Equipped as we are with perfect hindsight, modern historians are instinctively inclined to look for beginnings and endings. The urge to impose ordered narratives on the disorder of the past is hard to resist, and thus the story of the Carolingian empire is often told (as indeed it is in this book) as one with an identifiable beginning, middle and end. Introducing this book, we justified our selection and definition of a specifically ‘Carolingian’ period. By way of conclusion, we can return to the place of the Carolingian era in the bigger picture of European history, and remind ourselves of the tension in all historical explanation between the ideas of abrupt change and continuous development.

In the longer narratives of European history from which our ideas about the origins of modern nations are constructed, the Carolingian period is seen above all as an age of beginnings: of the hierarchical social structures often packaged together as ‘feudalism’; of medieval concepts of empire; of the political geography and concept of Europe itself. The details of all this are of course contested, but although few historians now would be as confident and categorical in their arguments as were those who identified Charles Martel as the inventor of vassalage and hence feudalism, a Carolingian template still seems to most to form an essential substructure of central medieval political culture. The Carolingian empire may have fallen in 888, but the grand narratives of the present day often assign it a privileged position in the foundation of the future.