Origins
Charlemagne was born around 2 April 742, the eldest son of Pepin the Short (the first Carolingian king of the Franks) and his wife Bertrada of Laon. He inherited half of the Frankish kingdom in 768 when Pepin died. His brother Carloman inherited the other half but died unexpectedly in 771, allowing Charlemagne to consolidate the entire kingdom.
Conquests
Over the following three decades, Charlemagne conducted a sustained series of military campaigns that approximately tripled the Frankish kingdom. He defeated the Lombards in northern Italy (774), pushed the Frankish frontier east into Saxony in a series of brutal wars (772–804), defeated the Avars in modern Hungary (791–796), and extended Frankish control south to the Pyrenees (the disaster at Roncesvalles in 778, immortalized in the Song of Roland, was a side note in a larger pattern of expansion).
By 800 AD his empire covered approximately 1.1 million square kilometers — comparable in extent, though not in population, to the western half of the late Roman Empire.
The imperial coronation
On Christmas Day 800, in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum — Emperor of the Romans. The coronation was politically extraordinary: it asserted that the Pope had the authority to confer the title of Roman Emperor (which had been dormant in the West since 476), and it positioned Charlemagne as the legitimate successor to the late Western Empire.
The Byzantine Empire in Constantinople — which had been the legitimate continuator of the Roman Empire — rejected the coronation, considering it a usurpation. Diplomatic tensions persisted for centuries.
Administration
Charlemagne’s administrative innovations were substantial. He standardised currency, weights, and measures. He reformed handwriting (the Carolingian minuscule script — clear, regular, lowercase — became the basis of modern Western typography). He organised the church-state apparatus that would become the medieval European pattern. He sponsored a sustained intellectual revival, the Carolingian Renaissance, that preserved much of late-antique Latin literature for the medieval period.
His court at Aachen became the cultural center of western Europe. He brought scholars from across the continent — Alcuin of York from England, Theodulf of Orléans from Visigothic Spain, Paul the Deacon from Lombardy. He could read but apparently could not write fluently; his biographer Einhard reports that he kept writing tablets under his pillow to practice in moments of insomnia.
What followed
Charlemagne died at Aachen on 28 January 814 and was buried in the Palatine Chapel he had built there. His son Louis the Pious inherited the empire intact but proved less capable; the empire was divided among Louis’s sons by the Treaty of Verdun (843), producing the embryonic states of France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia).
The imperial title Charlemagne had revived continued — under his descendants, then under the Ottonians, then under the Hohenstaufens — as the Holy Roman Empire until it was finally dissolved by Napoleon in 1806. Charlemagne is therefore the founder of both the medieval state system in Europe and the institutional framework that — through the German emperors — would shape continental politics for the next thousand years.
Legacy
Charlemagne is honored as the founder of the European political project by every subsequent attempt to unify Europe — from the Holy Roman Empire to the Habsburg ambition to the Napoleonic Empire to the post-1945 European Union, whose annual Charlemagne Prize for European service is awarded in Aachen each May. His tomb at the Palatine Chapel in Aachen is still venerated. The chapel, substantially intact, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.