Talk:Charlemagne

Reorganization?
Hi all, taking a look at this article, I personally believe it could do with some reorganization and cleanup to improve readability and facilitate some improvements to the article. For such a key figure, it'd be great if we could bring this article up to GA standards, and I think a reorg might be a good first step to build off of. This is based off organization of some other pre-modern ruler bios, and (admittedly), personal opinion of what might be a better flow. I'd propose something along the lines of the following, based on the article as it stands now (including some renaming of sections and maybe looking where we're duplicating info or maybe providing more than is necessary):
 * Names and nicknames -> Name
 * Early life and rise to power
 * Ancestry and political background
 * Early life -> Birth
 * Ambiguous high office -> **Joint reign (with Carloman?) - This section is a little odd to me. The first three paragraphs seem to duplicate and expand on information in "Political background" on how Pepin became king. Good info, but maybe better served there. Really, the key info at this point in the article are the last two paragraphs regarding the brothers' accession and how the kingdom was divided administratively. There's also room for expansion on the point (currently unsourced) "Charles was 26 years old, but he had been campaigning at his father's right hand for several years, which may help to account for his military skill." If we can dig up some sources on his activities in Pepin's reign, would be good information to add either here or a section detailing these activities.
 * Aquitanian rebellion - Of the eight paragraphs here, only the last actually deals with events during Charles's reign. The preceding are ~100 years of background on Aquitaine's history. While it's definitely good to give readers context for events, I wonder if this background material can be trimmed (and preserved either at Aquitaine or Carolingian Empire?)
 * Marriage to Desiderata - Needs sources, and as the content stands currently in these three sections, I think they can condense to one covering 768-771 for now
 * (Sole?) King of the Franks
 * Italian campaings
 * current subsections
 * Carolingian expansion to the south -> Southern expansion(?)
 * current subsections
 * Eastern campaigns
 * current subsections
 * Imperium -> (Reign as?) Emperor
 * Coronation
 * Debate
 * Imperial title
 * Administration
 * current subsections (for now, some of these probably need to be cleaned up)
 * Imperial diplomacy
 * Danish attacks
 * Death
 * Appearance - some here could maybe fly to other sections - i.e. Language into early life?
 * Wives, concubines, and children (issue?) - personally would ditch the table here in favor of a list format, but just my thought
 * Cultural impact (Legacy?)
 * current subsections
 * Beatification

Beyond the early sections, not proposing any major content changes. I'm digging up resources I have as well as acquiring some more so I can put some work into expansion of some of the thinner sections and (especially) adding citations to what we have. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 04:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)


 * And wow, doing an rewrite of the sections up to 771, and a source used in "Ambiguous high office" is |"Boot Camp & Military Fitness Institute - not only did it flag as a low quality source, but clicking through the article there is actually a mirror of this article. The article probably needs a top to bottom overhaul. I'm basing the early life section mainly on McKitterick, which I own, and am waiting for Janet Nelson's King and Emperor in the mail, which I hope should really be able to boost the article up. It looks like Nelson is currently used only a handful of times in the article.Seltaeb Eht (talk) 03:08, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * His beatification of equivalent canonization should be at least mentioned. Reparare (talk) 09:38, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Sketch image
User:SergeWoodzing, good call on removing the hairstyle info from the caption - was indeed too much and I should have eliminated it when I moved it to the new section. On "thought to be of" - the image is sourced to Fried's biography (p. 262), where it's captioned:

"FIGURE 29 Image from the inside front cover of the Fulda codex of the Aix capitulary, now held at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. This quick sketch is thought to be of Charlemagne."

I based the caption off of this. Do you know of a source that makes the more specific claim that it's definitely of Charlemagne? Seltaeb Eht (talk) 21:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for checking that! --SergeWoodzing (talk) 01:16, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I've also fixed this now on the image page at Commons. Being a bit sensitive, because many so-called "historians" hardly consider any portrait older than the 16th century to be an authentic likeness, I overreacted a bit. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 01:24, 3 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Very much understood, and share the sentiment! This, coins, and possibly the equestrian statue are probably the closest we have to getting a real view of what he may have looked like. I wanted to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun using Fried in exclusion of better sources in this case. Thanks for improving the caption, and replying to the talk quickly. Best, Seltaeb Eht (talk) 02:44, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

About "Karl" and "Karlus"
The page had for years on and off listed "Karl", the modern German form of his name, as the form that would've been used by Germanic speakers at the time. I can find evidence of this out on the internet, but not in any scholarly sources. This makes me worried that it's out there as a WP:CIRCULAR reference back here. The last time it was added, it was cited to Fried's biography, but Fried makes no such claim on page 2, or anywhere else in the book. "Karl" is only used in the book in footnotes referencing titles of German-language sources. Even in it's appearances prior to this it didn't seem we had any RSs for it.

I replaced Karl with the form "Karlus", citing the following in Nelson's King and Emperor: "I call my subject Charles, or use one or another of the languages spoken by his contemporaries: Latin Carolus, Old High German Karlus or Romance Karlo." (Nelson 2019 p. 2). Nelson's is the most up-to-date comprehensive English-language biography, and she's a giant in Charlemagne scholarship. Frustratingly, though, this is in the introduction, the only part of the book where she doesn't provide footnotes. And except for this passage, she invariably calls him "Charles", never using one of these forms again.

So while I trust Nelson on this, it's tough because she doesn't have a footnote we can track down, and "Karlus" definitely seems odd as a Germanic form to us. And what you see on the web is that the evolution went something like keril or kerl -> Karl -> Karolus/Carolus. Our article on Charles mostly seems to claim this, although it doesn't look that well sourced to me.

Johannes Fried, Roger Collins, and Alessandro Barbero are all silent on a contemporary Germanic name. The only other of the major biographies I have access to that addresses the name at all is Becher, on p. 43:

"But what did this name 'Charles,' which was uncommon in this period, actually mean? For a while it was thought that the name was taken from the root in 'Kerl - fellowman' which meant 'a free man without inherited property,' or simply 'man, married man, or beloved.' This interpretation of 'Charles' was used to support the now outdated theory that Charles Martel's mother Chalpaida came from a low-status family. Modern research sees the name 'Carolus' as the Romanized form of 'Hariolus' a pet form of the name 'Chario.' It also appears to have been an element in the name 'Charibert' which was borne by two Merovingian kings. There is also some suggestion that the name may have been derived from 'Crallo.' This was the name of the father of Bishop Kunibert of Cologne, who had been a close ally of Pippin the Elder. In any case, there were no negative connotations associated with the name 'Charles' at the end of the seventh century"

So Becher, gesturing at "modern research" seems to represent that Carolus is the original form of the name as an adaptation of the (Germanic?) names Chario and Hariolus. And that the kerl origin is outdated scholarship.

Doubling the frustration though, Becher is again one of the foremost Charlemagne scholars. But his book was apparently written for a general audience. According to Roger Collins' review in The Historian, it's in a genre of German publishing called a "pocket book" "aimed at a serious but non-specialist readership that wants to be well informed on a wide range of subjects but not in too much detail and without any element of uncertainty". So it also doesn't have any footnotes and doesn't engage in debate over topics, really just presenting a "state of the subject".

So between Nelson and Becher, my best hunch (though entirely synthesis at this point) is that modern scholarship has arrived that Carolus (a Latin name though with Germanic roots) was actually borrowed back into German in the form Karlus, which then derived into Karl, Karel, etc.

I'd love to track down the actual scholarship on this but haven't been able to. I'm sure it's in some obscure German-language journal. I was able to find through Googling this paper:, which has a text his for "Carolus" "Chario" "Hariolus", but it's paid access. But it's probably working from the same scholarship Becher is so I might go to WP:RX to see if anyone has access and try to get someone to translate the relevant paragraphs. Finding the source for Nelson's "Karlus" hasn't turned up anything. So if anyone cares to research this, hopefully we can eventually track it down. But I highly doubt Matthias Becher and Janet Nelson are just making these things up out of whole cloth.

TLDR/The point Not being able to track down Nelson and Becher's own citations, they are still preeminent scholars and the best references we have. So unless we can give an equivalent modern scholarly source that gives Karl as the contemporary Germanic form, giving Karlus as cited to Nelson is our best-sourced option. Karl is either old scholarship perpetuated by Wikipedia, or a WP invention that got picked up elsewhere. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 17:43, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Latin in the Carolingian Renaissance
Hi there, a note that Latin was standardised on the basis of Classical Latin texts during the Carolingian Renaissance, a change which began the "fixing" of Latin, and the realisation that modern Romance languages were no longer the same thing as Latin as a formal written and spoken language. This is a very important change that had implications for the development of vernacular languages as well as ensuring that Latin was fit to serve as the pre-eminent language of learning for the coming centuries, so deserves a line or two. Jim Killock (talk) 07:24, 8 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I added a line on the general relevance of the renaissance for the use of Latin; the point on Latin's change is a bit contested and seems less relevant on balance that its contribution to the spread and vitality of early medieval Latin learning and literature etc. Jim Killock (talk) 11:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

add a page
There are many contempory media portraits of charlemegne. Some are mentioned but there's a lot more, I think it'd be cool to get a page dedicated to that is like the layout of the wives/concubines page(just a list with brief descriptions and hyperlinks to other wikipages where possible). If you'd like I could name a few movies/TV shows/documentaries/songs that mention him or portrays him. I don't really know how to add something(and honestly dont really care to learn) but I could add some references and sources if people like this idea and would be willing to add this page. 2603:6011:2C00:3C5:9759:7B9B:C3EC:AD75 (talk) 19:38, 17 June 2024 (UTC)