoured the wealthy and pushed warfare into the hands of an aristocracy of mounted men whose equipment grew steadily more expensive.

The Saxon wars

The longest war was fought neither against the Lombards nor the Arabs but against the Saxons: thirty-two years, from 772 to 804, in a country with no cities to besiege and no central army to defeat. Each summer Frankish columns pushed into the forests, destroying villages and shrines and extracting submissions; each winter those submissions dissolved. Repression was severe, involving mass deportations and, according to the annals, the execution of thousands of prisoners at Verden in 782.

Roncevaux

In 778, returning from an expedition into Spain, the Frankish rearguard was destroyed in a Pyrenean pass by Basque highlanders. It was a minor affair that contemporary annals dispose of in a few lines. Three centuries later the Song of Roland transformed it into an epic confrontation between Christendom and Islam — a textbook case of how far literary memory can drift from the military event.

Equipment and coronation

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs the Frankish warrior of the Carolingian period: mail coat or scale byrnie, conical helmet, round shield, long sword and winged spear. On Christmas Day 800, in Rome, Leo III crowned Charles emperor — an act that formally revived in the West an institution three centuries extinct, and that would generate centuries of dispute with Byzantium and with the papacy itself.