Quotes About Charlemagne

Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn't bother with it. Charlemagne couldn't care less.

It was the Frisians who reinvented useful money, and taught their ideas to the Franks under Charlemagne.

Charlemagne's educational and cultural campaign was momentous for its preservation of the classical past and for its effects on medieval society. The level of literacy never again sank as low as it had in pre-Carolingian times.

When Charlemagne's driving impulse passed, his Renaissance faded. For 200 years after his death, there is not much to record in Western Europe in the way of creative thought.

The manorial system, widespread in the West from Charlemagne's time onward, was not at first favorable to the development of agriculture and commerce. Manors tended to be self-sufficient; the economy was closed. Men lived in their small world, in constant fear of the strange world beyond, from which came only evil. The best they could hope for was to endure, and they endured.

There were also domestic pressures against embracing Rome. Charlemagne already ruled his own realm, which itself stimulated imitation: the Polish król, Czech král and Russian korol, all meaning 'king', derive from 'Charles'.