Matthew Gabriele

As he gets older and as he starts to take on the trappings of empire, he starts to send out misi dominici, basically messengers of the Lord, in which they are charged by the king himself, sometimes maybe with written orders.

law codes that are promulgated at Aachen itself, and then making sure that the establishment of justice is being done, that people are aware of the new regulations and records that are being put forth at the capital are known about in southern Italy or in, you know, in Bavaria or kind of wherever.

This goes back to why expansion is so important, why plunder, why loyalty of his high aristocrats are so important, because they become effectively representatives of him out in the rest of the empire as well.

And they become kind of visible signs of the reach of the Frankish empire that extend kind of everywhere across this vast expanse of land.

What we can tell is that it was heavily agricultural.

It was tied very much to place, really dependent upon harvests and the rhythms of the season.

One of the really interesting things is that teeth quality actually improved in the early Middle Ages, as opposed to Rome and to the later Middle Ages, which means that they actually had a better balanced diet than earlier and before.

Generally, the standard of life was maybe kind of a little, especially in rural areas, was actually a little bit higher than it was in late Rome, which I think kind of goes against our expectations.

And so Charlemagne fought not only to expand his own territory, but to standardize the practice of Christianity, which led to, at his court, new translations of the Bible into Latin and the dissemination of proper translations, a standardization of the mass, of the liturgy that would be performed so that ideally every church within his empire would be having the same kind of Christian experience.

He relied upon his wives, the queens, to be important political figures as well.

And so this is absolutely true of Kildegard, his third wife.

She was absolutely a political dealmaker in her own right.

He was off campaigning a lot at the same time.

And so she was in charge of the court.

She was the person, his woman, at the court who was in charge of maintaining the proper functioning of court.

If you wanted to get to Charlemagne, you had to go through his queen oftentimes.

And we know this because actually there's a really interesting coin that was struck at one of his royal mints, which has the name Carolus Rex, Charles the King on one side, and then Fastrada Regina, Fastrada the Queen on the other side.

This is almost unheard of.

It acknowledges this relationship between the king and the queen, that she is not just a woman who's sitting by his side, but a power in her own right.

For a long time, scholars used to talk about the Carolingian Renaissance, this period kind of in the late 8th, early 9th century, in which there seemed to be kind of a re-flowering of learning after a long decline.