Readers of Charlemagne’s column in The Economist (“Europe’s 750 billion euro bazooka”) have no doubt been wondering whether there is anything new to be said about his namesake and – presumably – model: Emperor Charlemagne, a.k.a. Charles the Great (742–814 A.D.), who became the first head of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Day 800.
There is. Peter Heather in Empire and Barbarians presents a vivid study of Europe between the end of the Roman Empire and the year One Thousand. He puts Charlemagne in perspective. The news is that today’s scholars downgrade the role of migration in the formation of Europe’s ancestral states. Relatively few people actually moved, they believe. Most gathered around the cultural banners of those who did move. More important than migration, they think, were internal political and cultural transformations. Still, there is consensus that, before these transformations, “barbarians,” i.e., Germanic- and Slav-speaking forces, had destroyed the Roman Empire and, in the process, generated a set of ancestral states.
The greatest of these transformations was Charlemagne’s conquest – by the Sword and the Cross – of Gaul, of the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, of northern Italy and much of the Middle Danube Region, together with parts of northern Spain. Thanks to his assumption of imperial authority and his coronation by Pope Leo III, western Europe was born.
“From about 790 onwards,” writes Peter Heather, “a consistent thread appears in the writings of his team of resident intellectuals, extolling his success and his piety and that both showed him to be a true Christian emperor.”
Not a bad model of the author of “Europe’s 750 billion euro bazooka,” even if Charlemagne, who had learned to read Latin and some Greek, did not master writing.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Of course, Charlemagne was the founder of modern Europe. But his grave in Aachen (Aix-la-Chappelle) – which I visited once – is not genuine. It was changed to greater luxury in the 13th century. The reason is that then everybody “knew” he was the founder of “modern” Europe.
I thought you would pounce on the “news” that the Wanderungen-part of the Völkerwanderung
was being revised by contemporary scholars.
really more of a Kaiserwanderung, was it?