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See

Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants, Compiled by J. Orton Buck, and Timothy Beard, 1978, published by the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, page 34.

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See:

Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants, Compiled by J. Orton Buck, and Timothy Beard, 1978, published by the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, pages116-117.

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See:

Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants, Compiled by J. Orton Buck, and Timothy Beard, 1978, published by the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, page 151.

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See:

Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants, Compiled by J. Orton Buck, and Timothy Beard, 1978, published by the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, page 145.

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See:

Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants, Compiled by J. Orton Buck, and Timothy Beard, 1978, published by the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, page 292.

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See:

Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists, 7th Edition, Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1992, Frederick Lewis Weis, page 51, line 50. #13.

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See:

Royalty for Commoners, 4th Edition, Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 2002, Roderick W. Stuart, page 95, line 171, # 41; see also 124, 142.

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See:

Caroli Magni Progenies, Siegfried Rosch, Neustadt, Degener, 1977, pp. 48-64.

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Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Emperor of the West, born 02 April 742, died 28 January 814, married 3rd, Hildegard, born 758, died 30 April 783, daughter of Gerold I, Count in Vinzau.

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CHARLEMAGNE

(French for Carolus Magnus, or Carlus Magnus ("Charles the Great");
German Karl der Grosse).

The name given by later generations to Charles, King of the Franks,
first sovereign of the Christian Empire of the West; born 2 April,
742; died at Aachen, 28 January, 814. Note, however, that the place
of his birth (whether Aachen or Lifge) has never been fully
ascertained, while the traditional date has been set one or more
years later by recent writers; if Alcuin is to be interpreted
literally the year should be 745. At the time of Charles' birth, his
father, Pepin the Short, Mayor of the Palace, of the line of Arnulf,
was, theoretically, only the first subject of Childeric III, the
last Merovinigian King of the Franks; but this modest title implied
that real power, military, civil, and even ecclesiastical, of which
Childeric's crown was only the symbol. It is not certain that
Bertrada (or Bertha), the mother of Charlemagne, a daughter of
Charibert, Count of Laon, was legally married to Pepin until some
years later than either 742 or 745.

Charlemagne's career led to his acknowledgment by the Holy See as
its chief protector and coadjutor in temporals, by Constantinople as
at least Basileus of the West. This reign, which involved to a
greater degree than that of any other historical personage the
organic development, and still more, the consolidation of Christian
Europe, will be sketched in this article in the successive periods
into which it naturally divides. The period of Charlemagne was also
an epoch of reform for the Church in Gaul, and of foundation for the
Church in Germany, marked, moreover, by an efflorescence of learning
which fructified in the great Christian schools of the twelfth and
later centuries.

To the Fall of Pavia (742-774)
In 752, when Charles was a child of not more than ten years, Pepin
the Short had appealed to Pope Zacharias to recognize his actual rule
with the kingly title and dignity. The practical effect of this
appeal to the Holy See was the journey of Stephen III across the
Alps two years later, for the purpose of anointing with the oil of
kingship not only Pepin, but also his son Charles and a younger son,
Carloman. The pope then laid upon the Christian Franks a precept,
under the gravest spiritual penalties, never "to choose their kings
from any other family". Primogeniture did not hold in the Frankish
law of succession; the monarchy was elective, though eligibility was
limited to the male members of the one privileged family. Thus,
then, at St. Denis on the Seine, in the Kingdom of Neustria, on the
28th of July, 754, the house of Arnulf was, by a solemn act of the
supreme pontiff established upon the throne until then nominally
occupied by the house of Merowig (Merovingians).

Charles, anointed to the kingly office while yet a mere child,
learned the rudiments of war while still many years short of
manhood, accompanying his father in several campaigns. This early
experience is worth noting chiefly because it developed in the boy
those military virtues which, joined with his extraordinary physical
strength and intense nationalism, made him a popular hero of the
Franks long before he became their rightful ruler. At length, in
September, 768, Pepin the Short, foreseeing his end, made a
partition of his dominions between his two sons. Not many days later
the old king passed away.

To better comprehend the effect of the act of partition under which
Charles and Carloman inherited their father's dominions, as well as
the whole subsequent history of Charles' reign, it is to be observed
that those dominions comprised:
first, Frankland (Frankreich) proper;
secondly, as many as seven more or less self-governing
dependencies, peopled by races of various origins and obeying
various codes of law.

Of these two divisions, the former extended, roughly speaking, from
the boundaries of Thuringia, on the east, to what is now the Belgian
and Norman coastline, on the west; it bordered to the north on
Saxony, and included both banks of the Rhine from Cologne (the
ancient Colonia Agrippina) to the North Sea; its southern neighbours
were the Bavarians, the Alemanni, and the Burgundians. The dependent
states were: the fundamentally Gaulish Neustria (including within
its borders Paris), which was, nevertheless, well leavened with a
dominant Frankish element; to the southwest of Neustria, Brittany,
formerly Armorica, with a British and Gallo-Roman population; to the
south of Neustria the Duchy of Aquitaine, lying, for the most part,
between the Loire and the Garonne, with a decidedly Gallo-Roman
population; and east of Aquitaine, along the valley of the Rhone,
the Burgundians, a people of much the same mixed origin as those of
Aquitaine, though with a large infusion of Teutonic blood. These
States, with perhaps the exception of Brittany, recognized the
Theodosian Code as their law. The German dependencies of the
Frankish kingdom were Thuringia, in the valley of the Main, Bavaria,
and Alemannia (corresponding to what was later known as Swabia).
These last, at the time of Pepin's death, had but recently been won
to Christianity, mainly through the preaching of St. Boniface. The
share which fell to Charles consisted of all Austrasia (the original
Frankland), most of Neustria, and all of Aquitaine except the
southeast corner. In this way the possessions of the elder brother
surrounded the younger on two sides, but on the other hand the
distribution of mm under their respective rules was such as to
preclude any risk of discord arising out of the national sentiments
of their various subjects.

In spite of this provident arrangement, Carloman contrived to
quarrel with his brother. Hunald, formerly Duke of Aquitaine,
vanquished by Pepin the Short, broke from the cloister, where he had
lived as a monk for twenty years, and stirred up a revolt in the
western part of the duchy. By Frankish custom Carloman should have
aided Charles; the younger brother himself held part of Aquitaine;
but he pretended that, as his dominion were unaffected by this
revolt, it was no business of his. Hunald, however, was vanquished
by Charles single-handed; he was betrayed by a nephew with whom he
had sought refuge, was sent to Rome to answer for the violation of
his monastic vows, and at last, after once more breaking cloister,
was stoned to death by the Lombards of Pavia. For Charles the true
importance of this Aquitanian episode was in its manifestation his
brother's unkindly feeling in his regard, and against this danger he
lost no time in taking precautions, chiefly by winning over to
himself the friends whom he judged likely to be most valuable; first
and foremost of these was his mother, Bertha, who had striven both
earnestly and prudently to make peace between her sons, but who,
when it became necessary to take sides with one or the other could
not hesitate in her devotion to the elder. Charles was an
affectionate son; it also appears that, in general, he was helped to
power by his extraordinary gift of personal attractiveness.
Carloman died soon after this (4 December, 771), and a certain
letter from "the Monk Cathwulph", quoted by Bouquet (Recueil. hist.,
V, 634), in enumerating the special blessings for which the king was
in duty bound to be grateful, says,
Third . . . God has preserved you from the wiles of your brother .
. . . Fifth, and not the least, that God has removed your brother
from this earthly kingdom.

Carloman may not have been quite so malignant as the enthusiastic
partisans of Charles made him out, but the division of Pepin's
dominions was in itself an impediment to the growth of a strong
Frankish realm such as Charles needed for the unification of the
Christian Continent. Although Carloman had left two sons by his
wife, Gerberga, the Frankish law of inheritance gave no preference
to sons as against brother; left to their own choice, the Frankish
lieges, whether from love of Charles or for the fear which his name
already inspired, gladly accepted him for their king. Gerberga and
her children fled to the Lombard court of Pavia. In the mean while
complications had arisen in Charles' foreign policy which made his
newly established supremacy at home doubly opportune.
From his father Charles had inherited the title "Patricius Romanus"
which carried with it a special obligation to protect the temporal
rights of the Holy See. The nearest and most menacing neighbour of
St. Peter's Patrimony was Desidarius (Didier), King of the Lombards,
and it was with this potentate that the dowager Bertha had arranged
a matrimonial alliance for her elder son. The pope had solid
temporal reasons for objecting to this arrangement. Moreover,
Charles was already, in foro conscientiae, if not in Frankish law,
wedded to Himiltrude. In defiance of the pope's protest (PL 98:250),
Charles married Desiderata, daughter of Desiderius (770), three
years later he repudiated her and married Hildegarde, the beautiful
Swabian. Naturally, Desiderius was furious at this insult, and the
dominions of the Holy See bore the first brunt of his wrath.
But Charles had to defend his own borders against the heathen as
well as to protect Rome against the Lombard. To the north of
Austrasia lay Frisia, which seems to have been in some equivocal way
a dependency, and to the east of Frisia, from the left bank of the
Ems (about the present Holland-Westphalia frontier), across the
valley of the Weser and Aller, and still eastward to the left bank
of the Elbe, extended the country of the Saxons, who in no fashion
whatever acknowledged any allegiance to the Frankish kings. In 772
these Saxons were a horde of aggressive pagans offering to Christian
missionaries no hope but that of martyrdom; bound together,
normally, by no political organization, and constantly engaged in
predatory incursions into the lands of the Franks. Their language
seems to have been very like that spoken by the Egberts and
Ethelreds of Britain, but the work of their Christian cousin, St.
Boniface, had not affected them as yet; they worshipped the gods of
Walhalla, united in solemn sacrifice -- sometimes human -- to
Irminsul (Igdrasail), the sacred tree which stood at Eresburg, and
were still slaying Christian missionaries when their kinsmen in
Britain were holding church synods and building cathedrals. Charles
could brook neither their predatory habits nor their heathenish
intolerance; it was impossible, moreover, to make permanent peace
with them while they followed the old Teutonic life of free village
communities. He made his first expedition into their country in
July, 772, took Eresburg by storm, and burned Irminsul. It was in
January of this same year that Pope Stephen III died, and Adrian I,
an opponent of Desiderius, was elected. The new pope was almost
immediately assailed by the Lombard king, who seized three minor
cities of the Patrimony of St. Peter, threatened Ravenna itself, and
set about organizing a plot within the Curia. Paul Afiarta, the
papal chamberlain, detected acting as the Lombard's secret agent,
was seized and put to death. The Lombard army advanced against Rome,
but quailed before the spiritual weapons of the Church, while Adrian
sent a legate into Gaul to claim the aid of of the Patrician.

Thus it was that Charles, resting at Thionville after his Saxon
campaign, was urgently reminded of the rough work that awaited his
hand south of the Alps. Desiderius' embassy reached him soon after
Adrian's. He did not take it for granted that the right was all upon
Adrian's side; besides, he may have seen here an opportunity make
some amends for his repudiation of the Lombard princess. Before
taking up arms for the Holy See, therefore, he sent commissioners
into Italy to make enquiries and when Desiderius pretended that the
seizure of the papal cities was in effect only the legal foreclosure
of a mortgage, Charles promptly offered to redeem them by a money
payment. But Desiderius refused the money, and as Charles'
commissioners reported in favour of Adrian, the only course left was
war.

In the spring of 773 Charles summoned the whole military strength of
the Franks for a great invasion of Lombardy. He was slow to strike,
but he meant to strike hard. Data for any approximate estimate of
his numerical strength are lacking, but it is certain that the army,
in order to make the descent more swiftly, crossed the Alps by two
passes: Mont Cenis and the Great St. Bernard. Einhard, who
accompanied the king over Mont Cenis (the St. Bernard column was led
by Duke Bernhard), speaks feelingly of the marvels and perils of the
passage. The invaders found Desiderius waiting for them, entrenched
at Susa; they turned his flank and put the Lombard army to utter
rout. Leaving all the cities of the plains to their fate, Desiderius
rallied part of his forces in Pavia, his walled capital, while his
son Adalghis, with the rest, occupied Verona. Charles, having been
joined by Duke Bernhard, took the forsaken cities on his way and
then completely invested Pavia (September, 773), whence Otger, the
faithful attendant of Gerberga, could look with trembling upon the
array of his countrymen. Soon after Christmas Charles withdrew from
the siege a portion of the army which he employed in the capture of
Verona. Here he found Gerberga and her children; as to what became
of them, history is silent; they probably entered the cloister.

What history does record with vivid eloquence is the first visit of
Charles to the Eternal City. There everything was done to give his
entry as much as possible the air of a triumph in ancient Rome. The
judges met him thirty miles from the city; the militia laid at the
feet of their great patrician the banner of Rome and hailed him as
their imperator. Charles himself forgot pagan Rome and prostrated
himself to kiss the threshold of the Apostles, and then spent seven
days in conference with the successor of Peter. It was then that he
undoubtedly formed many great designs for the glory of God and the
exaltation of Holy Church, which, in spite of human weaknesses and,
still more, ignorance, he afterwards did his best to realize. His
coronation as the successor of Constantine did not take place until
twenty-six years later, but his consecration as first champion of
the Catholic Church took place at Easter, 774. Soon after this
(June, 774) Pavia fell, Desiderius was banished, Adalghis became a
fugitive at the Byzantine court, and Charles, assuming the crown of
Lombardy, renewed to Adrian the donation of of territory made by
Pepin the Short after his defeat of Aistulph. (This donation is now
generally admitted, as well as the original gift of Pepin at Kiersy
in 752. The so-called "Privilegium Hadriani pro Carolo" granting him
full right to nominate the pope and to invest all bishops is a
forgery.)

To the Baptism of Wittekind (774-785)
The next twenty years of Charles' life may be considered as one long
warfare. They are filled with an astounding series of rapid marches
from end to end of a continent intersected by mountains, morasses,
and forests, and scantily provided with roads. It would seem that
the key to his long series of victories, won almost as much by moral
ascendancy as by physical or mental superiority, is to be found in
the inspiration communicated to his Frankish champion by Pope Adrian
I. Weiss (Weltgesch., 11, 549) enumerates fifty-three distinct
campaigns of Charlemagne; of these it is possible to point to only
twelve or fourteen which were not undertaken principally or entirely
in execution of his mission as the soldier and protector of the
Church. In his eighteen campaigns against the Saxons Charles was
more or less actuated by the desire to extinguish what he and his
people regarded as a form of devil-worship, no less odious to them
than the fetishism of Central Africa is to us.

While he was still in Italy the Saxons, irritated but not subdued by
the fate of Eresburg and of Irminsul had risen in arms, harried the
country of the Hessian Franks, and burned many churches; that of St.
Boniface at Fritzlar, being of stone, had defeated their efforts.
Returning to the north, Charles sent a preliminary column of cavalry
into the enemy's country while he held a council of the realm at
Kiersy (Quercy) in September, 774, at which it was decided that the
Saxons (Westfali, Ostfali, and Angrarii) must be presented with the
alternative of baptism or death. The northeastern campaigns of the
next seven years had for their object a conquest so decisive as to
make the execution of this policy feasible. The year 775 saw the
first of a series of Frankish military colonies, on the ancient
Roman plan established at Sigeburg among the Westfali. Charles next
subdued, temporarily at least, the Ostali, whose chieftain, Hessi,
having accepted baptism, ended his life in the monastery of Fulda
(see BONIFACE, SAINT; FULDA). Then, a Frankish camp at Lnbbecke on
the Weser having been surprised by the Saxons, and its garrison
slaughtered, Charles turned again westward, once more routed the
Westfali, and received their oaths of submission.

At this stage (776) the affairs of Lombardy interrupted the Saxon
crusade. Areghis of Beneventum, son-in-law of the vanquished
Desiderius, had formed a plan with his brother-in-law Adalghis
(Adelchis), then an exile at Constantinople, by which the latter was
to make a descent upon Italy, backed by the Eastern emperor; Adrian
was at the same time involved in a quarrel with the three Lombard
dukes, Reginald of Clusium, Rotgaud of Friuli, and Hildebrand of
Spoleto. The archbishop of Ravenna, who called himself "primate" and
"exarch of Italy", was also attempting to found an independent
principality at the expense of the papal state but was finally
subdued in 776, and his successor compelled to be content with the
title of "Vicar" or representative of the pope. The junction of the
aforesaid powers, all inimical to the pope and the Franks, while
Charles was occupied in Westphalia, was only prevented by the death
of Constantine Copronymus in September, 775 (see BYZANTINE EMPIRE).

After winning over Hildebrand and Reginald by diplomacy, Charles
descended into Lombardy by the Brenner Pass (spring of 776),
defeated Rotgaud, and leaving garrisons and governors, or counts
(comites), as they were termed, in the reconquered cities of the
Duchy of Friuli, hastened back to Saxony. There the Frankish
garrison had been forced to evacuate Eresburg, while the siege of
Sigeburg was so unexpectedly broken up as to give occasion later to
a legend of angelic intervention in favour of the Christians. As
usual, the almost incredible suddenness of the king's reappearance
and the moral effect of his presence quieted the ragings of the
heathen. Charles then divided the Saxon territory into Missionary
districts. At the great spring hosting (champ de Mai) of Paderborn,
in 777, many Saxon converts were baptized; Wittekind (Widukind),
however, already the leader and afterwards the popular hero of the
Saxons, had fled to his brother-in-law, Sigfrid the Dane.
The episode of the invasion of Spain comes next in chronological
order. The condition of the venerable Iberian Church, still
suffering under Moslem domination, appealed strongly to the king's
sympathy. In 777 there came to Paderborn three Moorish emirs,
enemies of the Ommeyad Abderrahman, the Moorish King of Cordova.

These emirs did homage to Charles and proposed to him an invasion of
Northern Spain; one of the, Ibn-el-Arabi, promised to bring to the
invaders' assistance a force of Berber auxiliaries from Africa; the
other two promised to exert their powerful influence at Barcelona
and elsewhere north of the Ebro. Accordingly, in the spring of 778,
Charles, with a host of crusaders, speaking many tongues, and which
numbered among its constituents even a quota of Lombards, moved
towards the Pyrenees. His trusted lieutenant, Duke Bernhard. with
one division, entered Spain by the coast. Charles himself marched
through the mountain passes straight to Pampelona. But Ibn-el-Arabi,
who had prematurely brought on his army of Berbers, was assassinated
by the emissary of Abderrahman, and though Pampelona was razed, and
Barcelona and other cities fell, Saragossa held out. Apart from the
moral effect of this campaign upon the Moslem rulers of Spain, its
result was insignificant, though the famous ambuscade in which
perished Roland, the great Paladin, at the Pass of Roncesvalles,
furnished to the medieval world the material for its most glorious
and influential epic, the "Chanson de Roland".

Much more important to posterity were the next succeeding events
which continued and decided the long struggle in Saxony. During the
Spanish crusade Wittekind had returned from his exile, bringing with
him Danish allies, and was now ravaging Hesse; the Rhine valley from
Deutz to Andenach was a prey to the Saxon "devil-worshipers"; the
Christian missionaries were scattered or in hiding. Charles gathered
his hosts at Dnren, in June, 779, and stormed Wittekind's entrenched
camp at Bocholt, after which campaign he seems to have considered
Saxony a fairly subdued country. At any rate, the "Saxon Capitulary"
(see CAPITULARIES) of 781 obliged all Saxons not only to accept
baptism (and this on the pain of death) but also to pay tithes, as
the Franks did for the support of the Church; moreover it
confiscated a large amount of property for the benefit of the
missions. This was Wittekind's last opportunity to restore the
national independence and paganism; his people, exasperated against
the Franks and their God, eagerly rushed to arms. At Suntal on the
Weser, Charles being absent, they defeated a Frankish army killing
two royal legates and five Counts. But Wittekind committed the error
of enlisting as allies the non-Teutonic Sorbs from beyond the Saale;
race-antagonism soon weakened his forces, and the Saxon hosts melted
away. Of the so-called "Massacre of Verdun" (783) it is fair to say
that the 4500 Saxons who perished were not prisoners of war;
legally, they were ringleaders in a rebellion, selected as such from
a number of their fellow rebels. Wittekind himself escaped beyond
the Elbe. It was not until after another defeat of the Saxons at
Detmold, and again at Osnabrnck, on the "Hill of Slaughter", that
Wittekind acknowledged the God of Charles the stronger than Odin. In
785 Wittekind received baptism at Attigny, and Charles stood
godfather.

• Married: BEF 770

1. Pepin, the Hunchback

• Married: 770

• Married: 771

1. Pippin(Karlman, Pepin), King of Italy b: ABT 777
2. Louis-I, King of the Franks b: AUG 778 in Herst in Chasseneuil

• Married: AFT 783

• Married: 794

1. Title: Caroli Magni Progenies, Rosch, Neustadt, 1977, p48-46; Royalty for Commoners, 2002, Stuart, p95.