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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne

Emperor Of The Holy Roman Empire

Charles the Great
Karl der Grosse
Carloman
Karolus Magnus

Charles, anointed to the kingly office while yet a mere child, learned the rudiments of war while still many years short of manhood, accompanying his father in several campaigns. This early experience is worth noting chiefly because it developed in the boy those military virtues which, joined with his extraordinary physical strength and intense nationalism, made him a popular hero of the Franks long before he became their rightful ruler. At length, in September, 768, Pepin the Short, foreseeing his end, made a partition of his dominions between his two sons. Not many days later the old king passed away.

Of these two divisions, the former extended, roughly speaking, from the boundaries of Thuringia, on the east, to what is now the Belgian and Norman coastline, on the west; it bordered to the north on Saxony, and included both banks of the Rhine from Cologne to the North Sea; its southern neighbours were the Bavarians, the Alemanni, and the Burgundians. The dependent states were: the fundamentally Gaulish Neustria , which was, nevertheless, well leavened with a dominant Frankish element; to the southwest of Neustria, Brittany, formerly Armorica, with a British and Gallo-Roman population; to the south of Neustria the Duchy of Aquitaine, lying, for the most part, between the Loire and the Garonne, with a decidedly Gallo-Roman population; and east of Aquitaine, along the valley of the Rhone, the Burgundians, a people of much the same mixed origin as those of Aquitaine, though with a large infusion of Teutonic blood. These States, with perhaps the exception of Brittany, recognized the Theodosian Code as their law. The German dependencies of the Frankish kingdom were Thuringia, in the valley of the Main, Bavaria, and Alemannia . These last, at the time of Pepin's death, had but recently been won to Christianity, mainly through the preaching of St. Boniface. The share which fell to Charles consisted of all Austrasia , most of Neustria, and all of Aquitaine except the southeast corner. In this way the possessions of the elder brother surrounded the younger on two sides, but on the other hand the distribution of mm under their respective rules was such as to preclude any risk of discord arising out of the national sentiments of their various subjects.

Children of Charlemange


Charles, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
Pepin, King of Italy
Adélaïde
Rotrude
Bertha
Loius I “The Pious”
Lothaire
Gisèle
Hildegarde

French for Carolus Magnus, or Carlus Magnus, Charles the Great; Karl
der Grosse.

The name given by later generations to Charles, King of the Franks,
first sovereign of the Christian Empire of the West; born 2 April,
742; died at Aachen, 28 January, 814. Note, however, that the place
of his birth has never been fully
ascertained, while the traditional date has been set one or more
years later by recent writers; if Alcuin is to be interpreted
literally the year should be 745. At the time of Charles' birth, his
father, Pepin the Short, Mayor of the Palace, of the line of Arnulf,
was, theoretically, only the first subject of Childeric III, the last
Merovinigian King of the Franks; but this modest title implied that
real power, military, civil, and even ecclesiastical, of which
Childeric's crown was only the symbol. It is not certain that
Bertrada , the mother of Charlemagne, a daughter of
Charibert, Count of Laon, was legally married to Pepin until some
years later than either 742 or 745.

Charlemagne's career led to his acknowledgment by the Holy See as its
chief protector and coadjutor in temporals, by Constantinople as at
least Basileus of the West. This reign, which involved to a greater
degree than that of any other historical personage the organic
development, and still more, the consolidation of Christian Europe.
The period of Charlemagne was also an epoch of reform for the Church
in Gaul, and of foundation for the Church in Germany, marked,
moreover, by an efflorescence of learning which fructified in the
great Christian schools of the twelfth and later centuries.