All You Ever Wanted to Know About Charlemagne

This is a terrific book – but that statement needs context. Charlemagne does not lack biographers. Jinty Nelson in an early footnote lists ten, just in the last 20 years. Why, and why add another? As to the first of these questions: Charlemagne was, as Nelson says on her first page, ‘by any standards extraordinary'. Living from 742 to 814, king from 768, emperor of the West from 800, ruler of the largest empire to have existed in Europe after the end of the western Roman empire in the fifth century (excluding the short-lived realms of Napoleon and Hitler), and conqueror of nearly half of it: if he was not extraordinary, he was at least extraordinarily lucky.