1,255 years ago today Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks. You've heard of him before, but why is he so famous? Well, it wasn't because of his military conquests. Even though he couldn't read or write, the mighty Charlemagne is important because... he really loved books. To cut a long (and very interesting) story short, Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks alongside his brother Carloman on the 9th October 768 AD. Carloman died three years later and Charlemagne became sole ruler. He defeated the Lombards (to defend the Pope), invaded Spain (recently conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate), Christianised the Saxons, and extended his territory all across Western Europe. This culminated on Christmas Day in 800 AD, when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. He had come to rule the largest state in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire — and the largest that would exist until Napoleon's brief conquests one thousand years later. Charlemagne's kingdom included modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia, Hungary, and Croatia, alongside parts of Spain, Italy, Poland, and more. Very impressive. But this is *not* what makes Charlemagne so important — after all, this kingdom splintered soon after his death, and history has seen countless conquerors before. Rather, Charlemagne's devotion to books is his greatest legacy. The strangest thing of all is that Charlemagne could not read or write himself — he learned from scholars through conversation and had books read aloud to him. But Charlemagne recognised the immense importance of education and so he funded monastic libraries and scriptoriums (where monks copied or wrote out manuscripts) all across his kingdom. There was a political motive — the only way to run a such a vast state was with highly educated administrators. But Charlemagne also believed a proper liberal arts education had intrinsic value, and ensured that he and his family received lessons in arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, and grammar. He also invested in architecture, and his Palace at Aachen (in modern-day Germany, of which only the chapel survives) was the first major structure built in stone in Northern Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire — Charlemagne was trying to drag Europe out of the Dark Ages. No wonder this period has been called the "Carolingian Renaissance". Art, literature, education, and architecture all flourished under Charlemagne's rule. His scribes even developed a type of Latin script known as "Carolingian Miniscule", which became the continental standard for writing and is the direct precursor to our modern and much-loved Times New Roman font. But, most importantly of all, he gave monks the time and resources to copy manuscripts of Ancient Greek and Roman books. The originals have long since deteriorated, but the copies made by Charlemagne's scribes have survived. In almost every case they are the oldest versions of Greco-Roman literature, philosophy, and history. A major part of the Renaissance was the "rediscovery" of Ancient Greek and Roman culture. But it wasn't original Greco-Roman texts they read — it was those copies made by Charlemagne's scribes, scrupulously written out by hand and scattered across the monastic libraries of Europe. Without Charlemagne's devotion to literature, literacy, history, and education, the Renaissance would almost certainly have never happened. Who knows how long the Dark Ages would have continued without him? And without the Renaissance there would have been no Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution — or at least not where and when it happened. And this legacy lives on; anybody who ever reads anything Greek or Roman today would likely not be able to do so without those nameless, tireless monks who worked under Charlemagne — not to forget the many Islamic scholars who also contributed to the preservation of Classical texts. Legend says that Charlemagne tried to become literate in his old age, practicing writing on a wax tablet each night before bed, but to no avail. Alas, the King who could not read or write turned out to be the most important champion of education in European history.