From Will Cuppy Decline and Fall of Practically Everyone
CHARLES THE GREAT, or Charlemagne, lived away back in
the Dark Ages when people were not very bright. They
have been getting brighter and brighter ever since,
until finally they are like they are now.
Charlie, as they called him at home, was born about
A.D. 742, the son of Pippin the Short and Bertha of
the Big Foot, an outstanding girl of the period. We
have no records dealing with his infancy and boyhood,
but it is likely that he ate off the mantel from time
to time while he was learning more about Bertha.
Pippin was mayor of the palace, or majordomo, for Childeric
the Brainless, one of the Do-Nothing kings of the Franks
who did nothing but sit around all day long twiddling
their mistresses and quaffing mead. Sometimes, for
a change, they would get up and assassinate their grandmothers
in all sorts of picturesque ways, such as tying them
to the tails of wild horses and shouting 'Giddap!'
Anything for a laugh.#1
#1 They were the last of the Merovingians, who were named
after an old man named Merwig.
As he was fed up with this nonsense Pippin threw Chiideric
out of the palace and made himself King Of the Franks
in A.D. 752.#2
#2 Pippin the Short can be thought of as Pippin III
in the majordomo line if you start with Pippin the
Elder as Pippin I and Pippin the Younger as Pippin
II.
Pippin the Short died in 768, leaving
his title jointly to Charles and Carloman a younger
son who soon died suddenly, although he had never been
sick a day in his life.
By this time Charles was twenty-nine and billed as almost
too good for this world, a reputation that has persisted
to our own day and is pretty sure to last forever.
He was so wonderful as soldier, statesman, moralist,
reformer, and what not that it would be awful to suggest
that there was anything wrong with Carloman's death.
The same goes for the sad passing of Carloman's two
little sons aften their mother tried to make trouble.
It seemed to run in the family.#3
#3 The most I will say is that I feel a little uneasy
about it. Gibbon did, too.
So there he was, sole King of the Franks, a large and
powerful Germanic tribe subsisting mostly upon sausages
and beer.#4
#4 Where such people come from is a problem. They
get in somehow.
The Franks had all been German at first,
but some of them had taken to eating frogs and snails
and were gradually turning into Frenchmen, a fact not
generally known at the time since there were no French
as yet. Most historians say that Charlemagne was neither
German nor French, but Frankish. He was German.
Charlemagne's strong point was morals. He was so moral
that some people thought he was only fooling. These
people came to no good. Naturally, he wanted to improve
others, notably the heathen Saxons, who had stored
an immense treasure in a hollow tree called the Irminsul
in honor of Woden, or Irmin for short.
So he paid them a visit baptized them all and chopped
down the Irminsul, and out fell the contents right
into Charlemagne's lap. And was he surprised! Well,
they asked for it.
Then he improved the Avars, who had been hoarding great
heaps of gold inside a perfectly impregnable fortress,
or that's what they thought.#5
#5 The Avars got their land from the Gepids.
He also looked over the
Sorbs and the Wiltzes but they turned out to be hopeless.
They were stony broke.#6
#6 It is well to bear in mind that the Wiltzes were really
the Weletalvians.
Whenever he decided to help
somebody's morals, people would bury their small change
and hide in the swamps and forests. Charlemagne had
a firm grasp of fundamentals. He has therefore been
called the first of the moderns.
Charles was now so obviously good and great that he
was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on
Christmas Day, A.D. 800, thus becoming, at least
on paper, the successor of the Caesars, as high up
as one could get in politics. He then announced that
he had never sought the honor for one moment and was
very much surprised at the whole thing. He said he
hadn't an inkling until the crown was actually placed
on his head while he wasn't looking. He felt something
tickling his brow, and darned if it wasn't the imperial
crown.
And who are you, I may ask, to call Charlemagne a barefaced
old liar,#7
#7 As we all know, Charlemagne had a long white beard.
even if he had brought the right tie to
the ceremony and arranged a few other little details
well in advance? Every word you ever spoke was the
gospel truth, I suppose.
The Emperor looked wonderful in his new regalia, and
Haroun al-Raschid, Caliph of Baghdad, sent him an elephant
named Abu-l-Abbas. That's the trouble
with success. People keep sending you elephants as a
slight token of their esteem.#8
#8 The King of Siam tried to give an elephant to President
Lincoln. He was talked out of it.
As a legislator, Charles was untiring. He held two assemblies
of nobles each year, one in the autumn to make more
laws and one in the spring to repeal them. He also
issued a series of edicts, or capitularies, concerning
everything he could think of, and appointed royal visitors,
or snoops, to report on the morals of bishops. They
brought in some pretty good stories.#9
#9 Trogo, one of Charlemagne's illegitimate sons, is
said to have lived an exemplary life as Bishop of Metz.
Charles wished justice and right to prevail among all
classes. He often spoke of the widow and the orphan
and the poor and how the wrong persons should not
be punished, as often occurred. He was a warm advocate
of the trial by ordeal, according to which those accused
of anything had to plunge their arms into boiling
pitch to see how they liked it. If they interviewed
the proper officials, the pitch would be only lukewarm,
but the lower orders never got wise to this. You can't
do much for the poor, as they are not in with the right
people.
Not least among Charlemagne's achievements was his contribution
to learning. He imported teachers from Ireland, England,
and Italy. They lived at the palace, ate every day,
and taught the subjects traditionally included in the
trivium and the quadrivium, which were then believed
to make sense. This was nice for the professors. Sometimes
the Emperor would propose riddles, and they would answer
them in Latin hexameters, or, in a pinch, pentameters.
Ho, hum! #10
#10 Angilbert, a young poet of the court, worked for years
on a Latin epic, portions of which he would read out
at the dinner table. Finished or unfinished, this poem
has not come down to us. We may never know what it
was all about.
One of Charlemagne's great admirers has called him the
greatest intellect of the Middle Ages. He was hardly that,
but he did try to learn reading and writing. Although he mastered
elementary reading, he was never able to write more than his name.
and he preferred to
sign his initial. He slept with pencil and paper under
his pillow in case the knack should come to him during
the night, but somehow it never did. He said he could
not accustom his fingers, callused by much use of the
sword, to the shaping of the letters. The trouble was
not in his fingers.#11
#11 Charlemagne handled his great sword beautifully in
parades. For reasons best known to himself, he never
appeared personally in battle.
As we all know, Charlemagne's height was seven times
the length of his foot, but we aren't quite sure what
that was.
If he took after Big-footed Bertha in that
respect, he would have been eight or nine feet.
tall, which is doubtful.#12
#12 Monsieur Gaillard, in his history of Charlemagne, fixed
his height at six feet one and one quarter inches.
I make it six feet three and a half.
He was a fine figure of a man
in spite of his long nose, short neck, and prominent
middle, and I think Mr. Gibbon rather goes out of
his way to spoil the picture when he remarks, "Of his
moral virtues, chastity is not the most conspicuous."
Why bring that up?
The fact is that Charles was a natural-born husband
and father, as Gibbon certainly was not. He had four
or five wives, never more than two at a time, and five
or six concubines for good measure.#13
#13 St. Augustine, Charlemagne's favorite author, has
some passages on that sort of thing. He was against
it.
If there was one thing he loved, and there was, it was honeymoons. I
figure that Desiderata, Hildegarde, Fastrada, and Luitgarde
were legal and Maltegarde, Gerswinda, Regina, and Adelinda
were not. I don't count Ermintrude, his earliest attachment.
At that time he was only practicing.
Among the children were several daughters who were kept
at home and not allowed to marry since Charles wanted
no heirs in the female line. One of them struck up
a beautiful friendship with the poet Angilbert, and
their son Nithard became a literary critic. The others
made out all right, too, but there was a good deal
of talk.#14
#14 I am sorry to find Gibbon repeating this gossip in
some detail, even though he seems to be quoting Schmincke.
I'm afraid there is no truth in the story that Emma,
or Imma, married Eginhard, or Einhard, her father's biographer,
after carrying him out of the palace on her back so
that he would not leave footprints in the snow. Eginhard,
or Einhard, married Emma of Worms,
different girl altogether.#15
#15 They parted by mutual consent a few years later. Incompatibility.
Besides, Charlemagne had no
daughter named Emma, or Imma.
At least eight of Charlemagne's sons and daughters were
legitimate. He recognized ten others as his own, a
fact which speaks well for his generosity and spirit
of fair play. I do think that people who confess to
ten illegitimate children probably have more.
Charlemagne waged fifty-four wars during the forty-three
years of his reign. His empire became greater with
each one until it reached a really ridiculous size,
extending from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and
from the Atlantic Ocean to goodness knows where.#16
#16 But don't get the idea that he resembled Attila the
Hun. Charlemagne was a much smoother article.
He died of a severe cold in A.D. 814 and was buried
in his chapel of Aachen. It is not true that his
beard grew so much that it filled his sarcophagus and
overflowed through the cracks.
As we learn in the books Charlemagne remade Europe practically
singlehanded, changing it from a mere mess of hostile
tribes and governments to an organized and unified
whole. Historians are agreed that he brought culture,
religion and civilization in general to all and sundry
and laid the foundations of a just and lasting peace
among all nations. What won't they think up next!
The elephant Abu-l-Abbas predeceased his master by several
years. In A.D. 810 Charlemagne took him across the
Rhine on a campaign against Guthfrith the Dane, intending
to use him a la Hannibal. But this was not to be. Abu-l-Abbas
lay down and died at Lippenheim, in Westphalia, and
was there interred. It must have been something he
ate.