Aachen, Charlemagne and oompah

I was visiting the medieval city of Aachen, but not by accident. I’d read a lot about Charlemagne - the first Holy Roman Emperor and was keen to visit his cathedral - one of the grandest north of the Alps.

Here lies Charlemagne 

By luck, last weekend was Aachen’s annual street carnival - the Festival of the Fool. The town folk dress in colourful outfits with joker hats and parade through the centre. Everybody congregates in the main square to guzzle cold Kolsch, chomp bratwurst and dance to infectious oompah music.

It was nice to see the Germans letting their hair down. Of course, all the merriment was carried out very earnestly and with regimental efficiency. For example, the bar would only accept tokens (available from a separate kiosk) to ensure the speediest service. English caterers could learn a lot from their Teutonic counterparts. The pop-up bar in Aachen was spitting out foaming lagers in a 360 degree field of fire with the smooth efficiency of a Wankel engine. 

A joker hat worn by a German man on the Festival of the Fool in Aachen

Despite this efficiency it still took me half an hour to order a beer, largely due to my inability to shout my order to the already harassed bar staff. If shouting failed the thirsty festival goers manfully grabbed the barmen by the wrist, presenting their order with a firm gravity. My tactic of eye-contact and patience was woefully outgunned.

I'd booked into Aachen’s most Germanic hotel. Brulls am Dom is a quaint hotel in the pedestrianised old town, close to the Rathaus. It’s run by a husband and wife - the latter is a keen collector of porcelain and knick-knacks. The dining room is overspilling with the treasures of her lifetime - including sinister dead-eyed dolls; creepy gnomes armed with pickaxes and other weapons fit for bludgeoning; and slim, black hares that looked like a ploughed warren in Watership Down. Despite her trove of terror, she was a lovely lady who serves one of the heartiest hotel breakfasts I’ve ever eaten; including spiegel eis, marble cake, cheese board, bread and jam and strawberries with an almond cream/yoghurt. The rooms were spartan but spotlessly clean. I can’t say fairer than that.

Hotel Brulls am Dom in Aachen

I had the good fortune to catch the Festival of Fools, but the misfortune to miss the Weihnachtsmarkt... by a matter of days. Aachen’s Christmas market is one of the most famous in western Germany and it’s easy to imagine why - with the pine sheds selling Eierpunsch, Lebkuchen and Stollen all in the shadow of Charlemagne’s cathedral. Elsewhere in Aachen Christmas was already in full swing and the many chocolate shops and bakeries were decorated with snow-capped pines and portly Weihnachtsmann; and judging by the red faces and swollen bellies the closer Santa is to a coronary bypass the better in Germany.

Germans getting overly sentimental about Christmas, surely not?

Right, who’s ready for some Charlemagne?

Charlemagne literally means Charles the Great - from the Latin Carolus Magnus - and the epithet is well deserved. This is my version of events and an explanation of why I have a particular obsession with the man.

To understand Charlemagne’s significance first it’s important to consider the Roman Empire.

Before Rome, Western Europe was a dark, brutal, benighted place. It was populated by hairy tribes whose chief pursuits were bloody raids on neighbouring clans and sacrificial Pagan worship conducted in forever dark oak forests. Of course all of this is right up my alley, very Black Metal, but it’s not so good for advancing civilisation.

While the Greeks were inventing philosophy and democracy and the Persians were building great road networks across the Orient, western Europe was largely hairy, smelly and stupid. Bref, Hicksville. The Romans changed all of this. Like the old joke ‘what did the Romans ever do for us’, they introduced trade, irrigation, education, transport... or more simply, civilisation as we know it. But - even more importantly - they introduced Christianity. Out with the old Gods in with the new.

Don’t think of Christianity strictly in its doctrinal sense - think of it from the perspective of architecture, literature, learning, scripture, art. Think of it as enlightenment - shining a flashlight into the dark recesses behind the back of the fridge... the metaphorical mouldy sandwich is a heathen tribe still worshipping Woden, the back of the fridge is a mephitic, malarial swamp untouched by civilisation (or Venice, as its now known).

Also think of Christianity to mean “us”, the Occident, the Western World (I’m deliberately avoiding getting bogged down by schisms between the orthodoxy and church catholic). Christianity was a uniting force, the branches of one great tree with its roots firmly sunk into Roman soil. The West was finally united, by Rome and by one religion.

(SPOILER ALERT) If you’ve not read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I won’t spoil the ending. But whether you ascribe the end of the Empire to the Crossing of the Rhine in 405 or the Vandal’s second sacking in 455 - at some time in the 5th Century AD the mighty finally collapsed.

And with the Romans went civilisation. As suddenly as if somebody had switched off the lights, we entered the Dark Ages. Where once we’d lolled in bubbling hot baths, sipping a sweet wine while fanned by some exotic catamite now the moss grew. In the shadows wolves now prowled. Shadows which had once been guarded by a burly Centurion and 99 of his mental mates - all happy to smash a skull more readily than a no-necked, roids-pumped bouncer outside a Reading centre nightclub. And the wolves came. On their arrival to England, the Anglo Saxons thought it must have been populated by giants so astonished were they by the abandoned stone buildings. The Saxons built in wood, and continued to do so. This is the dark ages after all. The axe age. A few pockets of enlightenment and learning remained, most notably in Ireland (no, I’m being deadly serious).

But Western Europe had a problem. Just as the glue which had once bonded us all came unstuck like a supermarket home brand Pritt Stick the Arab world was united and on the offensive. Islam had arrived and it wanted a slice of the old Roman Empire... and it nearly succeeded. The Islamic invaders advanced deep into Western Europe, stopping by the banks of the Loire outside modern day Tours... not far from where Hannah and I once sipped a cool Chinon in the afternoon sun. With Europe fractured and distracted by petty, internecine squabbling, the future looked bleak for the bacon butty.

However, there was one Germanic tribe, the Franks - who gave their name to modern day France - who were slightly less useless than the rest of us. It fell on them and their hard-as-nails leader, Charles the Hammer Martel, to drive the banners of the Crescent Moon back into the Iberian peninsula. Crisis was averted, depending on your point of view. Charles Martel did one more important thing, he had a son called Pepin the Short. Well, the less said about him the better, but Pepin also had a son called Charlemagne. And now the tale can begin.

Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours

Charlemagne was born in modern day Belgium, just outside Liege. However, the lines on the map in this part of the world have changed so often it’s not very helpful to think of nationality in a modern sense. In many ways he was the perfect mould of the Germanic warrior king. He spoke High German and bastardized Latin. He was a sturdy but not fat, with modern bone analysis suggesting he was tall for his time, perhaps 169cm. He was never without his sword and even at the height of his powers he still wore the traditional Germanic dress. 

Charlemagne probably sported a pudding bowl haircut - but history decided it lacked the necessary dignity 

Charlemagne - like so many ambitious rulers - set out on a campaign of to command and conquer. First he took Aquitaine, then northern Italy, then the South, and Catalunya in Spain, he went on to grab large chunks of modern Germany and campaigned all the way into Hungary against the Avars. Not a bad property portfolio. If you were playing Charlemagne in Monopoly he’d have hotels on all the red, yellow, green and blue streets... well, maybe the Pope still had Mayfair.

It’s hard to understate the power of Charlemagne. In an age when news only travelled as fast as a horse could gallop his reputation spanned the known world. For example, the Caliphate in Baghdad gave Charlemagne an elephant called Abul-Abbas as a token of their respect. 

It's Abul-Abbas... he's like a Christmas and birthday present rolled into one

But for all of Charlemagne’s smart military decisions he made an even shrewder political one. The Roman Popes often had a fairly torrid time - not least Pope Leo III who was forced to flee the Eternal City because its citizens had tried to cut out his eyes and tongue. He sought refuge with the Christian King Charlemagne who was sympathetic to Leo’s plight, promising to reinstall him... which he promptly did. To show his gratitude Pope Leo III announced Charlemagne as the new Emperor of Rome, even putting on a theatrical coronation ceremony in St Peter’s Basilica. It was a giant two fingers up to Constantinople - who’d been handed the Imperial baton centuries earlier. The West finally had a Roman Emperor again, and a powerful at that.

And so I stood in the Palatine chapel in Aachen, which Charlemagne himself had built in 792. Ironically it is typically Byzantine in design with great marble columns and sparkling, gold mosaics. He had seen a church built by the Byzantines in Ravenna, Italy and was so impressed he wanted one of his own.

Aachen’s cathedral is one of the most important buildings in the world. When the first list of UNESCO heritage sites was drawn up in 1978, Aachen cathedral was one of the original dozen. 

Aachen cathedral's towering stained glass windows

When Charlemagne died in 814 he was buried in the Cathedral where his remains are still kept in an ornate gold leaf shrine. 200 years after his death Otto III, the 14th Holy Roman Emperor, opened up Charlemagne’s tomb. He was no doubt surprised to find his Imperial predecessor sitting bolt upright with his finger nails growing through the end of his gloves. Miraculously Charlemagne showed no signs of decay, except for the tip of his nose, rather inexplicably - luckily Otto replaced this blemish with a gold prosthetic he just happened to have in his pocket.

The Cathedral also contains some precious relics including Jesus Christ’s loin cloth and Mary’s cloak. The relics are taken out once every seven years for the snaking line of pilgrims to worship.

And that’s why I think Charles is so great. 

Here he is, looking rather like storm-maddened Lear on the moors.
Charlemagne, taken from a statue outside Aachen cathedral


Other Aachen highlights include Hannah ordering a glass of Federweisser - literally feather wine, so called for its milky colour. It’s a low alcohol (typically four per cent) wine drunk young in late autumn/early winter from the first must. It gets its colour from the suspended yeast. It tastes a bit like a very fruity cider and is not bad at all. 

Wake up and smell the suspended yeast, it's a cloudy glass of Federweisser.

Idiot statue in Aachen

Also, I came across lots of very strange bronze statues. These strangest of all were of idiot men and women with gormless, gurning faces. Hannah never needs much encouragement to act the goat and was soon persuaded to pose with one of them.

A more famous statue is called the Puppenbrunnen. These creepy severed heads hang by hooks and drip water like blood. Very Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I think. 

And that was the end of our weekend in Aachen. On the way back we stopped at Liege to change trains. Just enough time for me to photograph the sublime (if not especially beautiful) gare.  

Liege station