Former good articleCharlemagne was one of the History good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
On this day... Article milestones
DateProcessResult
February 5, 2006Good article nomineeListed
June 14, 2006Featured article candidateNot promoted
September 7, 2006WikiProject A-class reviewNot approved
May 9, 2007WikiProject A-class reviewNot approved
June 7, 2008Good article reassessmentDelisted
On this day... Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on December 25, 2004, December 25, 2005, December 25, 2006, December 25, 2007, December 25, 2008, December 25, 2009, and April 2, 2022.
Current status: Delisted good article


Can the editor add some citations to his claim?[edit]

Article states, "He also campaigned against the Saxons to his east, Christianizing them (upon penalty of death) which led to events such as the Massacre of Verden." But no sources are cited for this claim. (AltheaCase (talk) 00:58, 16 January 2023 (UTC))Reply[reply]

Added citation and cleared it up. The source was already in the Massacre of Verden article. Momgamer09 (talk) 03:36, 20 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Legitimacy[edit]

The article mentions in a few places that Charles was most likely born "out of wedlock," before his parents' 744 marriage, etc., making him illegitimate. However, it notes that they did have some kind of contract to marry prior to his birth. I don't know who the sources were for the debate here. I'm a historian and I studied this time period, and in particular, the differences between standard modern practices and what were considered standard practices in the Middle Ages. It seems to me that the texts, books, and sources I read in graduate school agree that, in at least the Middle Ages, if not beyond the Renaissance, a betrothment could legitimize a child. Travel was not as easy then as it is now, resources were not as available or reliable then as they are now, and often - since marriage, particularly among the upper classes, was a financial contract, not a social or romantic act - the betrothed couple could have had a large age difference, or geographical separation, or other obstacles that even necessitated marriage by proxy or lengthy betrothments. As long as there was a solemn promise to marry (it wasn't like today's engagements, it was much more formal), the couple was considered in a legal & binding status; using a term that I am making up right here and now, it was kind of like a pre-marriage, but practically as binding as marriage (only in the event of death or some major political upheaval that negated the terms of contract, could the contract be broken without similar legal concerns as if a spouse died or a marriage ended). Children conceived and born in this time of betrothment were considered to be legitimate. What I'm saying is that it's anachronistic to say, the parents were betrothed or otherwise had a contract to marry, but weren't married, so he was illegitimate. In that time, if there was a contract to marry, he was legitimate.Kelelain (talk) 02:08, 20 September 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

"Cool story, bruh." Doesn't matter what you think. Sources. 109.70.84.130 (talk) 18:02, 18 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Reorganization?[edit]

Hi all, taking a look at this article, I personally believe it could do with some reorganization and cleanup to improve readability and facilitate some improvements to the article. For such a key figure, it'd be great if we could bring this article up to GA standards, and I think a reorg might be a good first step to build off of. This is based off organization of some other pre-modern ruler bios, and (admittedly), personal opinion of what might be a better flow. I'd propose something along the lines of the following, based on the article as it stands now (including some renaming of sections and maybe looking where we're duplicating info or maybe providing more than is necessary):

Beyond the early sections, not proposing any major content changes. I'm digging up resources I have as well as acquiring some more so I can put some work into expansion of some of the thinner sections and (especially) adding citations to what we have. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 04:27, 23 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

And wow, doing an rewrite of the sections up to 771, and a source used in "Ambiguous high office" is "Boot Camp & Military Fitness Institute - not only did it flag as a low quality source, but clicking through the article there is actually a mirror of this article. The article probably needs a top to bottom overhaul. I'm basing the early life section mainly on McKitterick, which I own, and am waiting for Janet Nelson's King and Emperor in the mail, which I hope should really be able to boost the article up. It looks like Nelson is currently used only a handful of times in the article.Seltaeb Eht (talk) 03:08, 26 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Sketch image[edit]

User:SergeWoodzing, good call on removing the hairstyle info from the caption - was indeed too much and I should have eliminated it when I moved it to the new section. On "thought to be of" - the image is sourced to Fried's biography (p. 262), where it's captioned:

"FIGURE 29 Image from the inside front cover of the Fulda codex of the Aix capitulary, now held at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. This quick sketch is thought to be of Charlemagne."

I based the caption off of this. Do you know of a source that makes the more specific claim that it's definitely of Charlemagne? Seltaeb Eht (talk) 21:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

 Fixed Thank you for checking that! --SergeWoodzing (talk) 01:16, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I've also fixed this now on the image page at Commons. Being a bit sensitive, because many so-called "historians" hardly consider any portrait older than the 16th century to be an authentic likeness, I overreacted a bit. --SergeWoodzing (talk) 01:24, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Very much understood, and share the sentiment! This, coins, and possibly the equestrian statue are probably the closest we have to getting a real view of what he may have looked like. I wanted to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun using Fried in exclusion of better sources in this case. Thanks for improving the caption, and replying to the talk quickly. Best, Seltaeb Eht (talk) 02:44, 3 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

About "Karl" and "Karlus"[edit]

The page had for years on and off listed "Karl", the modern German form of his name, as the form that would've been used by Germanic speakers at the time. I can find evidence of this out on the internet, but not in any scholarly sources. This makes me worried that it's out there as a WP:CIRCULAR reference back here. The last time it was added [1], it was cited to Fried's biography, but Fried makes no such claim on page 2, or anywhere else in the book. "Karl" is only used in the book in footnotes referencing titles of German-language sources. Even in it's appearances prior to this it didn't seem we had any RSs for it.

I replaced Karl with the form "Karlus", citing the following in Nelson's King and Emperor: "I call my subject Charles, or use one or another of the languages spoken by his contemporaries: Latin Carolus, Old High German Karlus or Romance Karlo." (Nelson 2019 p. 2). Nelson's is the most up-to-date comprehensive English-language biography, and she's a giant in Charlemagne scholarship. Frustratingly, though, this is in the introduction, the only part of the book where she doesn't provide footnotes. And except for this passage, she invariably calls him "Charles", never using one of these forms again.

So while I trust Nelson on this, it's tough because she doesn't have a footnote we can track down, and "Karlus" definitely seems odd as a Germanic form to us. And what you see on the web is that the evolution went something like keril or kerl -> Karl -> Karolus/Carolus. Our article on Charles mostly seems to claim this, although it doesn't look that well sourced to me.

Johannes Fried, Roger Collins, and Alessandro Barbero are all silent on a contemporary Germanic name. The only other of the major biographies I have access to that addresses the name at all is Becher, on p. 43:

But what did this name "Charles," which was uncommon in this period, actually mean? For a while it was thought that the name was taken from the root in "Kerl - fellowman" which meant "a free man without inherited property," or simply "man, married man, or beloved." This interpretation of "Charles" was used to support the now outdated theory that Charles Martel's mother Chalpaida came from a low-status family. Modern research sees the name "Carolus" as the Romanized form of "Hariolus" a pet form of the name "Chario." It also appears to have been an element in the name "Charibert" which was borne by two Merovingian kings. There is also some suggestion that the name may have been derived from "Crallo." This was the name of the father of Bishop Kunibert of Cologne, who had been a close ally of Pippin the Elder. In any case, there were no negative connotations associated with the name "Charles" at the end of the seventh century

So Becher, gesturing at "modern research" seems to represent that Carolus is the original form of the name as an adaptation of the (Germanic?) names Chario and Hariolus. And that the kerl origin is outdated scholarship.

Doubling the frustration though, Becher is again one of the foremost Charlemagne scholars. But his book was apparently written for a general audience. According to Roger Collins' review in The Historian, it's in a genre of German publishing called a "pocket book" "aimed at a serious but non-specialist readership that wants to be well informed on a wide range of subjects but not in too much detail and without any element of uncertainty".[1] So it also doesn't have any footnotes and doesn't engage in debate over topics, really just presenting a "state of the subject".

So between Nelson and Becher, my best hunch (though entirely synthesis at this point) is that modern scholarship has arrived that Carolus (a Latin name though with Germanic roots) was actually borrowed back into German in the form Karlus, which then derived into Karl, Karel, etc.

I'd love to track down the actual scholarship on this but haven't been able to. I'm sure it's in some obscure German-language journal. I was able to find through Googling this paper: [2], which has a text his for "Carolus" "Chario" "Hariolus", but it's paid access. But it's probably working from the same scholarship Becher is so I might go to WP:RX to see if anyone has access and try to get someone to translate the relevant paragraphs. Finding the source for Nelson's "Karlus" hasn't turned up anything. So if anyone cares to research this, hopefully we can eventually track it down. But I highly doubt Matthias Becher and Janet Nelson are just making these things up out of whole cloth.

TLDR/The point Not being able to track down Nelson and Becher's own citations, they are still preeminent scholars and the best references we have. So unless we can give an equivalent modern scholarly source that gives Karl as the contemporary Germanic form, giving Karlus as cited to Nelson is our best-sourced option. Karl is either old scholarship perpetuated by Wikipedia, or a WP invention that got picked up elsewhere. Seltaeb Eht (talk) 17:43, 23 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  1. ^ https://www.jstor.org/stable/24453272
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