DEATH

In 806, Charlemagne made plans for the traditional division of the empire on his death: Charles the Younger was to be given Austrasia and Neustria, Saxony, Burgundy, and Thuringia; Pippin got Italy, Bavaria, and Swabia; Louis got Aquitaine, the Spanish March, and Provence. There was no mention of the imperial title for any of the sons, which suggests that Charlemagne may have regarded the title at the time as an honorary personal award that his sons could not inherit.

The inheritance division was never to be tested. Pippin died in 810 and Charles died in 811. The emperor then reconsidered the situation, and in 813 he crowned King Louis “the Pious” of Aquitaine, his only surviving legitimate son, as co-emperor and co-king of the Franks—an action that suggests he changed his mind and now regarded the imperial title as a hereditary title and not a singular gift of the papacy. The only part of the empire that Louis did not receive was Italy, which Charlemagne specifically gave to Pippin’s illegitimate son Bernard.

The emperor spent the autumn hunting in the lands around the royal residence at Aachen, returning to the palace on the first of November. In mid-January, however, the great king fell ill with a fever and the symptoms of pleurisy, as his lungs were inflamed. Depressed, according to witnesses, because even at the age of 72 most of his life plans had not been achieved, he had decided to fast, abstaining from food but taking in a little liquid as was his custom to rid himself of fevers. This time, however, he became bedridden on the twenty-first of January and, as Einhard tells it:

He died January twenty-eighth, the seventh day from the time that he took to his bed, at nine o’clock in the morning, after partaking of the Holy Communion, in the seventy-second year of his age and the forty-seventh of his reign. (39)

He was buried the same day, in Aachen Cathedral, although such a hurried burial would seem unnecessary given the cold weather and the nature of his illness. Einhard explains that there was uncertainty as to what to do with the body, as Charlemagne himself had not made plans for a tomb or a burial site, but his people agreed that the best place for his tomb would be in the cathedral he had loved so much. His inscription supposedly read as follows:

Under this tomb lies the body of Charles, the Great and Orthodox Emperor, who gloriously increased the kingdom of the Franks and reigned with great success for forty-seven years. He died in his seventies in the year of our Lord 814, in the seventh indiction, on the twenty-eighth day of January. (40)

One of the first post-death tales, narrated by Otho of Lomello, Count of the Palace at Aachen in the time of Otto III, claimed that around the year 1000 he and Emperor Otto had discovered and opened Charlemagne’s tomb. The emperor had been buried upright, seated upon a throne and wearing a crown and holding a scepter, his flesh almost entirely natural and undecomposed. In 1165, Frederick I reopened the tomb and placed the emperor in a sarcophagus beneath the floor of the cathedral. Not to be outdone, in 1215 Frederick II re-interred Charlemagne in a casket made of gold and silver.

Charlemagne’s death was more than just another king’s death. It led to grief being expressed in almost every corner of the empire, some people mourning because they feared what might happen next, and others mourning out of love. It affected most those of the literary and intellectual clique who had surrounded and been protected by him at Aachen. An anonymous monk of the monastery of Bobbio lamented:

From the rising of the sun to the shores of the sea where it sets all hearts are full of sorrow. Alas! The Franks, the Romans and all the Christian peoples weep, bowed in sorrows. . . . The kingdom of the Franks has suffered many disasters but never has it suffered such great grief as in the moment when the awe-inspiring and eloquent Charlemagne was laid to rest at Aachen. O Christ, welcome the pious Charlemagne into your blessed home among the apostles. (Becher 135)

Louis succeeded Charlemagne as intended, but his empire lasted only another generation. The division of the lands made according to law and custom between Louis’s own sons after their father’s death laid the foundation for the modern states of Germany and France.