Charlemagne: The Importance And Influence: Charles The Great

There was once a beloved ruler, who encouraged schools and knowledge for everyone, while conquering territory and governing the city to the best of his ability. Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great, was a widely known emperor who ruled most of Western Europe from 768 to 814. His father, Pepin the Short, was Mayor of the Palace to king, who ruled over the Frankish kingdom for fifteen years until his death in October 768 AD. When his father died, the Franks placed the two brothers, Charlemagne and Carloman, to take over their father’s place; however, in 771 AD, Carloman died of disease and Charlemagne was immediately appointed as the sole ruler of the Franks. Consequently, Charlemagne impressed everyone with his military intelligence, …show more content…
With the new governmental systems in progress, he also felt that education should be a considered factor to improve communication, the understanding of laws and the overall generality of the community. For most of his life, Charlemagne would hire men to read and teach him how to read, write and speak in Latin and Greek. So, Charlemagne ordered churches and monasteries to open schools located inside their buildings, while he invited scholars from England and Ireland to teach. According to the primary source, “Another deacon, Albin of Britain, surnamed Alcuin, a man of Saxon extraction, who was the greatest scholar of the day, was his teacher in other branches of learning” (Einhard, 25). Alcuin was a deacon in York until he met Charlemagne; he was then appointed as a scholar at ‘Charlemagne’s Palace School at Aachen’ in 781 AD. He also supported the improvement of new scripts for copying texts and encouraged textbooks to be used when teaching Latin to non-native speakers. In addition, “…if Charlemagne had cared only for war and conquest and destruction, as did Attila the Hun, the world would have remained barbarian for a great many years longer than it did” (Lansing, 8). As stated in the quote, it is important to gain a great education and learn how and why the world has become this way, rather than fighting and killing to conquer more territory, only to be outsmarted by other intellectuals. Everyone in Western Europe was welcome to attend these schools to learn, since Charlemagne wanted his people to be knowledgeable about the world around them. Court room judges gained a better understanding about their laws and people were able to do their jobs with ease, compared to before. With that said, through the encouragement of education, he believed that comprehensive reading and grammatical teachings