FAMOUS INDIVIDUALS throughout history have regularly inspired the fantasy and captured the imagination of poets, artists, composers, sculptors and others, prompting admiration or hatred, but certainly not indifference. People have tended to conceive and project dream images of major role models, as they needed iconic figures they could identify with, and hence profit from their charisma.1 Max Weber famously defined charisma in the political or religious realm as follows:

He continues:

However, for Weber the charismatic leader is usually a revolutionary or a prophet, who specifically breaks with traditional authority. This cannot be said at all for Charlemagne, who nevertheless displayed enormous charisma, especially because his rank as king, and then as emperor, made it possible for him to routinize his charisma – again Weberian terms – and to permeate all of society by means of his personality and constant presence within the military, religious, economic and cultural framework. Weber calls this a ‘patrimonial bureaucracy’, which emerged primarily in the European Middle Ages and in Japan during the Shogun period.

Charlemagne proves to be an almost perfect example of such a charismatic icon, as he has been admired and glorified, but also maligned, ridiculed and hated, in much medieval German and Dutch literature and, indeed, all over medieval and early modern Europe. He was also very much present in the art and historiography of that time, as I discussed in the Introduction. Bringing together what we have learnt through our discussions of individual major texts in which Charlemagne appears, we can consolidate our newly acquired understanding of the myth complementing his historical presence and identify the powerful, long-lasting discourse on this unique figure as perceived by poets and artists.