If Charlemagne Lived Today

He spent more than thirty years fighting the same enemy on the same border and, when he finally won, offered the losers two choices: baptism or death. He also imported a monk from York to run his palace school, ordered monasteries across his territory to copy classical texts in a new, cleaner handwriting so scribes would stop garbling them, and reportedly kept a set of writing tablets under his pillow in old age, practicing his letters like a man cramming for an exam he was not going to pass. Both of these things are true of the same person. Neither cancels the other out.

Charlemagne is usually filed under "great unifier," which is accurate and does a lot of quiet work to keep the unifying part separate from the sword that made it possible.

The historical figure

Charles was born around 747 or 748, possibly as early as 742, the sources disagree and nobody alive can adjudicate it, the son of Pepin the Short, who had already made himself King of the Franks with the pope's blessing. Charles became sole king in 771 after his brother Carloman died and Carloman's widow fled with her sons rather than contest it, which solved a succession problem that could easily have gone the other way.

What followed was roughly four decades of near-continuous campaigning. He crushed the Lombard kingdom in northern Italy in 774 and took its crown for himself. He pushed into Muslim Spain with mixed results, later mythologized in the heavily fictionalized Song of Roland. He fought the Avars in the east. But the campaign that defined him, and that historians still argue about the morality of, was against the Saxons.

The Saxon Wars ran, on and off, from 772 to 804. They were not a single conquest but a grinding, repeatedly-collapsing occupation: the Franks would defeat a Saxon force, impose baptism and tribute, withdraw, and the Saxons would rise again under a leader like Widukind and undo the settlement. Charles's response escalated into explicit religious coercion. The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a legal code issued for occupied Saxon territory, prescribed death for refusing baptism, for eating meat during Lent in the old pagan manner, for cremating the dead by Saxon custom, and for conspiring against Frankish rule. In 782, following a Saxon uprising, Frankish sources report that several thousand Saxon captives, a figure usually given as around 4,500, though disputed and likely inflated by chroniclers, were executed at Verden. It is remembered as the Massacre of Verden, and it was not incidental to the unification project. It was the unification project, applied with maximum force to a population that would not convert or submit any other way.

He was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 AD. Einhard, his biographer and a member of his own court, later claimed Charles was taken by surprise and would not have entered the church that day had he known what the pope intended, a claim historians have treated with skepticism for over a thousand years, since a coronation of that magnitude does not typically happen without extensive advance coordination.

He was also, alongside all of this, the sponsor of what is now called the Carolingian Renaissance. He recruited scholars from across Europe, most famously Alcuin of York, to run the palace school at his court and reform education, manuscript copying, and Latin literacy throughout his territories. Carolingian minuscule, the clear, standardized script his scriptoria developed and spread, is the reason a large share of surviving classical Latin literature exists at all, later Renaissance humanists copied their classical texts from Carolingian-era manuscripts, mistaking the script for ancient Roman handwriting. By Einhard's own account, Charles never fully learned to write, despite trying late in life, though he could read and spoke fluent Frankish alongside Latin and some Greek. He built the empire that funded literacy without becoming fully literate in it himself.

The modern role

Put him in 2026 and the job title is something like Chairman of the Federated Continental Council, a post that fuses the presidency of a European-style political union with supreme command of its joint defense force, one office holding both the gavel and the general's baton, which modern institutions keep separate specifically because of people like him.

The forced-conversion machinery of the Saxon Wars does not translate cleanly, and it should not be softened into a punchline. The honest modern analogue is not violence-free: holdout territories that decline the Council's common regulatory code, currency, and security arrangement face tariff walls, frozen accession funds, and, in the most resistant border regions, deployment of the joint force under a peacekeeping mandate that looks, from the ground, very much like occupation. Compliance is not optional and the pressure is not gentle. It is simply slower and less visibly lethal than a legal code prescribing execution for refusing baptism, which remains a different order of thing entirely and should be named as such.

Alongside the enforcement arm runs the prestige arm: a well-funded "Renaissance Initiative" that recruits star researchers, funds a unified digital archive standardizing document formats across the bloc's institutions, and underwrites university partnerships headquartered at his personal seat of government. It is, by any measure, a genuine public good. It is also, unmistakably, soft power purchased with the same authority that enforces the tariff walls.

The family

His domestic arrangements would generate their own standing press office. He had somewhere between four and five wives across his life, the exact status of his first partner, Himiltrude, is disputed among historians, with some treating her as a wife and others as a concubine, plus several long-term concubines afterward, and something like eighteen to twenty children in total, only some of whom were considered legitimate heirs.

The modern version reads like a dynasty-succession drama played out across multiple public divorces, at least one annulment handled with the discretion of a man who understands optics, and a blended family large enough to require its own org chart. Succession planning becomes the Council's most closely watched internal story: children from different unions, each with a faction of advisors and allies, maneuvering for the eventual handover. Historically it worked out narrowly, two of his sons predeceased him and the succession collapsed onto one surviving heir, Louis the Pious, almost by elimination rather than design. The modern equivalent spends heavily on succession lawyers trying to make sure that does not happen by accident again.

Where he'd live

Aachen was his choice for its hot springs, its proximity to his core Frankish and Saxon territories, and its usefulness as a permanent, symbolic seat rather than the itinerant court most kings of his era kept. He built the Palatine Chapel there, modeled deliberately on Byzantine and Ravennate architecture, an unmistakable statement that this provincial town was now claiming the inheritance of Rome.

The modern equivalent is a purpose-built headquarters city, not the bloc's largest metropolis but its administrative and symbolic center, with a signature glass-and-steel chapel-adjacent building: a landmark constructed specifically to say that authority now resides here, permanently, by design rather than accident of geography.

Social media presence

The public feed is curated with real discipline. It is Renaissance Initiative grant announcements, photographs at the flagship university partnership, a fluent multilingual video series about the digital manuscript archive, the occasional humanizing post about how he is, even now, still working on his handwriting. It is the great-unifier-and-patron-of-learning persona, produced professionally and published often.

What does not appear on the feed: footage from the joint force's operations in holdout territories, casualty figures from border enforcement actions, the terms of accession agreements imposed on regions that resisted longest. Those stories get covered, but by other outlets, in other languages, days or weeks later, by which point the feed has already moved three cycles ahead with something about a manuscript exhibition.

The contemporary peer

No single living public figure maps onto him and naming one would flatter or slander someone unfairly. The closest honest comparison is an archetype: a European Commission president fused with a NATO-style military commander, with a streak of the empire-building executive who absorbs rivals through acquisition rather than treaty and then funds a prestige culture wing to launder the reputation of the acquisitions. That composite, part regulator, part general, part patron, is the shape Charlemagne would take if built out of present-day institutional roles rather than present-day individuals. The office, not any one person currently holding a version of it, is the real analogue.

Why it matters

Charlemagne's reputation as the man who built Europe survives mostly intact because the Carolingian Renaissance left better paper trails than the Saxon Wars did, and because the winners of forced unification tend to write the surviving chronicles. The Massacre of Verden and the Capitulatio's death penalties for refusing baptism are not footnotes to the story of a unifier and patron of learning. They are the terms on which that unification happened for the people on its receiving end.

The modern reframe is useful mainly for the discomfort it exposes: continental projects remembered as achievements of law, culture, and administration are very often built on the same coercive foundation as the ones remembered as conquests, just with better documentation and a longer runway before the bill comes due. The chapel at Aachen and the executions at Verden came out of the same reign, funded by the same throne. History mostly kept the chapel in the postcard and the field at Verden in the footnotes. That sorting is worth noticing rather than repeating.

For more historical figures reimagined as modern power players, read our profiles of If Bismarck Lived Today and If Genghis Khan Lived Today.