On Christmas Day in 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned a Frankish warlord named Charles the Great — Charlemagne — as Roman Emperor in St. Peter's Basilica, reviving in the West an imperial title vacant for three centuries. The empire he had assembled by decades of war covered most of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and northern Italy. He could not write fluently and learned to read only as an adult; his biographer Einhard records that he kept tablets under his pillow to practise forming his letters, and never quite succeeded. He was also the most learned ruler in western Europe in three centuries, and he grasped that the future of his empire — its administration, its church, its very capacity to issue a coherent law — depended on producing more people who could read.
Charlemagne's response was the Carolingian Renaissance — a coordinated program to recover Latin learning, standardize manuscript production, and rebuild the educational infrastructure that had collapsed with the Western Empire. He summoned scholars from across Christendom to his court at Aachen, chief among them the Northumbrian Alcuin of York, who ran the palace school and helped draft the capitularies — notably the Admonitio generalis of 789 — ordering every monastery and cathedral to keep a school. His scriptoria standardized a clear, spaced, lowercase script with word-separation and punctuation — Carolingian minuscule — whose letterforms, mistaken by Renaissance humanists for genuinely antique and revived as their own hand, became the basis of the lowercase type you are reading now. His scribes copied roughly ninety percent of all surviving works of classical Latin literature during his and his successors' reigns; the oldest manuscript of most Roman authors we possess is a Carolingian copy, not an ancient one. Without the Carolingian project, most of what we have of Cicero, Virgil, and the Roman canon would simply not exist. The empire itself fragmented within two generations — partitioned among Charlemagne's grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun in 843 into West Francia, East Francia, and a doomed Middle Kingdom, then battered by Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens — but the intellectual infrastructure his court built outlived the dynasty: it was the seed crystal from which medieval Europe's cathedral schools, universities, and royal chanceries grew.
Modern Europe's idea of itself as a cultural project with shared Latin-Christian roots is genealogically Carolingian; the partition of 843 even traces the rough outline of the later France–Germany divide whose reconciliation the European Union was built to secure. The Charlemagne Prize, awarded annually at Aachen for service to European unity — to figures from Churchill to Merkel — is no accident of branding: it points back at the original architect of the European project of literacy by political will.