The legends around Charlemagne began even before the emperor was dead. Even though the Royal Frankish Annals offer readers the detailed facts of year-by-year events, he was too much a larger-than-life figure for speculation and fiction not to arise.
Einhard joined Charlemagne’s court in the 790s and served his son Louis the Pious at both Aachen and the king’s estates at Selingenstadt. Einhard had been a pupil of Alcuin of York and was most likely the youngest of the circle of international scholars that the king had collected for his court (see section on Charlemagne’s educational reforms). What makes his biography of Charlemagne so interesting is that we are reading the account of an insider to the court and to the royal family, and the evidence in court letters of how others held Einhard in high esteem gives the biography a status that others do not hold. A later biography—the anonymous Visio Karoli Magni, written around
865 as a visionary, cautionary tale of Charlemagne meeting with a prophetic specter in a dream—uses facts taken from Einhard and the author’s own observations on the decline of the emperor’s family after the tumult of the civil war in 840.
The emperor still found his way into epic tales. He was considered one of the Nine Worthies, one of the three model knights of Christendom in that body, and so it seems fitting that one of the great topics of medieval narrative, known as the Matter of France or the Charlemagne Cycle, focuses on the deeds of Charlemagne. In it he is called “The Emperor with the Flowing Beard,” a title seen in the Song of Roland, and Roland and the paladins are made equal to the knights of the Round Table in King Arthur’s court. Charlemagne was honored by Dante, who placed the emperor’s spirit in the Heaven of Mars, among the other “warriors of the faith.”
In 1165 Charlemagne was canonized by Antipope Paschal III to gain the favor of Frederick Barbarossa. The sainthood was never recognized by the church, of course, and all of Paschal’s ordinances were annulled at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. Charlemagne was later beatified by Pope Benedict XIV (r. 1740-58); he is venerated on January 28.
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