Charlemagne by Johannes Fried (review)

In 673 densely packed pages, Johannes Fried offers his "visualization of Charlemagne" (p. vii) "to a readership beyond academic circles" (p. x). The clever opening gambit of labeling the book as a "work of fiction" from "his own imagination" (p. vii) effectively insulates Fried from scholarly critiques about the "accuracy" of the details of his portrait. Although I disagree with, or fail to see the evidentiary warrant for, a number of his specific assertions, I will not argue those points here. Instead, I will focus my efforts on conveying how Fried visualizes Charlemagne, and then ask what sort of reader might have an appetite for devoting several weeks of their lives to admiring Charles in Fried's company.

The Prologue reasserts the fictionality of Fried's subject: he "left none of his real deeds behind … . after his death a process of mythmaking set in that was all-embracing … . All we have to go on are a few isolated deeds of his, a handful of instructions that he may have issued, various results of his reign, a few impersonal traces of his life, and the basic fact that he ruled as king and emperor from 768 to 814" (pp. 4–5). Charlemagne is "a king, a ruler, and a human being about whom no one knows the slightest thing anymore" (p. 8). Clearly, none of this has stopped Fried from providing a detailed portrait of the man.

"A great hunter" (p. 22), "the master of them all at swimming" (p. 318), whose "whole being was shot through with a refreshing sensuality" (p. 35), Charlemagne was a man marked by "love of the sciences, astronomy, calendrical calculation and mathematics, and dialectics and rhetoric" (p. 224) and a "widely renowned thirst for knowledge" (p. 238) who "wanted to introduce his country's elite to a rational conception of their world" (p. 283). He was also a man of "unswerving religious observance" (p. 24) and a "tireless warrior in his defense of the faith" (p. 213) who "could see destructive forces operating even within ecclesiastical circles. He was determined to counter them" (p. 434). "Faith, justice, peace, compassion, strength of mind, moderation, benevolence, equity, and piety – these were the watchwords that … always guided the emperor's actions" (p. 508). This "champion of innovation" (p. 519) came along just in time to save the post-Roman West, where "a far-reaching descent into barbarism had swept culture away with it" (p. 219), where "it was not common practice to reach logical decisions or to differentiate between facts" (p. 221), and where "superstition and faithlessness spread unopposed" (p. 225).

The portrait of Charles that emerges is completely clear. However, it is embedded in a crushing mass of detail that wanders and sometimes romps chronologically in all directions. Not many people "beyond academic circles" will be able to navigate through the people, places, events, and texts packed into these pages. In its original German, the work was already accessible both to the relatively broad, historically-informed readership that does exist in Central Europe, and to academic specialists (on early medieval Europe) who would be legitimately interested in this magnum opus from a giant of the German historical profession. The question for this review is whether world historians who do not command German will benefit from reading this study of the foundational moment of the European "Holy Roman Empire." As Fried notes, "the revival of the empire in the West changed the world" (p. 432), and "the office of Western emperor survived for over a millennium, until 1806 and even, if we take into account the successor 'emperors' to the Holy Roman Emperor – l'empereur in France, the Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, el emperador in Mexico, the German Kaiser, and the British Empress of India – well into the twentieth century" (p. 430).

My sense is that many world historians will find Fried's adulatory "Great Man" school of history tome naively old-fashioned and out of step with the many sophisticated approaches to the study of empires, and indeed of...