Charlemagne: A Biography by Derek Wilson (English) Paperback Book

Description: Charlemagne by Derek Wilson An absorbing biography of the great leader who was the bridge between ancient and modern Europe — the first major study in more than twenty-five years.Charlemagne was an extraordinary figure: an ingenious military strategist, a wise but ruthless leader, a cunning politician, and a devout believer who ensured the survival of Christianity in the West. He also believed himself above the rules of the church, siring bastards across Europe, and coldly ordering the execution of 4,500 prisoners. Derek Wilson shows how this complicated, fascinating man married the military might of his army to the spiritual force of the Church in Rome, thereby forging Western Christendom. This is a remarkable portrait of Charlemagne and of the intricate political, religious, and cultural world he dominated. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description An incisive and absorbing biography of the legendary emperor who bridged ancient and modern Europe and singlehandedly altered the course of Western history. Charlemagne was an extraordinary figure: an ingenious military strategist, a wise but ruthless leader, a cunning politician, and a devout believer who ensured the survival of Christianity in the West. He also believed himself above the rules of the church, siring bastards across Europe and coldly ordering the execution of 4,500 prisoners. Derek Wilson shows how this complicated, fascinating man married the military might of his army to the spiritual force of the Church in Rome, thereby forging Western Christendom. This is a remarkable portrait of Charlemagne and of the intricate political, religious, and cultural world he dominated. Author Biography Derek Wilson graduated from Cambridge in 1961. He spent several years traveling and teaching in Africa before becoming a full-time writer and broadcaster. His bestselling and award-winning books include Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power, Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man, and Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England. He has also written and presented numerous radio and television programs. Wilson is married and lives in Devon, England. Review Praise for Derek Wilsons Charlemagne"Wilson interrelates the personal and political. . . with an effectiveness that few other biographers have matched." —The Sunday Telegraph (London)"Fast-paced. . . . Wilson deftly chronicles Charlemagnes military exploits, political intrigues and religious devotion." —Publishers Weekly"Masterful and lively. . . . [Wilson] writes with great conviction and a breathtaking attention to the kind of personal detail that makes his books such compelling reading." —Alison Weir, author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII"Brilliant. . . . An utterly captivating and exquisitely written narrative about the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire. . . . Charlemagne is also a timely and provocative essay about the idea of Europe." —Donald Yerxa, editor at Historically Speaking Long Description An absorbing biography of the great leader who was the bridge between ancient and modern Europe -- the first major study in more than twenty-five years. Charlemagne was an extraordinary figure: an ingenious military strategist, a wise but ruthless leader, a cunning politician, and a devout believer who ensured the survival of Christianity in the West. He also believed himself above the rules of the church, siring bastards across Europe, and coldly ordering the execution of 4,500 prisoners. Derek Wilson shows how this complicated, fascinating man married the military might of his army to the spiritual force of the Church in Rome, thereby forging Western Christendom. This is a remarkable portrait of Charlemagne and of the intricate political, religious, and cultural world he dominated. Review Quote "Wilson interrelates the personal and political. . . with an effectiveness that few other biographers have matched."- The Sunday Telegraph "Brilliant. . . . An utterly captivating and exquisitely written narrative about the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire. . . . Charlemagne is also a timely and provocative essay about the idea of Europe"-Donald Yerxa, editor, Historically Speaking "Fast-paced. . . . Wilson deftly chronicles Charlemagnes military exploits, political intrigues and religious devotion."- Publishers Weekly "Masterful and lively. . . . [Wilson] writes with great conviction and a breathtaking attention to the kind of personal detail that makes his books such compelling reading."-Alison Weir Excerpt from Book CHAPTER 1 Inheritance He pitched there a tent and was waiting in prayer the arrival of the new converts when, behold! instead of friends, a band of enraged infidels appeared on the plains all in arms and, coming up, rushed into his tent. The servants that were with the holy martyr were for defending his life by fighting; but he would not suffer it, declaring that the day he had long waited for was come, which was to bring him to the eternal joys of the Lord. He encouraged the rest to meet with cheerfulness and constancy a death which was to them the gate of everlasting life.(1) That account of the death of Boniface, the "Apostle of Germany," in June 754 is important because it marks a turning point in world history. It is also useful as a launchpad for this book because it may help us to get into the right frame of mind to approach the life and times of Charles the Great. Professor Barraclough succinctly observed, "Without Boniface there could have been no Charles"(2) and that is a truth that we in the laid-back, agnostic, twenty-first-century West should not lose sight of. If we find it difficult to understand the mentality of Islamic suicide bombers and tend to be dismissive of all fundamentalisms, then our imaginations need to be jolted so that we can place ourselves alongside the warriors, scholars and missionaries who created and led the first western empire. They were men who believed simply, felt passionately, saw complex issues in black and white, were aggressive in word and deed and understood this world as but a shadow of a greater reality. And it was because they were the men they were--heroes in every sense of the word--that they turned the tide of events, took hold of a culture that seemed doomed to extermination by superior forces and forged the civilization of which we are the heirs. The Carolingian prince who would become Charlemagne was only twelve years old when the venerable English missionary, Boniface, went to his death in what is now Holland, but he knew Boniface and the septuagenarians martyrdom will have made its impact on the boy. Boniface had been a very important figure in the life of Charlemagnes family, a bold, uncompromising religious hero and a Carolingian supporter who inspired gratitude and awe. This bustling, no-nonsense ecclesiastic towered over church life north of the Alps and it was he who legitimized the coup that established Charles father as the progenitor of a new sovereign dynasty in Francia. Frankish dominance in the area west of the Rhine had been established by Clovis in the fifth century, and his descendants of the Merovingian ruling house had pushed their boundaries ever farther. But, in the way of hereditary dynasties, enjoyment of power gradually took the place of effective exercise of power. Successive rulers relied increasingly on their leading court officials, the mayors of the palace, to fight their wars and administer their lands. In 750, the reigning mayor, Pepin III (Pepin the Short), decided to bring this unsatisfactory situation to an end. But, instead of simply seizing power and disposing of Childeric III, the last Merovingian, he sought papal authentication for his usurpation. He sent Rome a message as brief as it was pregnant with significance: "Is it wise to have kings who have no power or control?" Pope Zacharias, who had his own reasons for wishing to oblige Pepin, concluded that it was not wise. Armed with the permission of Gods representative on earth, Pepin bundled Childeric off to a monastery where he lived out his days, while Pepin himself was anointed King of the Franks. The man deputed to officiate at this ceremony on Zacharias behalf was Boniface. It was the forging of this unique bond between the spiritual and terrestrial powers that was to form the basis of what became the Holy Roman Empire. More important, the creation of a religious and civil infrastructure--neither theocracy nor secular state--made possible whatever it is that we call "Europe." Only in the closing years of his reign did Charlemagne and his contemporaries begin to think of themselves as Europeans, and any notion they had of a newly emerging cultural entity was, at best, shadowy. They were too close to the political, religious and racial pressures that were forming this entity to be able to give it a name. We must, therefore, take a little time out to study the map of those lands where the slow but dramatic metamorphosis was taking place. The Roman world had been centered on the Mediterranean basin. As the triumphant armies of the Empire and the Republic extended their sway farther and farther from their homeland, they applied vague names to the hinterlands of those regions that remained largely outside their permanent control. To the south, beyond Mare Nostrum, lay Africa. Eastward, over the Hellespont, was Asia. The land on the far side of the Alps bordered only by forbidding forest and the Atlantic worlds edge was Europa. The appearance of Christianity as a world religion that replaced tribal and household gods gave the heterogeneous, overextended Roman state what was no more than a semblance of cultural unity and greater political stability, even after Constantine converted to the faith of the crucified Jew. Under pressure of the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, the Romano-Christian world contracted to the Mediterranean fringes and to scattered monastic outposts, where men and women of prayer kept the sacred flame of faith and learning flickering and planned the evangelization of their pagan neighbors. Worse was to come in the shape of the Islamic explosion. After the death of Mohammed in 632, his followers, aflame with the zeal of their new faith and a passion for military conquest, surged in all directions from their Arabian heartland. Within a century the Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, was bordered by lands over which the crescent flag flew. From Palestine, along the African littoral, across the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Pyrenees the champions of the new religion advanced with a speed and success that dwarfed the earlier achievements of Christianity. By the time that Charles, the eldest son of Pepin the Short, was born in 742, the followers of the Cross were everywhere under pressure. The once fiercely thriving North African Church had been obliterated. In the East, the Muslim advance had been halted at the Taurus Mountains, but this had not prevented military expeditions reaching the Bosporus in 673 and 717. In the West, the seemingly inexorable triumph of Islamic arms had only been checked by Pepins father, Charles Martel, at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. The Christianized transalpine tribes were between the hammer of an aggressive Islam and the anvil of disparate pagan communities to the east and northeast--Frisians, Saxons and Alemanni--who were themselves being harassed by the westward-thrusting Slavs. As if that were not bad enough, the professional Church was in a perilous state. Ever since Constantine had moved his capital to the Golden Horn, a gulf had grown between the leaders of the Latin Church in Rome and the Greek patriarchs of Byzantium. Since both priestly houses claimed unifying authority, they effectively divided the Christian world. But that was only one of several tears in the seamless robe of Christ. Throughout the Latin half of the Church there was scant uniformity of either belief or practice. Wherever mass conversions were achieved, they usually involved an element of compromise with prevailing customs. Thus pagan and Christian symbols are often found side by side in ancient burials. Some Germanic tribes had actually embraced the old heresy of Arianism, outlawed at the Council of Nicaea in 325, to demonstrate their independence from the pope. In 664 it took a very acrimonious debate at the Synod of Whitby to induce the Celtic Church to celebrate Easter on the same date as the "mother" Church in Rome. Even where orthodoxy was impeccable, morality often was not. In a turbulent age the authority of the clergy depended almost entirely on their education and the purity of their lives. All too often they forfeited any influence they might have enjoyed by ignorant and unbridled behavior. The peripatetic Boniface expended more effort in disciplining adulterous monks and clerical rapists than in bringing heathens to the baptismal font. A council at Aix-la-Chapelle in 836 denounced certain convents for practicing infanticide in order to dispose of the evidence of their inmates sexual activities. With all these internal weaknesses and external pressures, no betting man would have wagered on the emergence from this threatened culture of a world-conquering Christian civilization. That such a civilization did emerge is thanks to three types of men: Celtic missionaries, Roman popes and Frankish kings. Two religious currents--one from the north and one from the south--washed over Francia. Celtic spirituality was, and is, a very distinctive strain of religious experience. The conditions for its development and spread were restricted in both space and time. Like a diamond formed under intense pressure, it developed in a narrow cultural stratum sandwiched between the ancient rock of Celtic paganism and the new deposits of Anglo-Saxon paganism. The first native, British Christians built centers for the exercise of their highly disciplined routines of worship and meditation in the remoter parts of the remotest western province of what had been the Roman Empire. In the white heat of a spiritual commitment that refused to be obsessed with mere survival, they planned and launched ever more extensive evangelistic crusades. This, the first experience of Britain at the heart of Europe, was one of the most remarkable phases in the long history of Christian missionary endeavor, and its legends ring wit Details ISBN0307274802 Short Title CHARLEMAGNE Series Vintage Language English ISBN-10 0307274802 ISBN-13 9780307274809 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 944.014092 Year 2007 Audience Age 14-18 Subtitle A Biography DOI 10.1604/9780307274809 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2007-06-12 NZ Release Date 2007-06-12 US Release Date 2007-06-12 UK Release Date 2007-06-12 Author Derek Wilson Pages 272 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2007-06-12 Imprint Random House Inc Illustrations 16 PP COLOR Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:12637214;

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