Books: Life Without Charles

CAROLINGIAN PORTRAITS (311 pp.)—Eleanor Shipley Duckett—University of Michigan ($5.95).

Pleurisy gave Charlemagne a final month in bed, and he spent it searching for errors in Latin Bible texts. He could afford a sublime death. In the 46 years of his reign he had extended his empire across all Europe. With a kind of ecumenical zeal, he had made Christians out of Saxons, Serbs and Slavs, and with paternal zeal, he had made kings out of both his sons—Louis the Pious in Aquitaine, Pippin in Italy. He died at 71, in 814. but his power...