On Christmas Day in the year 800, Charles, King of the Franks, was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. Whatever the politics which surrounded this event, it was hailed by contemporaries and also by posterity as the re-creation of the empire in the West. Charles or Charlemagne was heir, after a lapse of 324 years, to Romulus Augustulus. And the empire thus reestablished was to last until, in 1806, it lapsed without a murmur, absorbed into the empire of Napoleon. The short-lived Carolingian period occupied a gap between the first wave of Germanic and barbarian invaders and the second, characterized by the incursions of the Norse and the Avars, and by renewed activity of the Moors. The period of Charlemagne was one of relative peace, and was marked by a renaissance of art, literature, and learning, only to be snuffed out before the end of the ninth century.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

The political geography of Europe at the beginning of the ninth century was dominated by two empires, the western of which Charlemagne had just been crowned emperor and, eight hundred miles to the east, that which derived in unbroken succession from Diocletian and Constantine. Both claimed universal rule and carried on only a frigid diplomacy with one another. They had no direct contact. Between them lay the Germans, the Avars of the Hungarian plain, and the Balkan Slavs. This was a frontier into which both hoped to expand.