Big Daddy of Europe?

It was one of his own poets who described Charlemagne as ‘father of Europe’, over 1,200 years ago. Pres- umably that is why the publishers call him father of a continent, although in this case the continent was more notional than geographical. About a third of the land-mass bowed down to the big man by the time he died in 814, but even after 46 years of generally successful self-assertion there were still four other European empires going strong (the Byzantine, Bulgar, Chazar and Cordovan), not to mention the kingdoms of the British Isles and Nordic world. Another of those poets called him ‘lighthouse of Europe’, which will seem more accurate to those who think he showed the way to the EU, a confederacy based on states which occupy the Rome-Rennes-Hamburg triangle where his rule was most effective.

They are quite wrong, because the two organisations are so different as to be in direct opposition to each other. Charles’ was a successful war-machine; the EU is not. Charlemagne wanted religious uniformity, Christianity ‘his way’; the EU is secular. Poor countries want to join it, in the hope of economic advantage; no one wanted to join Charlemagne’s empire other than ecclesiastical carpet-baggers like Alcuin of York. There is a complaint from the farmers of a recently annexed district east of Venice which had belonged to the Byzantine emperor before 804:

In the time of the Greeks, they would never have dared to get angry with a free man, or hit him with a stick … but now they beat us and threaten us with swords, and we daren’t resist out of reverence for our lord the emperor, fearing they might do worse.