The Carolingian Period

The Carolingian Period, roughly 750 to 900 CE, named for the Carolingian dynasty founded by Pepin the Short and brought to its height by his son Charlemagne, saw the closest approach to political reunification of Western Europe achieved in the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the modern era. Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day 800, built an empire covering most of modern France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy through decades of military campaigning, while sponsoring the Carolingian Renaissance, a deliberate revival of classical Latin learning, manuscript production and monastic education centered on his court at Aachen that preserved much of the surviving corpus of ancient Roman literature for later generations. The period established the standardized Carolingian minuscule script, ancestor of modern lowercase Latin letters, and a network of monastery and cathedral schools that kept literate scholarship alive through the following centuries. Charlemagne's empire fragmented among his grandsons after his death in 814, formalized by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, dividing it into territories that anticipated the later separate kingdoms of France and Germany as the period gave way to a more fragmented, feudal early medieval Europe.