Charlemagne

Charlemagne casts very long shadows.  He found the crown of the Roman emperors lying in the gutter of time, and by his efforts, against the odds, restored, in alliance with the popes, a Western Empire.  Charlemagne laid the foundation that allowed Catholic Europe to survive the siege by Islam and to ultimately defeat the Vikings through conversion.  In his reign Western Europe began waking from the long night described by Chesterton:

For the end of the world was long ago,

When the ends of the world waxed free,

When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,

And the sun drowned in the sea.

When Caesar’s sun fell out of the sky

And whoso hearkened right

Could only hear the plunging

Of the nations in the night.

When the ends of the earth came marching in

To torch and cresset gleam.

And the roads of the world that lead to Rome

Were filled with faces that moved like foam,

Like faces in a dream.

And men rode out of the eastern lands,

Broad river and burning plain;

Trees that are Titan flowers to see,

And tiger skies, striped horribly,

With tints of tropic rain.

Where Ind’s enamelled peaks arise

Around that inmost one,

Where ancient eagles on its brink,

Vast as archangels, gather and drink

The sacrament of the sun.

And men brake out of the northern lands,

Enormous lands alone,

Where a spell is laid upon life and lust

And the rain is changed to a silver dust

And the sea to a great green stone.

And a Shape that moveth murkily

In mirrors of ice and night,

Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,

As death and a shock of evil words

Blast a man’s hair with white.

And the cry of the palms and the purple moons,

Or the cry of the frost and foam,

Swept ever around an inmost place,

And the din of distant race on race

Cried and replied round Rome.

And there was death on the Emperor

And night upon the Pope:

More than any other single man in secular history Charlemagne set the course of European history for the next 1000 years.   Even today, Western Europe might well bear the stamp: “Charles made me.”