He initially considered marrying his seven daughters to foreign princes, but he could not bear to be parted from them – and there are hints of incestuous liaisons.* Notorious for their games, teasing and sexual adventures, the girls were like ‘little crowned doves’, wrote the Anglo-Saxon courtier Alcuin, that ‘flit around the chambers of the palace, come to your windows’ and then ‘like wild horses, break in at the door of your chamber’. The ‘crowned doves’ were hard to restrain, being young, alluring and fearless, each of them made pregnant out of wedlock by young courtiers, one by an abbot. So brutal at war, Charlemagne’s court was cultured* and easy-going, tolerating this erotic atmosphere while also supporting the papal campaign to promote single sacred marriages, discouraging annulments, concubinage and cousin marriages.* At the same time the popes encouraged the inheritance of property only by legitimate sons. The Church claimed the right to inherit lands that lacked legitimate heirs, and by 900 it owned a third of western farmland. Charlemagne, who linked his own power to that of the papacy, backed this European version of marriage, fixated on legitimacy and sex (not having much) that was peculiarly Christian. European families developed differently from those of Asia and Africa, where people still remain loyal to wider clans. Increasingly Europeans married once, loyal to their nuclear families; they married later and had fewer children; some women never married since they could no longer become junior wives; property was inherited by legitimate eldest sons; and moralistic people could signal their virtue by living according to Church rules. Sex for procreation was God’s work, for pleasure a delicious taboo. This changed Europe, but it didn’t change Charlemagne, who enjoyed concubines unabashed. It did affect his sons, however, as they jostled for power.
Yet Charlemagne lived for war, sacred war. Every summer he went to war on one of eight different fronts where his heavy cavalry on towering destrier warhorses seemed to give his armies a superiority over all other forces. He granted property and titles to his magnates in return for the supply of cavalry, a feudal relationship between king and vassal that came to militarize and shape society in hierarchies that were regarded as natural and sacred. ‘It’s our role’, he told Pope Leo III, ‘to defend by force of arms the Holy Church of Christ everywhere from the attacks of pagans and the devastations of infidels.’ He was preparing for the imminent End of Days, his respect for the Church a means of promoting eternal life as well as his own dynasty – partners in power and salvation. To the west were the Muslims, and it is easy to forget that at this time eastern and northern Europe – eastern Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, Baltics, Russia – were pagan. Charlemagne’s mission in life was to convert these monsters – or kill them all.
KILLING THE DEMONS: THE SWORD OF CHARLEMAGNE
‘Baptism or death!’ was Charlemagne’s offer. Mass killing was the solution. In 772, Charlemagne attacked the Saxons, who worshipped the gods Thor, Wotan and Saxnot, and burned down their sacred World Tree, the shrine of the Irminsul, believed to support the sky. It was the start of a thirty-year mission to eliminate the ‘cult of demons’. In 782, Charlemagne slaughtered 4,500 Saxons to make the point: they must embrace Christianity or be ‘entirely eliminated’.
In 778, an Arab rebel from Zaragoza arrived at this court and invited Charlemagne to attack the Falcon, Abd al-Rahman. The king crossed the Pyrenees and took Girona, north of Barcelona, but Zaragoza closed its gates, and after a terrifying retreat across the Pyrenees, retold in the chivalric
Undaunted, he switched eastwards to swallow Bavaria, a move which brought him into contact with the Avars, once nomadic pagans who ruled Pannonia (Hungary/Romania), which now also fell to Charlemagne. He started to see himself as a Christian Augustus, a project made possible by some shocking atrocities in Constantinople, seat of the only real Roman emperor. But now a murderous filicidal woman was on the throne.
CHARLEMAGNE’S CORONATION, HAROUN’S WEDDING
