Today I want to tell you the story of the man who built Europe.

This is the tale of Charlemagne.

I told you that I wanted to talk about the song of Roland or the chanson de Roland, the

great French epic poem of the medieval period.

When we talked just last couple of weeks about Gouen in the Green Night, I said that this

era is distinguished by these sort of two halves of poetry.

Those halves are the Mathieu de Breton, the British material, the stuff about Britain,

and that's the stuff about King Arthur.

Then there's the Mathieu de France, and that's the stuff, the great heroic stories of what

happens in what would eventually become our France.

Remember that at this period, Europe is much, much more fissile and divided and fractious.

Then we currently think of it, the nation state, which is the set boundaries and borders

within which people rule with sovereignty over their own people.

That is not really a thing.

Instead, what we have is different kings and different nobles under the kings trying

to gain the upper hand over one another, really essentially in the wake of the Roman Empire,

which has collapsed at this point and been subject to all sorts of internal division.

In the east, in Byzantium, it sort of remains, but here in the west, in the areas that we're

mostly talking about, you really have these kind of shifting power vacuums that leave

these opportunities for great kings and great warlords to assert themselves and take control.

Of course, also creates this great opportunity for heroic deeds and stories and tales of heroic

deeds.

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