ABSTRACT
The vision of the figure of Charlemagne, who established an empire of almost a million square kilometres reaching from the frontiers of modern Hungary to the Atlantic, and from the English Channel to central Italy and Catalonia, has been a heady one for those who came after him. The power of Charlemagne as a political symbol has endured. In contrast, European history after the middle ninth century was for many years often cast as the nadir to Charlemagne’s zenith, and as a period of decline preceding the seismic political and cultural changes brought about in the later eleventh century. The Carolingian Empire’s heyday may well have ushered in a ‘renaissance’ of knowledge, art and culture, but the tenth and earlier eleventh centuries saw intellectual breathing space develop as an inevitable outcome of the fragmentation of power.
