Charlemagne
The Frankish king crowned Emperor of the Romans in 800, who united most of Western Europe and is remembered as the Father of Europe.
On Christmas Day in the year 800, in the old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III set a crown on the head of a Frankish king and hailed him Emperor of the Romans. The Western Roman Empire had been dead for more than three centuries. In a single ceremony it was, at least in theory, alive again, and the man wearing the crown, Charles the Great, had spent a lifetime of conquest making the claim plausible.
The conquering king
Charlemagne became king of the Franks in 768 and turned the next four decades into an almost permanent campaign. He crushed the Lombards in Italy, absorbed Bavaria, and fought a brutal thirty-year war to subdue and forcibly Christianize the pagan Saxons, once beheading thousands of prisoners in a single day at Verden. By 800 he ruled most of Western and Central Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Elbe, the largest political unit the continent had seen since Rome.
The imperial coronation gave that empire an idea to stand on. It fused three inheritances: Germanic warrior kingship, the memory of Roman authority, and the Latin Church, which now had a sword to protect it. Out of that fusion came something that would outlast Charlemagne by a thousand years, the notion of Europe as a single Christian political community, and a Holy Roman Empire that limped on in Central Europe until Napoleon abolished it in 1806.
Schools and small letters
Charlemagne could barely write, and it bothered him. From his capital at Aachen he bankrolled a revival of learning now called the Carolingian Renaissance: he imported scholars like the Englishman Alcuin, ordered monasteries to run schools, and had monks hunt down and recopy crumbling classical manuscripts. Much of what survives of ancient Latin literature reaches us only through those Carolingian copies.
The revival even reformed handwriting. Scribes developed Carolingian minuscule, a clean rounded script with spaces between words and lowercase letters, far easier to read than the cramped hands before it. Renaissance humanists later mistook it for genuine Roman writing and revived it, which is why the lowercase letters on this screen descend directly from Charlemagne's scriptoria.
Divided among grandsons
Empires built by one man rarely survive him intact. Charlemagne died at Aachen in 814. Within a generation his grandsons were at war, and in 843 the Treaty of Verdun carved the realm into three: a West Francia that would grow into France, an East Francia that would become Germany, and a fragile middle strip running from the Low Countries to Italy that the two larger neighbors would fight over for the next eleven centuries.
That is why nearly everyone claims him. France and Germany both count him a founder. Napoleon staged his own coronation as a deliberate echo. And since 1950 the city of Aachen has handed out the Charlemagne Prize to champions of European unity, from Winston Churchill to the architects of the EU. Twelve hundred years after a pope surprised him with a crown, Charles the Great is still the man Europe reaches for when it wants to remember that it was once, briefly, one thing.