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How Did the Carolingian System Enforce Royal Authority? - Charlemagne's Mobile Court | Sleepy Facts About History
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We generally assume that governing a large empire requires a fixed capital, a standing bureaucracy, and a ruler who stays put. Charlemagne, who ruled the Franks from 768 to 814, had none of these. His government was a mobile court—several hundred people, animals, and carts—that moved constantly between royal estates, making the king's physical presence the actual mechanism of rule. This episode examines how that itinerant system functioned and why constant travel was not a failure of…
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