Charlemagne's Empire in Global Perspective “A Great Wealth of Gold, Silver, and Even Gems”

This evocative passage, taken from a contemporary biography of Charlemagne (r. 768– 814 CE), illuminates two key features of Charlemagne's empire. First, it illustrates connections between the Franks and the world around them, showing us a Carolingian polity with a wide, if not directly global, range of vision. Second, the passage, almost casually, intimates to us the great wealth Charlemagne had available to him to make possible such elaborate acts of generosity. Other evidence suggests that Einhard, while he overstated and got some details wrong, was not leading us astray. Michael McCormick has recently analysed a survey of religious institutions in the Holy Land compiled by Charlemagne's agents, men known as missi, in preparation for the sending of alms. McCormick has explored this remarkable document, which survives in a ninth-century rotulus (a parchment scroll), and its context, arguing that Charlemagne did indeed send gifts to the Holy Land, gifts that are also referred to in royal legislation. Moreover, the evidence of trade connections in the late eighth and early ninth centuries also makes clear the extent to which the Carolingians were in contact with the societies around them. Einhard's vision was long dismissed by scholars, who, working in a paradigm set by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, had tended to see the Carolingian empire as economically stagnant and isolated.