The Making of Charlemagne's Europe (768-814)

The reign of Charlemagne (768-814) saw the incorporation of most continental Western regions into the Frankish empire, resulting in the establishment of new forms of rule and a new kind of political culture, with far-reaching implications for later European history. 'The Making of Charlemagne's Europe' project is intended to document this change not simply from the perspective of central Frankish authority and the rarefied realm of high politics, but on the ground and in the localities, in an effort to grasp its practical and material impact.

The only way to achieve this is to look to the only type of source capable of conveying information at both ends of the scale, from the royal to the local: documents known as charters. Some of these, termed diplomas by modern scholars, were issued by rulers, but the vast majority, termed private charters, were issued by non-royal persons, including some churchmen, but more often laypeople. Whereas narrative sources, such as annals, hardly ever mention anyone outside the immediate entourage of the king, charters allow access, often of a very direct and personal kind, to broader sections of the population from regional elites to local peasant landowners.

Land transactions were crucial in forming and maintaining relationships between institutions, families and individuals, and therefore belong in the social and political realm as much as in that of economic history. The predominance of monastic archives gives a distinctly ecclesiastical slant to the surviving record, but this makes it no less illuminating: monasteries, far from being withdrawn from politics, were the front-line representatives of Carolingian power as well as some of its main beneficiaries, and temporary grants from church and monastic lands were an important way of rewarding followers and sustaining secular rule.

Charlemagne's reign corresponds to an exceptional peak in the documentary record, with some 4,500 surviving documents - more than for any other early medieval reign. Though their distribution is patchy, charters have been preserved from all the main regions of Charlemagne's empire. Bringing them together will allow genuine cross-regional comparison, something which has never been done before in a systematic way. This will give the project the combination of a high level of precision in local detail and a bird's eye view of the whole empire required to answer some of the most important questions related to Charlemagne's empire: above all, what made it an empire after the initial stage of conquest? What impact did it have on the ground?

The project will seek to answer these questions through the creation of a database extracting information from all surviving documentary sources from the reign of Charlemagne, in a fully relational, searchable format. This will make this material comparable in a way that simply reproducing the Latin text would not. It will not only facilitate the exploration of personal and political networks for particular individuals, but also bring to light more complex patterns through the development of mapping and statistical tools, to allow questioning on more structural lines (to answer questions such as, for example: were there regional differences in the types or the extent of property transacted by women?). We will therefore be able to test and evaluate the issue of regional difference with far greater rigour than has so far been possible.

Beyond serving our own research objectives, the database will also constitute a lasting resource open to many different avenues of questioning. It will be accessible, online and for free, to anyone interested, whether academics, graduate or undergraduate students, A-level pupils or members of the public. As well as answering crucial questions on the nature of empire-building in the early middle ages, it will be a genuinely democratic resource, presenting in immediately usable form an extraordinarily rich and rewarding type of material.

The constituencies which will potentially benefit from the project include: teachers and students (taught graduates, undergraduates, A-level); PhD students; libraries; museums; media (broadcast and web); publishers (books, history magazines); and the general public. Charlemagne stands at the heart of a remarkable convergence of interests from academics and the wider public. No other medieval ruler has been the subject of as many biographies, both academic and popular: the last decade alone gave us ten books dedicated to his reign. He is even part of the school curriculum (OCR, A2 module 2587). Charters and documents might seem like a challenging source, but recent projects funded by the AHRC, such as the Fine Rolls project, show that this does not preclude engagement beyond academia. A notable trend of public engagement with history is the desire to connect, beyond the wider political and military narrative, with the life experiences of ordinary people and their fates. Charters offer a particularly fruitful way of linking the two: while illuminating the empire-building for which Charlemagne is so well known, they also document 'ordinary' people far better than any other source. The project will link these two strands of engagement with history in the following ways:
- Feeding into commemorative literature, exhibitions and broadcasts. Public interest in Charlemagne is certain to grow with the imminent 1200th anniversary of his death in 2014, when the project is set to be completed. The launch of the project would coincide with events in Britain and in other European countries (books, museum exhibitions, magazine articles and television programmes). The project includes a Knowledge Transfer Advisory Group which will work to ensure the project shares in this heightened level of exposure and contributes positively and appropriately to media and exhibition content. We will use our existing links with the British Museum and the British Library to achieve this, and will also target magazines such as BBC History and History Today.
- Creating a genuinely free and democratic resource for all. The resource will be accessible online and for free. Every effort will be made to ensure it is easy to use. All entries will be in English, and where translation would be impossible or misleading, as in the case of technical terminology, Latin words will be linked to a glossary. Apart from the glossary, the project will include other supporting materials intended for non-specialists: a methodological introduction, explaining how to use this data and what sorts of question it can answer; a general introduction to the reign of Charlemagne and its major developments (the empire-wide context for the regional and local developments traceable in the charters); and, where known, short biographies of key people. The aim throughout will be for maximum transparency and ease of access. Users will be encouraged to submit their own short studies or biographies for 'feature of the month' entries, which have proved so successful in engaging the public in the case of the Fine Rolls project. The resource will be useful to prospective PhD students, by giving them a much more coherent basis on which to formulate research topics; to libraries, by offering them a simple resource capable of bringing together bibliographies and original materials for the benefit of their users, and (in European countries) a guide to their own materials; and to museum curators, by offering them a rich geographical context for displayed artwork, manuscripts and artefacts.
- Contributing pedagogic resources. We will use the expertise of the KTAG to ensure that resources for teaching are relevant and pitched correctly. The success of published sourcebooks and translations of full texts linked with the reign of Charlemagne shows a genuine demand for improved accessibility. The project would