Charlemagne: Great Capitulary

Impact

Historians have had a difficult time tracing the specific impact of the capitularies, including that of 802. These documents were not like the Constitution of the United States, for instance, which has been preserved in its original form and is widely available in exactly the same form to anyone interested in it. In a sense, the capitularies were somewhat like ninth-century memos, intended to provide information but not to be enshrined as documents. While a copy of the capitulary would have been kept at the royal palace, the fate of other copies, sent out with the missi dominici, would have been uncertain, for it is likely that the documents were read or summarized for the benefit of the local officials charged with the responsibility of enforcing the king's dictates. In some instances the document may have been lodged in the hands of one of those local officials; in other instances it would have remained with the missus dominicus, ultimately to disappear. Further, because the documents were copies, they varied, particularly because it might have been necessary to alter the instructions depending on the district to which the capitulary was going. Some of the capitularies survive in books that were published in the ninth and tenth centuries. In sum, the provenance of the actual text of any capitulary is highly uncertain and varied.

What can be said with certainty is that the capitularies, including that of 802, were an important part of the apparatus of government under Charlemagne. They were the means by which he communicated his wishes—some major, some minor—to government and to ecclesiastical officials and, ultimately, to the people in their charge. The impact of the capitularies can be traced indirectly, for through them Charlemagne established a strong, vital empire. As a patron of learning, he fostered art and literature and the formation of a large number of monastic schools. Some 90 percent of the surviving works of the ancient Romans have been preserved because they were copied in Carolingian monasteries. The offices of counts, dukes, and marquesses continued to exist in Europe for centuries. Charlemagne revised the monetary system. He became the inspiration behind “the matter of France,” referring to the subject matter of epic poems about his exploits, such as the Song of Roland. Although the empire that he forged did not survive—having been divided by the Treaty of Meerssen in 870 into France and the principalities that became Germany—Otto the Great, who assumed control of Germany, modeled his Holy Roman Empire on that of Charlemagne.