Name-dropping:
Charlemagne (pronunciation: SHAR- luh-main) (c. 742–814 CE).
For 43 years, he was King of the Franks (the Franks being the forefathers of both the French and the Germans). You might think that having the same forefathers might keep France and Germany from getting into a gigantic war every few decades. But, hey. Cain and Abel. Union blue and rebel gray.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
During drunken poker games, whenever elephants come up, and—most significantly—when you get stuck talking to someone who is absolutely, positively fascinated by genealogy.

The Basics
Charlemagne means “Charles the Great” in French, and—indeed. He became king of a recently unified France in 771, when he was in his 20s, whereupon he immediately decided to invade and conquer Italy. Then he annexed Bavaria (for the beer, presumably), took over Hungary, and conquered parts of Spain. Before he was 40 years old, Charlemagne had unified most of European Christendom. And that was only the beginning.

Charlemagne’s real gift was for infrastructure. He divided his kingdom into 350 well-run counties, rebuilt schools in France, and encouraged the growth of church music. He even experimented with a kind of pre-Republic in an annual, open-air meeting with landowners during which he’d outline his plan for the coming year and then listen to their suggestions. (He didn’t always take these suggestions, and he sometimes killed the landowners he disagreed with, but—baby steps!) However, Charlemagne wasn’t in the pocket of the landlords, and he fought, with mixed results, against the growth of the serf system.

Charlemagne’s chief passion, aside from war, was education. Like most nobles of his day, he received minimal academic instruction in his childhood, but he made his palace a kind of early university. The school’s hardest-working student was Charlemagne himself, but unfortunately Charles the Great was a poor student. For instance, he never really learned how to, um, write. But he tried hard, studying rhetoric, astronomy, and Latin.

In the coming Dark Ages, Europe would cease to be a center of the cultural world, but Europe flowered under Charlemagne as never before. And although he was an absolutely ruthless tyrant who would today doubtlessly be called a war criminal, he is the rare “Great” who earned the name.

Question: Who’s Your Great 38 Granddaddy?
Answer: Charlemagne, if you’re of European ancestry. We made a solemn vow not to do any difficult math during the writing of this book, so just take our word when we say that you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and about a trillion great38 grandparents (there’s a lot of doubling, due to extremely distant incest). Ergo, everyone of European ancestry living today can count Charlemagne (and, inciden- tally, also the prophet Muhammad) as an ancestor. In fact, research indicates that every human being alive is probably a descendant of Queen Nefertiti and Confucius. One study claims that the chance Charlemagne isn’t a European’s great38 granddad is about 1 in 1015,000. (By comparison, there are about 1080 atoms in the entire universe, so we’re talking a very, very slim chance.)

Cowboy of Hearts
Beginning in the mid-1400s, French playing card designers associated each king in a deck of cards with an actual, real-life king. In fact, even today the cards are associated with the royal links the French gave them.

• King of Spades—King David
• King of Clubs—Alexander the Great
• King of Hearts—Charlemagne
• King of Diamonds—Julius Caesar

POUND FOR POUND
Charlemagne introduced much of the world to the livre, known in English as the pound—both the monetary unit and the weight. In a world where princes often printed their own special currencies, Charlemagne applied his standards throughout his kingdom, and the English adopted them to ease trade. In time, Britain passed them to America. We Americans still measure in pounds; but all of Charlemagne’s empire, and indeed nearly every other nation in the world, uses kilograms.

Conversation Starters
◆ Many contemporary accounts of Charlemagne record that he was, well, a bit of a girly man. Apparently, he spoke in an unusually high voice.

◆ Although Charlemagne is often remembered for his Christian piety due to his passion for sacred music and converting the masses, there was one commandment he just couldn’t seem to follow: the one about killing. In just one day, for instance, he oversaw the beheading of 4,000 Saxons.

◆ According to legend, Charlemagne used to impress guests by throwing his tablecloth into the fire and then pulling it out unburnt. (These were simpler times, when people were impressed by Amazing Unburnable Tablecloths.) Those who believe the story is true provide a simple enough explanation: Charlemagne’s tablecloth was likely made of asbestos.

◆ Somewhere around the beginning of the ninth century, Islamic caliph Harun al-Rashid gave Charlemagne an elephant. The elephant (whose name is lost to history) was sort of the Columbus of his species. He is believed to have been the first ever to venture into Northern Europe.