Who was Charlemagne? (src: Ryan Reeves)

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Summary

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Content

Charlemagne is crowned

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

In the later 8th century, the power of the papacy was certainly far from absolute:

• The Lombards in and around the Italian peninsula were causing problems for the papacy.
• Some of the Romans themselves (particularly those in the city of Rome proper) were hostile towards the papacy: powerful local families threw their weight around and tried to exert control over the papacy.

As the Carolingians emerged from the Merovingians during this time, the relationship between the papacy and the Franks deepened.

Yet the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III was a step past mere friendly relations. On Christmas day in 800 A.D., the Pope placed a crown on Charlemagne’s head and declared that he was now the new emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum). Regarding the significance of this event, depending on how you define “reigning emperor”, Charlemagne was the first reigning emperor in the West since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476—more than 300 years before.

Now, some protest at this fusing of Church and State, seeing it as a terrible new development. But the truth is that Constantine already set the precedent hundreds of years before, in his politicization of the Church. So it is not quite right to treat this event as some sort of never-before-seen thing, just a continuation (and perhaps intensification) of the idea.

The Pope crowning a new emperor in the West strained relations with the East, where an emperor already reigned from Constantinople. (Well, not exactly an emperor in 800 A.D., since during this year Irene of Athens was in power as empress—having seized the throne from her son—but you get the idea). Unlike the West, the East never really stopped having emperors. But for the people of the West, Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor of the West was taken as a sign of God’s providence and superintendence of the West, sparking hope for re-unification and a return to glory.

This event also marked the beginning of what scholars typically call the the Holy Roman Empire, at least if you take Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor (rather than Otto the Great, who was crowned in 962 by Pope John XII).

In examining Charlemagne, aside from discussing what his reign was like generally, we will discuss:

1. How he conquered so much land in such a short period of time
2. What effect his reign had on European culture (e.g., through the Carolingian Renaissance)
3. How he shaped and changed the Church as it developed from an early ancient Church into a medieval western European Church.

Follow-on topics

The Catholic Church was not always a dominant force

In the first few centuries of the Early Middle Ages, the Catholic Church did not have anywhere near the power we sometimes associate with it. Rather than being able to unilaterally topple kings or force policy, at this point in time, the organization we would term the Catholic Church was gasping for breath, nearly snuffed out by the Lombards.

I think it is important to emphasize exactly how much the Catholic Church changed over time, according to political circumstances. No matter what one thinks of the institution from a religious perspective (i.e., whether or not it is the One True Church, and so on), it seems to be a pretty clear historical fact that the Catholic Church has been far from uniform in its approach to exercising political authority.

For example, nowadays the Vatican is not able to exert very much foreign policy influence (at least when compared in a relative sense to what they did with the Holy Roman Empire and so on), and certainly at this point we describe here in the mid to late 700s, they could barely survive themselves, much less influence other nations.

So it is interesting to consider what sort of explanations Catholic theologians might try to make in order to justify and explain the vast changes in how the Catholic Church expressed itself and exerted its influence across time and place and circumstance. As I see things, it is a problem they truly must grapple with.

We Evangelical Protestants have no such concern (at least those of use who believe in a decentralized “each Church is directly accountable to God with no larger hierarchy” form of church polity), because under this model, churches have nothing to do with political power, but are solely focused upon teaching the Word of God.

Further discussion

Charlemagne’s military conquests

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Charlemagne conquered lands that his ancestors (like Charles Martel and Pepin the Short) never managed to. To be clear, the land holdings that his ancestors left him were already quite substantial, but it is just that Charlemagne expanded them even more, incorporating even more territories into the Frankish Carolingian Empire. For example:

• The area of Lombardy (the northern part of Italy down to the middle part of Italy)
• Bavaria
• Saxony

Charlemagne also created borderland regions that came to be known as [marches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_(territory), which were set up on the borders of the empire to keep an eye on enemy movements. So, for example, Charlemagne established one down in the southern part of Aquitaine to create a buffer between the Frankish Empire proper and Muslim Spain.

All said and done, after his conquests, Charlemagne ruled an empire that spanned some 800+ miles across most of the arable land of Europe.

So how was Charlemagne so successful militarily, such that he could conquer all this land?

• He inherited the martial tradition of his ancestors (like Charles Martel)
• The Frankish armies were relentless and determined
• Etc.

Some scholars have postulated that a wider adoption of the stirrup in this timeframe allowed for more effective cavalry which the Carolingians made proportionally more and better use of (giving them a military edge), but the exact impact that stirrup technology had upon Europe is a matter of debate (with many recent scholars leaning towards viewing the impact as grossly overstated). Compare the so-called “Great Stirrup Controversy”, and also see here.

At any rate, the Carolingian military proved to be very effective. However, they were not invincible. For example, Charlemagne sent troops down to try to retake certain portions of Muslim Spain, and they got pretty soundly defeated in the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (a defeat captured in the epic poem the Song of Roland).

Follow-on topics

What the so-called “Great Stirrup Controversy” can teach us about Bible teaching

The question of exactly how much the wider adoption of stirrups as cavalry technology shaped Europe in the Middle Ages may seem to be rather academic and of little consequence. However, I think this particular scholarly debate is an excellent example of why Bible teachers must take care in what and how they teach. 2 Timothy 2:15 says that a Bible teacher should present themselves to God “as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (cf. also James 3:1). This is a high bar, and higher still when we consider the concept we are going over here.

The power of narrative (“spin” if want to use a dirtier word for it) in historical analysis is huge. That is to say, the way in which things are framed and explained can very strongly shape what people make of them. One might not care in a moral sense whether stirrups really had a big impact here, but what about when we are not talking about stirrups, but some biblical concept?

An errant word or comment, when it comes from a Bible teacher in a position of authority, can fundamentally alter how lay Christians view entire topics. If we come up with a meta-narrative about something in scripture but get it wrong, it can lead to a certain form of spiritual blindness in those who buy into our incorrect narrative. They may thereafter have a terribly hard time reading the Bible through any other lens than the false one we handed to them.

Consider, for example, the doctrine of the pre-tribulation rapture. There is not a single Bible verse that directly teaches that the event that we call the rapture (as described in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4, for example) will happen before the events of the tribulation. Yet because people were exposed to this way of looking at things, they unconsciously interpret all the passages this way, making it very difficult for other possible interpretations (like the one that holds that this event happens when Jesus returns at the end of the tribulation, directly preceding Armageddon) to even be considered.

And so it is that Bible teachers need to respect the power of ideas to shape belief, and take care not to teach anything past that which it is clearly safe to teach. Any mistakes we make are costly—proportionally much more so than a perhaps overblown theory about the importance of stirrup technology on the development of medieval Europe. For while mistaken scholarly ideas can give people misimpressions about history, mistaken theological ideas can give people misimpressions about God or the Bible.

We do not want to find ourselves facing the words of Matthew 18:6. So we’d best watch our words and make sure we aren’t merely theorizing or hypothesizing, but teaching from a position of full certainty. In other words, we should leave speculation to the scholars, because it has no place whatsoever in the pulpit.

Further discussion

The Carolingian Renaissance

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Despite all his successes in the military sphere, Charlemagne was not just a military brute. He also organized effective administration within his empire:

• He arranged for all kinds of ambassadors and legal experts and scholars and scribes.
• He ensured his decisions and rulings were spread out from the central imperial government with clear and concise language.
• He organized land registries and tax systems to keep track of who owned what.
• He poured resources into the legal profession: laws and precedents were codified and written down.

Aside from new legal and administrative practices, there was also during Charlemagne’s reign what historians call the Carolingian Renaissance: a time period during which there was a flourishing of intellectual activity—letters, arts, manuscripts, etc.

Think back to what we discussed before with regards to how some people perceive the Early Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”. As we discussed there, one might consider this period “dark” relative to Italy’s Renaissance proper in the 14th and 15th centuries, or perhaps due to the fact that we as historians do not have as much evidence as we would like from this period (since literacy rates were relatively low and there simply is not as much to draw on from a literary standpoint). However, all these valid points notwithstanding, the Carolingian Renaissance still clearly serves as counterevidence against the general narrative of there being some sort of “Dark Ages”. Why?

Because Charlemagne taking interest in these things was perhaps as much about preserving Roman culture as the advancement of it; there was clearly a concerted effort to ensure that the Roman culture—the Romanitas, the ways in which the old world had engaged in the life of the mind—was going to continue. And so in fact it is simply not true that Roman culture (including the parts of it that are definitely more art than political norm or engineering practice) did not just “go dark” for hundreds of years, only to return with the Italian Renaissance.

As one might expect, the cultural explosion during the Carolingian Renaissance had far-reaching effects. For example, we might consider architecture. According to Dr. Reeves’s numbers, by one count, between 768 A.D. and 855 A.D., there were 30 cathedrals and 417 monasteries built across the Frankish Empire (and that is not even counting palaces for the dukes and counts, which also involved plenty of architecture). In fact, not a few of the medieval castles in Europe (at least those in areas that used to belong to the Frankish Empire) belong to this architectural period.

Charlemagne also tried to gather together leading intellectuals. Prior to the Carolingian Renaissance and concentration of scholars in the Frankish court, one of the leading places of scholarship was actually the British Isles. Their monks were literate and wrote a great deal (for example, cf. the Venerable Bede and others). But Charlemagne tries to draw people from all over Europe to his court in Aachen, from Lombardy to Britain, and everywhere else besides.

One of the more important figures Charlemagne manages to draw to his court was Alcuin of York. Around 781 A.D., on the way back from a successful embassy to convince the Pope to support an Archbishopric in York (in addition to the already existing Archbishopric in Canterbury), Alcuin apparently meets Charlemagne. (Whether or not this was their first meeting is sort of irrelevant to the fact that this meeting did in fact happen). Soon after, he was persuaded to join Charlemagne’s court at Aachen, running both the palace school and scriptorium.

Whether or not he himself actually actually developed it, Alcuin seems to have helped promote a new form of writing known as Carolingian miniscule, particularly after his retirement from the court to St. Martin’s at Tours. The development of this writing script is extremely important from a paleographical perspective, since it is much more pleasant to work with, relative to what came before. Carolingian miniscule was uniform, with a set font pattern:

• Uppercase for titles
• A combination of uppercase and lowercase for subtitles
• Spaced-out words (!) and more liberal use of punctuation (!)

All of this might not seem all that important, but relative to previous writing systems where everything was uppercase with no spaces or punctuation, Carolingian miniscule makes everything a lot easier to work with, especially for people without the specialized training and practice necessary to make sense of the former sort of writing (…which is most of us who are not professional academics).

As the Carolingian Empire fades and the High Middle Ages come about, a new script takes over called [Gothic script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_script_(palaeography), and we are back to pain and suffering. Gothic script is maybe not quite as impenetrable as the ancient Roman scripts, but it is nonetheless clearly a step backwards in legibility, relative to Carolingian miniscule.

During the Italian Renaissance, amusingly, scholars of the time came to think that Carolingian miniscule was the ancient Roman script (whereas actually, any copies of ancient texts written in Carolignian miniscule came about in the 8th century or later). Terming it litteria antiqua (“antique letter”), they based their own writing systems off of it, all the while looking down on everything between ancient Rome and them. The irony is that the texts they came to appreciate were actually from the very times they were so quick to dismiss as ignorant and backward!

This misapprehension meant that Renaissance typography was actually based off of Carolingian miniscule, and since printed fonts (from the printing press all the way to modern printed fonts on computers) have all been based off of Renaissance typography, in essence, they also trace their origin to Carolingian miniscule. Modern Latin script fonts therefore owe much to the Carolingian Renaissance, whether they know it or not.

In some ways, you might consider Carolingian miniscule as a wider symbol of the educational reforms that Charlemagne pushed for in the Carolingian Renaissance. We should note that Charlemagne himself seems to not have been fully literate (although scholars debate about the exact level of Charlemagne’s education). In some ways, this makes the heavy emphasis he puts on learning and education all the more interesting: he was doing all of this without even being able to fully taste the fruits of all these intellectual labors he was funding.

But nonetheless, he was quite consistent in such funding, and this is what drives the Carolingian Renaissance. All of this was also not just limited to Aachen (although the court there was definitely the intellectual center of the empire; more on Aachen in a moment). For example, Charlemagne mandated a widespread, authorized revision of the Vulgate and ordered that corrected, accurate copies be produced and distributed to monasteries and cathedral libraries across the empire.

Follow-on topics

Paleography in the study of ancient texts

Paleography is important in studying ancient texts. By analyzing the writing style and handwritten script used, scholars can actually sometimes come to identify which period a text came from, which can help immensely in dating texts.

One has to be careful though, as writing styles changed not only with time, but also with geographic location. And every once in while, you might bump into texts written in a writing style “before their time” (so to speak); that is, texts that were written in a particular writing style years or even decades before that writing style came to be widespread. And of course, just because a writing style fell out of fashion (for example, like how Carolingian miniscule did when Gothic script came on the scene) does not mean that absolutely everybody stopped using the writing style (and especially not all at once). This means that if you wed yourself too firmly to dating texts by paleography alone, you can occasionally get yourself into trouble.

Also, this sort of thing works best when we have records about the development of the new writing style that lets us date it precisely. For example, we know from various sources that Carolingian miniscule script was developed around the late 8th century—we can pretty narrowly define when the writing style came into existence. This is far from the case for other writing styles. The further back you go and the more sparse the documentary meta-evidence about the writing system itself, the worse this gets. It doesn’t help that oftentimes scripts were developed as an accumulation of subtle changes over time, rather than all at once like Carolingian miniscule was. This can make determining what is older than what much harder than might initially be apparent.

Recent research (2025) used an AI model trained on radiocarbon dated manuscripts to predict the age of Aramaic and Hebrews writing scripts. This analytical approach yielded older dates for some of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments than the academy had previously postulated.

In my opinion, while this is fascinating and introduces some much-needed quantitative measures into the process, even here certainty is less than 100%. For example, how do you know that the age of the materials upon which the text was written exactly matches the time the text was written? It is probably usually close, statistically speaking, but even that is a bit of an assumption. And of course palimpsests make all of this even more complicated. (Although palimpsests were much more common with animal hide parchments compared to papyri, so that is something).

In short, paleography is part and parcel of what historians must do in order to accurately analyze ancient texts, and this is no different when it comes to biblical texts. But as you can see, the process is a bit complicated. We go through all of this not to say that we should lose trust in our understanding of ancient texts (including the biblical text), but in order to show that a great deal of scholarship is necessary for us to get to the bottom of things in a truly rigorous sort of way.

Textual criticism is very similar in this regard. We have tools at our disposal to properly get to the bottom of things, but we ought not pretend like there is not work involved, because there very much is. We can thank God that he gifts and empowers certain individuals in the body of Christ to shoulder the burdens here as Bible teachers and scholars!

I will say that both paleography and textual criticism have been much helped by technological innovation. Modern digital transcriptions of ancient texts mean that nowadays only a very small number of highly proficient scholars need to suffer through the original manuscripts in order to produce the digital transcriptions, and the rest of us can simply stand upon their shoulders (and perhaps double-check them occasionally, in controversial places).

Further discussion

Aachen was the epicenter of the Carolingian Renaissance

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Aachen was the place Charlemagne decided to build his imperial palace, which means that Aachen ultimately ended up being the epicenter of the Carolingian Renaissance in practice.

The palace complex that Charlemagne built is largely lost to us today (some pieces no longer exist at all; others exist in some form but have been renovated such that they are no longer in their original form; etc.). Nonetheless, we can at least partially reconstruct what the palace complex may have looked like.

On one end was the council hall, built in a basilica style (i.e., there was a main entrance, then a long corridor structure terminating in a rounded curve). In the council hall, Charlemagne engaged in a number of state functions:

• He entertained ambassadors from other countries
• He issued legal rulings
• Etc.

Off of the council hall was a tall tower containing the treasury and the archives for the Frankish Empire. With respect to the treasury, it is from here that some of the economic policy of Charlemagne’s rule would have likely originated. For example, currency switched from a gold-based system to more of a silver-based system, which had certain advantages. With respect to the archives, they would have contained a repository of the decisions, artifacts, and manuscripts that were developed at the palace.

The collection of manuscripts in particular made the archives at Aachen special. If it were not for the manuscript collection in this tower, significant numbers of manuscripts from the ancient world that we still have today would perhaps have been lost; something in the neighborhood of 7,000 manuscripts survived through this collection. This would include texts that we don’t have the originals for, or even any earlier copies of. What happened is that Charlemagne paid for these manuscripts to be recovered from wherever they might have been initially, then brought to Aachen and copied. This practice made the tower archives at Aachen an invaluable library of knowledge in the Middle Ages, and important document source for historians.

On the other side of palace complex was the grandest building of them all: the Palantine Chapel. This building:

• Was in the shape of an octagon.
• Had three chapels on the ground floor: the Chapel of Our Savior, the Chapel of the Virgin Mary, and the chapel of St. Peter.
• Had a design that in some ways mimicked heavenly Jerusalem (e.g., it had a mosaic depicting Jesus seated with the 24 elders mentioned in Revelation 4:4 and Revelation 5:8-10).

In this chapel complex, Charlemagne would sit on the second floor (up above for all to see) upon a marble throne. The imagery here was that Charlemagne occupied an elevated—almost divine—seat of power. You could argue that it is perhaps out of this that later monarchial developments (like the exultation of kings from human rulers to quasi-sacred beings) come about.

Other buildings at the Aachen palace complex also existed:

• There was a menagerie with animals
• There was a gymnasium
• There were barracks
• There were even baths built on top of the hot springs present there

Follow-on topics

Sourcing ancient texts

Have you ever considered where exactly scholars get ancient texts from? When you think about it, considering all the wars and violence that mar the pages of history, it is somewhat a miracle that we have as many texts preserved as we do.

Most of us have probably heard of the famed library of Alexandria, and its supposed burning (which… may not have actually destroyed the whole library, according to some scholars). Regardless of the specifics, this is the sort of historical event that shows the utter fragility of textual transmission in antiquity.

We “know of” far more texts than we actually have copies of. What I mean by that is that some ancient texts reference other texts that apparently did not survive and come down to us in the present. Spotty transmission is common especially for the works of minor authors or less important individuals. Because hand-copied texts in antiquity were very expensive, most of the time only texts with substantial value or significance (or rather, perceived substantial value and significance) were widely copied, and therefore survived.

Even so, some important texts come down to us only in handful of copies (cf. the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest), and other works we would very much like to have are completely lost to us.

Hopefully all of this can help explain why Dr. Reeves spent the time he did discussing the manuscript archives in the palace at Aachen that housed those 7,000 manuscripts. No matter what we may think of Charlemagne’s court overall, these works of his scriptorium are things that we can certainly thank him for as historians.

Further discussion

How Charlemagne shaped and changed the Church

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Charlemagne was involved in enforcing and regulating the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

If you recall, at this time, Northern Europe had a reasonably sizable Arian population, after Arian missionaries got to some of the pagan tribes before missionaries teaching trinitarian theology. But Charlemagne set out to push the Nicene point of view top-down, leading to a greater degree of “Catholicization” among the northern populations than before the central government got involved.

Charlemagne does a number of things to ensure the regulation of the churches in his regions:

• He mandates a formal 10% tithe, to go to the Church.
• He requires his churches to follow the liturgical pattern that had been established in Rome.
• He tries to ensure education amongst the clergy such that there are “quality sermons” (according to their definition of the concept, at any rate).
  • He goes so far as to draw up a list of model sermons that can be read aloud if the person to give a sermon is unable to come up with one on his own.

All of this is important because in it we see Charlemagne taking steps to develop a cohesive Catholic identity in Western Europe:

• Were Charlemagne to not have implemented the policies he did in Western and Northern Europe, the papal Catholic faith might have been delayed if not attenuated altogether in some parts of these regions.
• But instead, with Charlemagne stressing the Catholic faith and papal obedience, we see Europe develop increasingly in the Middle Ages towards a unified Catholic Church.

Follow-on topics

Are developments in the Church visible more history or theology?

We have discussed before how something Catholic theologians must grapple with (in my opinion) is the fact that their ecclesiological structure greatly changed throughout history—for example, transforming from the fragmentation of the church councils predating Nicea to the centralized monolith of the Catholic Church of the late Middle Ages. We call both of these institutions by the same name, but truly, are they the same if their organization and operation are not very similar to each other?

From the point of view of us Evangelical Protestants, it does not much matter how the Catholic theologians try to answer that sort of question. And in fact, I tend to favor viewing most all “church developments” (such as those we are discussing here in reference to Charlemagne’s reforms) as being more history than theology. Just like the Church fathers, councils, and creeds we have previously discussed.

So, for example, we might note that nowhere does the New Testament command tithing. But did Charlemagne implement a mandatory tithe because of an argument from scripture? My thesis is that trying to view these developments in those terms is not quite proper. These reforms were political just as much as they were theological, as I see things. This doesn’t necessarily make them evil or anything like that; it simply means that viewing them as theological developments is somewhat misguided. Instead, these were simply things that we find in the pages of history, done by other claiming Christ.

Fortunately, our epistemology as sola scriptura Evangelical Protestants allows for this without any issue. Since we base what we do off of the Bible and the Bible alone (or at least we ought to), we needn’t overly concern ourselves with what things other self-professed Christians throughout history got up to, since none of our interpretation ever depends upon tradition.

The idea being introduced here is powerful in its ability to sidestep most ecclesiological controversies before they even get started. Truly, the Bible has very little to say about church polity, leaving very many things flexible. One can be forgiven for finding that hard to believe for all the blood and ink spilled throughout history in the name of “proper Church practice”, but it is nonetheless true.

So we just need to be sure we keep all of this in mind when we consider things done in the name of the Church—that the greater part of events of this sort have little to do with theology proper, and should therefore be treated first and foremost as history. Including what Charlemagne was doing here.

Further discussion

After Charlemagne

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

Despite Charlemagne’s great achievements in terms of unifying the Frankish empire, as always with strong rulers who themselves serve as the organizing principle of a government, the problem proved to be succession.

Charlemagne’s descendants squabbled over matters of succession in much the same way as the Merovingians that we previously discussed. In fact, within two generations of Charlemagne’s death, we see the Frankish empire caught in civil war between three brothers: Lothair I, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald. All three brothers initially received divided portions of the Frankish empire, and for a number of reasons they end up going to war with each other.

Lothair I initially had the upper hand, but his other brothers Louis the German and Charles the Bald managed to defeat him, and in 843 the Treaty of Verdun was signed. This treaty essentially divided the lands:

• Lothair I got major portions of what had been the Lombard regions (Northern Italy down into Central Italy).
• Louis the German, as this name we know him by might suggest, got the eastern part of the Frankish Empire, including lands in modern day Germany.
• Charles the Bald got the western part of the Frankish Empire, extending down to Aquitaine in the southwest, including lands in modern day France.

From this treaty we actually see the outlines of modern European countries that exist to this day, like Italy, Germany, and France. Now, while the eastern and western portions of Francia remained largely unified and eventually developed into what became Germany and France (respectively), the Italian portion splintered into multiple different regions after the death of Lothair I, which remained split (albeit with various different kingdoms rising and falling over the centuries) all the way up until the Unification of Italy (Risorgimento) in the 19th century.

Division of lands aside, what about the title of Holy Roman Emperor? Initially, Charlemagne stuck to traditional Frankish inheritance laws—where realms were divided among all surviving sons—rather than making his newly revived imperial title hereditary. However, two of Charlemagne’s three sons died before him, eventually leaving Louis the Pious as his sole heir. So shortly before his death, Charlemagne crowned Louis the Pious as co-emperor, passing on the title. However, the title did not get cleanly passed down after that, as the empire was torn apart by the civil war we mentioned above (between the sons of Louis the Pious = Charlemagne’s grandsons).

Eventually, it is Germany (the region of Eastern Francia) that comes to dominate and take over the title of Holy Roman Emperor. This happens with Otto the Great, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962. Otto the Great explicitly made the title hereditary, meaning it (and the empire) would be bequeathed to his son, then his son in turn, and so forth.

The Germanic Holy Roman Empire managed to survive nearly a millennia (all the way until 1806, when Napoleon’s rapidly expanding power forced Francis II to abdicate or else risk Napoleon claiming the imperial title for himself).

Follow-on topics

Contrasting Christ’s eternal kingship with that of normal human kings

By most measures, Charlemagne was an exceedingly important king in European history. Through his military expansion, administrative reforms, sponsoring of intellectuals, Church reforms, and so on, we can see the commanding influence he wielded, and how he unified an entire empire.

Yet within two generations, everything he had built up was consumed by the flames of civil war as his grandsons fought with one another for control. We might compare Ecclesiastes 2:18-21:

Even the greatest of human rulers cannot safeguard their achievements. Their reigns are temporary, and when they die, all of their efforts may fall apart and wither away. And there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

By way of contrast, Christ’s kingdom will be everlasting and eternal (cf. Isaiah 9:7; Daniel 7:14; Luke 1:33; 2 Peter 1:11; Revelation 11:15); nothing will be able to shake his kingdom (Hebrews 12:28). And thus it is that Jesus is King of Kings and Lord or Lords (Revelation 17:14; 19:16), not at all like lowercase kings and lords who are here today and gone tomorrow. Even powerful ones like Charlemagne.

Further discussion

Review Questions

Coming soon!