Karl der Grosse

Rain. In the rain. He stood in the rain, at the foot of the Mountain of Purification. The rain poured down on him endlessly, yet it seemed unable to wash away the sins that stained him. A monster incessantly gnawed at his flesh, which quickly regenerated only to be devoured again and again. An old monk looked at the penitent and was alarmed. He scarcely dared to reveal the name of the dead. But everyone knew: it was Charles, the great emperor, the sinner who had to atone.

With these words, Johannes Fried begins his long-awaited biography of Charlemagne. Biography? We know very little about the life and person of the greatest ruler of the medieval era. A biography of Charles in the modern sense is impossible. Yet how Fried, the master storyteller and gifted medievalist, pulls all historical strings in his magnum opus, tracing Charles through sources and artifacts, clues and analogical reasoning, intertwining knowledge, cutting-edge methods of memory research, and creative intuition to bring an era and a ruler to life - that is history writing of the highest caliber. One will not come closer to Charlemagne, whose death anniversary will be commemorated for the twelve hundredth time in 2014, for a long time.