Matthew Gabriele

When we want to talk about how Charlemagne came to power, we really have to start with the people that he belonged to, a group of people called the Franks.

They solidified as Roman authority kind of pulled back under a dynasty called the Merovingians, who ruled for about 300 years.

And then in the beginning of the 8th century, a very powerful aristocratic family, who would soon become the Carolingians, kind of rose to power under the Merovingian kings, mostly as kind of their war leaders.

Pippin, unfortunately named Pippin the Short, became king in 751 in basically a coup d'état, when he seized power from the Merovingians, kind of assigned them to a monastery so that they could live out their lives and seize power for himself.

It's a really interesting question about when Charlemagne was born.

We don't actually know because there's no sources from that period that recorded a birthday.

There's no later sources which record kind of how old he is.

Some really good scholarship has put his, probably it's our best guess, and it's probably a very good guess, that he was born sometime around 741.

His mother was a woman by the name of Bertrada.

We don't know a whole lot about Bertrada.

She was probably a high-ranking noblewoman befitting someone of Pepin's station.

We can kind of guess from what the education of an elite Frankish man at that time would have been.

And also from a biography that was later written about Charlemagne by a chronicler by the name of Einhard, who was a courtier who knew Charlemagne personally, who lived at his court.

There's some problems with the biography, of course.

It's very highly stylized.

And also it was written as political propaganda after Charlemagne's death.

That being said, is that it seems pretty clear that Charlemagne himself was pretty well educated.

He himself knew how to read, but he probably didn't know how to write, which seems maybe perhaps odd to us.

But at the same time, in early Middle Ages, these two activities were actually held as distinct.

You could learn how to read, but not how to write.