Stamboom Ray Baker » Charlemagne (± 742-814)

Persoonlijke gegevens Charlemagne 

• Alternatieve naam: Charles the Great (ook bekend als / alias)
• Hij is geboren rond 2 april 742 in Prussia Germany.
• Titel: King
• Hij is overleden op 28 januari 814.

Gezin van Charlemagne

Kind(eren):

1. Louis of Aquitaine   

Notities over Charlemagne

The Capitulary of 802, is, in reality, nothing more nor less than the foundation charter of that longlived institution, the Holy Roman Empire. The latter, as will be remembered, began its existence on Christmas-day, 800, and ended it on August 6th, 1806. Already in Voltaire's time it had ceased to be " either holy, or Roman, or an empire," but its pretensions were kept up until all Germany fell asunder before the wars and the wiles of Napoleon.

This capitulary of Charlemagne is the programme, so to speak, of the young empire. It is the ideal-an ideal never once to be fulfilled-of what that empire should have been. At the head of all things stands the emperor, whose greatest duty it is to provide for the welfare of his subjects. Every male being in his realm who is over twelve years of age has to plight his troth to him. In his hands are justice, morality, and religion. His realm is to be a haven of rest where all discords are to cease and no one to infringe on the rights of another. In his care are all the churches of God, all widows, orphans, and strangers, "for the emperor himself, after God and His saints, has been constituted their protector and defender."

Quite new, in the present document, is the introduction of the "missi dominici"-regular envoys who were to radiate from the emperor as a centre, and bring peace and justice to all parts of the realm. They were to overlook all the different officials, and to listen to complaints against them. So excellent was the institution that one similar to it was adopted in England, where in the time of Henry II. the itinerant justices formed an important feature of the administration.

It is worth while to notice how completely, at this time, the clergy were under the rule of the emperor. The new empire was to be as much of a theocracy as the kingdom of that David whose name Charlemagne bore in the intimate circle of his learned friends. But too soon, alas, the elements of disruption were to make themselves felt. The clergy were to assert their allegiance to a King higher than any earthly monarch, whose commands, as issued and tampered with by His representative on earth, were to be at variance with all the best interests of the emperor. Nationality was to war with universalism, the accepted principles of heredity with the desire for the necessary unity; and with the death of the last Carolingian emperor the empire itself was irretrievably to be cleft and riven.

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