They should have appeared odd collectively, the Frankish king and the courtier who later memorialised him. Charlemagne was tall for the interval, round six foot three. Einhard in the meantime, his good friend Walahfrid Strabo wrote, was ‘despicable in stature’ – a ‘tiny manlet’, in Einhard’s phrase.
Born right into a household of modest wealth, Einhard was educated on the abbey of Fulda. We don’t know if he ever sought a monastic life, however he arrived on the imperial courtroom in Aachen within the early 790s the place, it was mentioned, he buzzed round like a honey-laden bee. Einhard’s lifetime of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli Magni, wasn’t written till some 15 years after the king’s dying in 814. Einhard himself lived on till 14 March 840.
His main supply, he mentioned, was ‘the witness of my very own eyes’; however the Vita is so spinoff of Suetonius in each type and construction that some historians query its utility as a supply. Even the bodily descriptions of Charlemagne observe his mannequin, drawing on at the least six of Suetonius’ portraits of the emperors.
However one in all Einhard’s goals was to put Charlemagne within the line of Roman greatness. That the Vita survives in 123 manuscript copies attests to his success. As for himself, he habitually signed his title ‘Einhardus peccator’, Einhard the sinner, by no means dropping sight of his personal insufficiency.