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James T. Palmer, Charlemagne's Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Carolingian Empire. Hachette, 2026.
The standard story of the European Middle Ages (sometime around 400 CE to 1500 CE), as I learned it, starts with the Fall of the Roman Empire and a general narrative of decline, at least in western Europe. Even if you’re ornery like me (and an increasing number of pre-modernists) and question the “fall,” the conversation still gets stuck in the gravity well of post-Rome.
But then, scant centuries later, along comes Charlemagne—Charles the Great—and the Carolingian Empire, which brings back all kinds of things that historians tend to admire. The empire spans from northwest Europe down into Italy and far into the center of the continent. That’s really big! The Carolingian court hired smart people and sponsored the arts! Surviving documents have really good handwriting! What’s not to like?
But alas, this empire had no staying power. Within three generations after Charlemagne’s death, western Europe seemed stuck in a state of inter-kingdom warfare among relatively small decentralized powers. Invasions came from all directions. What remained of the great empire was mostly a narrative of what-might-have-been.
So the Carolingians stand in a strange place in terms of any grand narrative of the history of the Middle Ages, of modern state formation, the development of Catholicism, whatever “western civilization” might mean, and the fall and rise of Europe. The implication of such storytelling is that the empire could have lasted but instead survives as a cautionary tale and a tragedy. The first time I learned this history (as a sophomore in college), I mourned.
But what if, instead, Carolingian history is a story of bad guys—or at least guys no more morally virtuous or proto-modern or any other? What if the fall of the empire is no more tragic than any set of upheavals that cost both lives and treasure?
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In Charlemagne’s Dream, James Palmer sets out to provide, as he says at the end of the book, a “dark” history of the Carolingian Empire. If it is dark, though, it’s because he has removed the rosy glow so often applied to the early phase of the empire. Palmer’s new narrative strips away the veneer of a tragic rise and fall. Instead, he offers a four-part history that chronicles initial rapid growth and ultimately a failure to build stable institutions governed by “collaborative leadership.”
Palmer takes his title and his structure from a ninth-century text that describes Charles the Great dreaming of a sword inscribed with four mysterious Germanic words: raht, radoleiba, nasg, and enti.
In the original text, the emperor explains that the words refer to the eras of his own dynasty—abundance, failure, disorder, and the end. Palmer has taken this Carolingian source and used it as his shaping parable. In some ways that makes the volume a little teleological, but that teleology actually seems useful. The dream rubric keeps the reader from getting too caught up in the early abundance, the gilded story of Carolingian rise, because we know enti is going to come. It also helps Palmer make visible the cracks in the foundation of empire from the very beginning.
The book itself proceeds chronologically. Along the way, Palmer deftly teases out the contexts, personalities, and events that created or limited choices for a given Carolingian leader, then assesses how they reacted. This approach reveals the qualities of leadership (good or bad) of a given ruler (or would-be ruler) but also shows that events were often outside of their control—especially when the Vikings started raiding or the weather turned dangerous.
Moreover, when things went badly, Palmer describes one Carolingian intellectual after another declaring, with wild eagerness, that Revelation was nigh. Bad ruler? Apocalypse! Comet in the sky? Apocalypse! Loss in battle? Apocalypse! Especially cold winter? Apocalypse! Ran out of wine? Apocalypse! (I might have made this last one up).
But it matters that the Carolingians used the proximity of Revelation as their core hermeneutic for interpreting the meaning of current events. If the question is whether the End of Days is close or extremely close (the two main options), then the answer is always that everything is a sign of that end (soon, or very soon).
I admit I started the book with a little trepidation, not because I had any doubts about its quality; Palmer is a superb historian and here he writes with clarity and verve, guiding the reader through an ever-expanding family tree (with far too many dudes named Pepin, Louis, or Charles) and a similarly expanding empire facing new threats on every border. It’s a great read for its own sake as a work of narrative history that pushes beyond the too-familiar story of Charlemagne.
But the book does hit a little close to home: Reading about elites reacting to the fall of empire by invoking the antichrist again and again and again, in a tale that most certainly does not have a happy ending, I kept thinking about Peter Thiel and American Dominionists, men who are equally powerful and equally obsessed with Armageddon.These are not comfortable echoes. And yet, even here I expose my own learned predisposition to mourn the fall of empire, to assume that imperial collapse is a “bad” outcome. It’s terrible to live through the worst moments of crisis, for sure, but it’s not clear to me that the people living through enti were worse off than those caught up in raht.
If Palmer complicates the “rise” of the Carolingian empire from the start, he likewise exposes the complexities of the fall, tracing the long consistencies across the centuries. The “heroes” of the beginning of the book aren’t really that different in character, goals, abilities, or vision from the alleged bumblers toward the end. It’s just that in the expansion era there were opportunities to “create a new political ecosystem that was more centralized, more expansive, and more ideological than the post-Roman world had yet seen. Like sharks, they had to keep moving to breathe. Not being sharks however, it was unsustainable.” We should understand the later generations, Palmer argues, as struggling to reckon with the decisions of the earlier ones, rather than merely squandering their gains in internecine squabbles.
Is this a “dark” history of the Carolingians? Are they the “bad guys” of the Middle Ages? That’s not the impression I took from Charlemagne’s Dream. Instead, Palmer has dethroned the narrative of the Carolingians as pre-mature modern statebuilders, as guys with the right idea but the wrong timing.
In that narrative’s place, we get something that’s messier but ultimately more satisfying and, I think, more important.
As someone living through our own moment of imperial collapse (as I see it, anyway), I’m not sure this book gives me hope exactly, but that’s not the job of history. Instead, reading this book helps us to better understand the contingencies that shaped a key story of the medieval European past and see just a few more contingencies in our own moment. I take the lesson that dream or no dream, raht-to-collapse wasn’t inevitable. It’s not inevitable now either, no matter what today’s prophets of the End Times say.
David M. Perry is Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. He’s the co-author of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe and Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe, both from HarperCollins. His most recent book is The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (Johns Hopkins University Press). Follow him on Bluesky.
