Johannes Fried. Charlemagne

The impossibility of writing a biography of Charlemagne is generally acknowledged, even by those attempting so to do. What has to be undertaken instead is something of a “life and times” approach, blending limited biographical evidence into wider contexts, with a good dose of speculation as to the roles played by the individual. For Charlemagne, the Frankish king and emperor who ruled from 768 to 814, none of his personal writings have survived, even if some of the most important administrative and theological texts of his reign were presented as if they were the product of the ruler’s own pen, and all sources of evidence for his reign need careful interpretation. Accepting the overall limitation does not prevent Johannes Fried, in Charlemagne, from trying to identify incidents and textual details that might reveal something of Charlemagne’s own thoughts and feelings. This is regrettable, as none of the chosen examples seem convincing, and almost all depend on lavish use of the conditional tense: “may” and “might” feature all too often and arouse in the mind of the skeptical reader the response, “or just as easily may not.” Some of Fried’s interpretations depend more on evidential claims than on mere speculation, but too frequently these are asserted rather than proved. For example, it is suggested that “we may surmise that the death of his little brother affected Charlemagne deeply” (19)—just because that death was recorded in the set of annals now known as Annales Regni Francorum (under the year 759). This interpretation depends upon the view, unsupported here, that nothing could have been included in this text without his later approval. Such attempts at psychological insights are particularly frequent in the first chapter of the book, titled “Boyhood,” a period for which the evidence is especially sparse, but can be found throughout the book, culminating in an imagined dialogue between Charlemagne, on his deathbed, and God. In general, explicit text criticism is needed but lacking, even when sources disagree, and no overall introduction to the sources is provided

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