The History of Charlemagne

The precise birth-place of the greatest man of the middle ages is unknown; neither have any records come down to us of his education, nor any particulars of those early years which are generally ornamented by the imagination of after biographers, even when the subject of their writing has left his infancy in obscurity. Eginhard, who possessed the best means of knowledge, frankly avows that he was himself ignorant; and the manuscript of a contemporary author, whose propensity to anecdote gives a value to his details, which neither the style of his composition, nor the accuracy of his statements, could bestow, is defective in that part which might have afforded some information, however vague, regarding the youth of Charlemagne. The year of his birth, however, as ascertained by computation from other data, seems undoubtedly to have been AD 742, about seven years before his father, Pepin the Brief, assumed the name of King. 

His mother was Bertha, daughter of Charibert, Count of Laon; and concerning her early union with Pepin, a thousand pleasant fables have supplied the place of all accurate information. Although one of the papal epistles to Charlemagne insinuates that Pepin at one time contemplated a separation from Bertha, for the purpose of marrying another woman, it is evident that she was loved and honored by her husband, from the fact of her having shared in the new and solemn spectacle by which Pepin attempted to consecrate, in the eyes of the people, his usurpation of the supreme authority. 

To the forms usually observed on the accession of a new monarch of the Francs, Pepin added various ceremonies which had never before been used in Gaul. Amongst these, the most striking, from its novelty, was the unction which had been instituted for the kings of Israel, and which was readily performed for the Frankish usurper by the famous Boniface, Archbishop of Metz. In all the solemnities which dignified the elevation of her husband, Bertha was a partaker; and many have been the laborious struggles of historians to discover, or invent, various complex and political motives for so very natural an occurrence; but it would seem, that the simple desire of distinctly marking that his personal elevation to the royal station implied the elevation of his whole family, and the permanence of the kingly office in his race, was the sole view of the new sovereign of the Francs. The influence which she exercised over her husband, and the reverence which her children always displayed towards her, render it probable that to Bertha herself was entrusted the early education of Charlemagne. Still it is greatly to be regretted, that we do not possess any details of the tuition under which the mind of that prince put forth, between infancy and manhood, those grand and splendid qualities which, hidden in the darkness that overhangs his youth, shine out immediately on his accession to the throne, like the rising of a tropical day, which, we are told, bursts forth at once in its splendor, unannounced by the slow progress of the dawning twilight...