Author Topic: HISTORY OF CHARLEMAGNE  (Read 888 times)

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rangerrebew

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HISTORY OF CHARLEMAGNE
« on: January 19, 2019, 05:54:50 pm »

HISTORY OF CHARLEMAGNE
     
Charles the Great: 768-814

The only empire which has ever united France and Germany (apart from a few years under Napoleon) is the one established in the 8th century by Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel and son of Pepin III.

On the death of his father in 768, Charles - whose name Charlemagne is a version of the Latin Carolus Magnus (Charles the Great) - inherits the western part of the Frankish empire, a coastal strip from southwest France up through the Netherlands into northern Germany. Three years later his brother Carloman dies. Charlemagne annexes Carloman's inheritance - central France and southwest Germany. By the time of his own death, in 814, he rules much of the rest of Germany together with northern Italy.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistoriesResponsive.asp?historyid=aa20

Offline The_Reader_David

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Re: HISTORY OF CHARLEMAGNE
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2019, 06:27:38 pm »
Nice article.  I'm pleased it got the implications of Charlemagne's coronation as Emperor more or less right, by acknowledging the legal status of the Emperor in Constantinople. 

I should relate, however, the view expressed by the late H. Tristram Englehardt (raised Southern Baptist, converted to Holy Orthodoxy late in life, simultaneously held in bioethics at both Baylor's med school and Rice's Dept. of Philosophy):  in a discussion of what has gone wrong with the world, and the cultural decline of the West, someone ask in his presence, "When did it all start to go wrong?"  Engelhardt' replied, "Let me see, if I recall correctly it was just after the third Mass of Christmas in the year 800..."

A lot of us Orthodox Christians see the attempt to revive the office of Western Augustus and the resulting existence of a competing "Holy" Roman Empire under the patronage of the still-Orthodox Popes of Rome as the foundation of what eventually became the schism of Rome from the Church (yes, unless you accept the papal claims, which we never have, that's what happened two and a half centuries later), the rise of rationalism in the West (Aquinas was actually a precursor of the later rationalists, who had less regard for Scripture and Holy Tradition) and inevitably of secularism and unbelief.
And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know what this was all about.