Greetings fellow time travellers, always great to have you with me on the journey through history.

As always before I start the episode, a huge thanks goes out from me and Paul to all the people who support

the podcast, vodcasts, the whole Kit and Caboodle, by subscribing to my Patreon site.

It's the financial support from the Patreon site that enables everything else.

It's a symbiotic relationship that we've got going there.

So if you're not part of the Patreon family and you'd like to be,

go to Patreon.com search for me by name and part with some cash, monthly or or annually. It's cheaper by the dozen.

And you get access to

podcasts and questions and questions and also brings you into contact with

like-minded people. A questioning, curious, interested, historically fascinated types who all interact with one another.

So time to strap ourselves into the time machine as we set off on the next stop in my love letter to the world recorder microphone action

distilled from barbarian stock, harried by Islam to the south and by Vikings to the north, a man of war, a formidable force and a conqueror supreme, king among among Franks fighting to build a vast kingdom stretching

from Scandinavia to the Adriatic, crowned emperor by Pope Leo the 3rd.

The Holy Roman Empire was born.

Endeouring to understand history in hopes of illuminating the future.

I'm Neil Oliver and this is my love letter to the world.

Hi Neil, in the last episode we travelled with you to the wild windswept island of Lindisfarne

where the Vikings wrote themselves into the history books.

Which moment in history are we heading to this week?

Hi Paul, well it's 800 a.D.

at this moment in time and we're leaving behind the beautiful East Coast of England

and traveling across what at this time was a rough, tough, ragged European mainland.

...