Emperor of the West
Hywel Williams
460 pages including notes and index
published in 2010
Emperor of the West: Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire is a book I ran across when looking for other books in the Middelburg library, but which turned out to be exactly the book I needed to read after having spent most of December reading Peter Heather’s empires and Barbarians. Heather’s book was a comparative history of the first millennium CE, from the Late Roman Empire through to the Carolingian and Ottonian empires, of which the Carolingian was the first European empire with had its power base in north-west Europe, as opposed to the Mediterranean basin. Heather’s focus was on the interactions of these three empires with the various “barbarian invasions” each had to deal with and how these shaped what would become modern Europe, but what it made me want to read was more about the Carolingians themselves, which is where Emperor of the West came in handy.
Though not quite an introductionary level book — some familiarity with the various characters is expected — Emperor of the West turned out to be a good overview of Carolingian history. Williams’ main focus is on Charlemagne himself, but through him looks at wider Carolingian culture and history. He consistently puts Charlemagne in the context of the Western European recovery from the fall of the Roman Empire in which the awareness of imperial Rome and its history helped shape Charlemagne’s empire, in the same way that the Carolingian conviction that they were uniquely blessed by Christ also did. The Carolingians always looked back to the Roman past and consciously set out to restore it in their own image, but in the process created something new, the first European empire not to depend for its power on the Mediterranean Basin.