"( Charlemagne's ) army was enlisted to help the Muslim governors of Barcelona and Zaragoza against the Umayyad ( emir ) in Cordoba ..." Essentially Charlemagne was being hired as a mercenary, even though he likely had other plans of acquiring the area for his own empire.

Charlemagne's force eventually headed back to France via a narrow pass in the Pyrenees, where his rearguard was wiped out by Basque and Gascon rebels ( this disaster inspired the epic Chanson de Roland ).

After being conquered by the Arabs in the early 8th century, it was reconquered in 801 by Charlemagne's son Louis, who made Barcelona the seat of the Carolingian " Hispanic March " ( Marca Hispanica ), a buffer zone ruled by the Count of Barcelona.

When the Frankish Empire was divided among Charlemagne's heirs in 843, the eastern part became East Francia.

In 800, Charlemagne's authority was confirmed by his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by the pope on Christmas Day in Rome.

Louis was one of Charlemagne's three legitimate sons to survive infancy, including his twin brother, Lothair.

* Bernard, the son of Charlemagne's son Pippin of Italy, was confirmed as King of Italy, a title he had been allowed to inherit from his father by Charlemagne.

As a Scandinavian forename, it was extracted from the Frankish ruler Charlemagne's Latin name " Carolus Magnus " and re-analyzed as Old Norse magn-hús = " house of might / power ".

Charlemagne's reply stated that it was his function to defend the Church, and the function of the Pope to pray for the realm and for the victory of his army.

* September was called " harvest month " in Charlemagne's calendar.

A large sunspot was also seen at the time of Charlemagne's death in 813 AD.

An eastern march ( military borderland ), the Avar March, was established in Charlemagne's time, but it was overrun by the Hungarians in 909.

Louis II was made the King of Bavaria from 817 following the Emperor Charlemagne's practice of bestowing a local kingdom on a family member who then served as one of his lieutenants and the local governor.

Within a generation, the Oaths of Strasbourg ( 842 ), a treaty between Charlemagne's grandsons Charles the Bald and Louis the German, was proffered and recorded in a language that was already distinct from Latin.

He was mentioned first in 777, when he was the only one of the Saxon nobles not to appear at Charlemagne's court in Paderborn.

Disguised as a beggar, he was spying on Charlemagne's troop camp during Easter.

He was interrogated and confessed to spying on Charlemagne's camp for the purpose of becoming better acquainted with the Christian faith.

Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict: the Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren.

Although Bernard succeeded Pepin as King of Italy, Louis was made co-Emperor in 813 and the entire Empire passed to him with Charlemagne's death in the winter of 814.

More importantly, the two-story palace chapel had obvious similarities to Charlemagne's palatine chapel at Aachen ( built 792-805 )-a parallel that Louis was keen to exploit in presenting himself as a worthy successor to the first Holy Roman Emperor.

* Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor has Charlemagne's vault opened ( see Aachen Cathedral ).

We see the emergence of this not only in Charlemagne's effort to re-name the months in terms of human activities ... but more particularly in the change which occurs in illustrated calendars beginning shortly before 830.

Great Britain's early use of the silver standard is still reflected in the name of its currency, the pound sterling, which traces its origins to before the Middle Ages ( see Anglo-Saxon pound ), when King Offa of Mercia introduced the silver penny, which copied the denarius of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire.

* For more information on Charlemagne's campaign to subdue and convert the Old Saxons, see: Saxon Wars.

His success there gave him considerable influence, which he used to found and reform a number of other monasteries, and eventually becoming the effective abbot of all the monasteries of Charlemagne's empire.

However, all of Charlemagne's paladins bore Germanic names ; and the Latin derivation of the name may be a result of folk etymology working on an unidentified Germanic personal name, possibly a cognate of Álvaro ; or possibly distantly connected with the Old Norse Óleifr, meaning " ancestral relic ".

Copies were distributed throughout Charlemagne's empire, and this " composite liturgy ", as Duchesne says, " from its source in the Imperial chapel spread throughout all the churches of the Frankish Empire and at length, finding its way to Rome gradually supplanted there the ancient use ".

But in the event, Charlemagne's other legitimate sons died – Pepin in 810 and Charles in 811 – and Louis alone remained to be crowned co-emperor with Charlemagne in 813.

Near the end of Charlemagne's reign ( and throughout the reigns of his sons and grandsons ), a string of Norse raids began, culminating in a gradual Scandinavian conquest and settlement of the region now known as Normandy.

Moreover, Gerberga, the widow of Charlemagne's brother Carloman, sought the protection of the Lombard king after her husband's death in 771 ; and — probably in return for the insult Charlemagne had given to the Lombards by rejecting Desiderata — Desiderius recognised Gerberga's sons as lawful heirs, and attacked Pope Adrian for refusing to crown them kings and invaded the Pentapolis.

The war was the contention over the territorial inheritances the division of the unified lands of Charlemagne's Carolingian Empire between his grandsons, the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious.

Her son Pépin, who suffered from a spinal deformity and was called " the Hunchback ", was eclipsed by Charlemagne's sons from the later marriage of this to Hildegard.

In 787, Ecgfrith had been consecrated king, the first known consecration of an English king, probably arranged by Offa in imitation of the consecration of Charlemagne's sons by the pope in 781.

On the other hand, they may have been related to the adoptionist controversy which had brought Bermudo's kingdom into Charlemagne's view.

Abul-Abbas was brought from Baghdad which was then a part of the Abbasid empire by a Frankish Jew named Isaac, who along with two other emissaries, Lanterfrid and Sigimund, was sent to the caliph on Charlemagne's orders.

The English monk Alcuin was invited to Charlemagne's court at Aachen, and brought with him the precise classical Latin education that was available in the monasteries of Northumbria.

In 843, the Treaty of Verdun divided up Charlemagne's empire.

The prototype may have been one known to have been set up in Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel in Aachen, apparently in gold foil worked over a wooden core in the manner of the Golden Madonna of Essen, though figureless jeweled gold crosses are recorded in similar positions in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the 5th century.

On the other hand, some historians have speculated that Charlemagne opposed formal marriages for his daughters out of concern for political rivalries from their potential husbands ; none of Charlemagne's daughters were married, despite political offers of arranged marriages.

It later served as a base from which missionaries could accompany Charlemagne's armies in their political and military campaign to fully conquer and convert pagan Saxony.

He tells the Saracens how they could ambush the rear guard of Charlemagne's army, which will surely be led by Roland as the Franks pick their way back to Spain through the mountain passes, and helps the Saracens plan their attack.

Under Charlemagne's surviving legitimate son, Louis the Pious ( ruling 813 — 840 ), who, however, lacked Charlemagne's military charisma, the process of disintegration was hastened, as, once he had associated the choice of missi with the assembly of nobles, the nobles interfered in the appointment of the missi, who, now selected from the district in which their duties lay, were soon found to be looking after their own interests rather than those of the central power, and to be associated with the rising local hereditary filiations.

During the Saxon Wars, the Saxons rebelled against Charlemagne's invasion and subsequent attempts to Christianize them from their native Germanic paganism.

Charlemagne's biographer Einhard calls her a " concubine " and Paulus Diaconus speaks of Pippin's birth " before legal marriage ", whereas a letter by Pope Stephen III refers to Charlemagne and his brother Carloman as being already married ( to Himiltrude and Gerberga ), and advises them not to dismiss their wives.

As the plot is not woven around a single pivotal action, the inextricable maze of most cunningly contrived episodes are seen to be linked, first, with the quest of beautiful Angelica by love-smitten Orlando and the other enamoured knights, then with the defence of Albracca by Angelica's father, the King of Cathay, against the beleaguering Tartars, and, finally, with the Moors ' siege of Paris and their struggle with Charlemagne's army.