This is the first person in the West claiming to be emperor, and the Byzantine Empire doesn’t like it.īy 802, he is done with his two campaigns: one in Spain, and the other in Saxony and the regions of the Danube. This is arbitrary, but this is shown by the energy of his quarrel with the Byzantine empress over his arrogating to himself the title of emperor. The high watermark of his reign seems to be the year 802. And Charlemagne, presumably– well, not presumably. On the other hand, I can get another cat. As someone who lost his cat within recent memory, you’ve just got to get over it. One of the signs of things starting to unravel in the Carolingian Empire, so some historians say, is the death of Charlemagne’s elephant, which Einhard talks about, actually, in his biography that is, it is an event that’s worth mentioning. Nevertheless, here’s this elephant who lives for about ten years. And how he got there, what the logistics of his transport were, how he got to Baghdad in the first place– it’s not as if they have elephants in the natural habitat of Iraq either. The elephant was certainly the first one seen in Europe probably since Hannibal and his invasion of Italy. But neither the alliance with Byzantium, at least not at this point, and certainly not the more far-fetched alliance with Baghdad came to anything. The Carolingian ruler was contemptuous of Byzantium because it was ruled by a woman, the Empress Irene, a rather exceptional figure. At various times, there had been negotiations between Constantinople and Aachen discussing the possibility of an imperial marriage.
There was a tentative thought of, perhaps, an alliance between Baghdad and Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne’s empire. This is a link between two very powerful and very distant empires, the two of the three that we’ve described as, in some sense, heirs to the Roman classical empire and civilization. In 801, there arrived an elephant at the court of Charlemagne, a gift from the caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who figures in the Arabian Nights entertainments.
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But Charlemagne’s rule had been so successful, so full of accomplishments, he was a ruler such prestige, that even the difficult last ten years or so of his reign can’t quite eclipse that. We always can see signs of decline coming after. Nevertheless, there’s no sense hastening the signs of decline. The beginnings of the Viking invasion, which we will be talking about after the break, occur before Charlemagne’s death in 814. Infrastructure in a sense of not just towns, roads, communications, but social infrastructure, the lack of an idea of obeying the state or obeying the ruler, and a tendency, therefore, to mix private and public interest, and to the benefit of the powerful. Part of it, however, as you will have read in the Fichtenau reading is its lack of infrastructure and economic development. Part of the problem with the Carolingian Empire is its size. But those empires are able to manage with this weakness for quite some time. We’ve already said that the Abbasid Caliphate has this flaw. So when we say that it has certain flaws, like size, well, we already said that the Roman Empire had this flaw.
The empire of Charlemagne is an empire that does not last that long.
It’s not just that we’re compressing lectures or in a hurry. Professor Paul Freedman: So we’re going to talk today, now, about Carolingian decline. The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 HIST 210 - Lecture 21 - Crisis of the CarolingiansĬhapter 1: End of Charlemagne’s Rule
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