Two Lives of Charlemagne

Two early biographies of Charlemagne in one volume, and the interest is in the gap between them. Einhard wrote the Vita Karoli Magni within about twenty years of the emperor’s death in 814, as a courtier who had worked beside him, and modelled it closely on Suetonius — appearance, habits, campaigns, family, death, all under headings. Notker the Stammerer, a monk of Saint Gall, wrote the Gesta Karoli some seventy years later out of stories that had by then been told and retold, and his Charlemagne is a figure of anecdote and moral instruction.

Read together they are a lesson in how a written life is made: the same ruler as an eyewitness records him and as a tradition remembers him.

Context: The medieval anchor of the list’s History section, sitting between the Roman historians (Annals (Tacitus), The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius)) and Empires and Barbarians on what replaced Rome.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Einhard — the courtier who wrote the first life.
• Notker the Stammerer — the monk who wrote the second, two generations later.
• Suetonius — Einhard’s explicit model; the thematic-heading structure is borrowed from him.
• Christianity — the framework both authors write inside, and the empire’s own claim to legitimacy.
• Leadership — what a medieval reader was meant to take from the text.
• History — the two lives as a case study in sources and distance.