Charlemagne Dreamed of a Sword With Four Words on It and They Predicted Exactly How His Dynasty Would Fall

Late at night in his palace at Aachen, Charlemagne had a dream. A mysterious figure approached him carrying a sword engraved with four Germanic words: raht, radoleiba, nasg, and enti. The meaning seemed immediately clear to the emperor, who fancied himself a philosopher as well as a conqueror. There would be four ages of his dynasty: one of abundance, one of sudden failure, one of great disorder, and then the end. The dream is almost certainly a fiction, composed as a warning to a later generation of kings. But it turned out to be perfectly accurate. Within a century of Charlemagne's death, every word on that sword had come true.

Today's guest is James Palmer, author of Charlemagne's Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire. We discuss how the dynasty's founder, Charles Martel, was an unloved son from a failed relationship whose tomb was later found scorched as if a dragon had been inside, why the Battle of Tours may not have been the civilizational turning point that Gibbon and centuries of historians have claimed, and how Pippin III pulled off the most audacious political revolution of the early Middle Ages by deposing the last Merovingian king and making himself the first Carolingian with papal blessing. We look at how Louis the Pious triggered the empire's collapse by publicly confessing his father's sins, why a twelve-year royal divorce scandal involving ordeal by boiling water and papal excommunication became the greatest crisis of the ninth century, and how Charles the Fat reunited the entire empire for the first time since Charlemagne only to be deposed within three years. Palmer argues that the Carolingians were destroyed not by Vikings, Arabs, or Slavs but by their own impossibly high standards: they built a system that demanded moral perfection from its rulers and then punished every ruler who fell short.

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