SOURCE: “Results” in Charles the Great, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1914, pp. 232-51.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1897, Hodgkin summarizes Charlemagne’s accomplishments in the fields of the Church, literature, science, law, and the state-system of Europe.

No ruler for many centuries so powerfully impressed the imagination of western Europe as the first Frankish Emperor of Rome. The vast cycle of romantic epic poetry which gathered round the name of Charlemagne, the stories of his wars with the Infidels, his expeditions to Constantinople and Jerusalem, his Twelve Peers of France, the friendship of Roland and Oliver and the treachery of Ganelon—all this is of matchless interest in the history of the development of mediæval literature, but of course adds nothing to our knowledge of the real Charles of history, since these romances were confessedly the work of wandering minstrels and took no definite shape till...