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jdintr's review against another edition
4.0
Preparing to spend the summer in Ingelheim on the Rhine, Germany, site of one of Charlemagne's palaces, I read several books on the 8th-century ruler. Lamb's was one of the best, as it focused on the man--and the legends, which are among the amplifiers of the great king's legacy--while minimizing current analogies.
Charlemagne took a huge empire, that of the Merovignian Franks, and turned it into an enduring one. He used the tools of his day: war and marriage, but he was also perceptive enough to see Christianity as a unifying principle, and the Pope as a convenient tool.
We don't think much about it today, but Charlemagne's era brought to an end the centuries known as the Dark Ages. Christianity had a foothold in northern Europe, little more. The Saxons were ascendant in the 8th century, ruling Britain along with their German homeland; the Vikings threatened Europe's northern coasts, and Muslims controlled Spain and were less than 50 years removed from their most recent push beyond the Pyrenees. It would be an interesting act of historic revisionism to imagine a world without Charlemagne: where Christianity remained a feature of southern Europe and the north had remained a polyglot mix of traditional, Christian, and even Muslim cultures.
Lamb dramatizes different moments of Charlemagne's life. This isn't a conventional biography, but a popular one, entertaining, informative, ennobling.
Charlemagne took a huge empire, that of the Merovignian Franks, and turned it into an enduring one. He used the tools of his day: war and marriage, but he was also perceptive enough to see Christianity as a unifying principle, and the Pope as a convenient tool.
We don't think much about it today, but Charlemagne's era brought to an end the centuries known as the Dark Ages. Christianity had a foothold in northern Europe, little more. The Saxons were ascendant in the 8th century, ruling Britain along with their German homeland; the Vikings threatened Europe's northern coasts, and Muslims controlled Spain and were less than 50 years removed from their most recent push beyond the Pyrenees. It would be an interesting act of historic revisionism to imagine a world without Charlemagne: where Christianity remained a feature of southern Europe and the north had remained a polyglot mix of traditional, Christian, and even Muslim cultures.
Lamb dramatizes different moments of Charlemagne's life. This isn't a conventional biography, but a popular one, entertaining, informative, ennobling.
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