Across Europe with the Emperor, lessons in history, visions of the future.
Unlike John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, I was missing a canine companion when I made my way across the European continent last week; as a substitute, however, I had the founder of the Holy Roman Empire — Karl der Große, or Charlemagne — by my side, who proved a very chatty, knowledgeable passenger princess and also knew how to read a map. Qué chic! The big question on our minds, which presumably Karl had come back for, was the state of Europe in 2026, 1,226 years after his coronation in Rome and 69 years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. (Karl had read on X that Europe was about to fall to an Islamist invasion and, being the boomer he is, was now trying to raise awareness of the issue by vlogging inner-city decay across Europe.)
Karl and I set off from Düsseldorf, a small town on the River Rhine in the vicinity of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, where I found him at a gas station complaining about the recent rise in the price of diesel (I swear he could have just as easily said Döner). It took me a while to explain to him the repercussions of the war in Iran, the lack of global refining capacity, and a looming energy export ban in the US; in the end, he just nodded along, but we agreed to continue our tour together to save some money. Since he didn’t even have a car and was trying to sleep on the floor wherever we went — he says that was the source of his gout, but he still did it for the love of the game — I feel that he got the better end of that deal!
Fortunately, Karl proved to be very knowledgeable about history (his forte, the early Middle Ages), hearing about which sorta kept me awake at the wheel – the few times I nodded off I handed it to Jesus; though I would say he still proved much less entertaining than an average episode of The Rest is History. Karl kept on wanting to make a detour to Aachen – why I didn’t understand – but I stayed firm and insisted on taking the Germans’ preferred route to France: via Belgium. Across that tiny nation to our geographic left – hard to spot on a map, easily forgotten, except for that lingering taste of Pommes Frites 100 km later – we practically followed along the original Roman frontier, which to this day separates Flanders (ex-barbarian, now wealthy) from Wallonia (ex-industrial, now poor), all the way to Calais, England’s last French possession on the European mainland. It is said that when Mary Uno (catholic, bloody, in love with a Spaniard) lost Calais to the French in 1558, she exclaimed: “When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Philip’ and ‘Calais’ lying in my heart.” What a drama queen!
I didn’t much care for this historical fun fact but was more concerned with the last-minute booking of our channel ferry as we sped towards the port to get there in time, a process in which Karl proved to be of very little help. Instead, he kept asking about my engine’s horsepower and became very interested in making biodiesel from horse manure (his new favourite subject). Getting seriously bored with his amateur conversation, I shut him up with a six-pack of Kronenburgs, which a) put him to sleep and b) allowed me to take a closer look at the city of Calais.
I had ignored the outside world thus far, being completely absorbed by Karl’s “rich” inside world, but now the port’s picturesque surroundings of barbed-wire fences, crumbling concrete and a healthy number of homeless people came into full view. That first impression was topped off by an impressive oil refinery (given the Diesel crunch, pretty important), whose methane-burning activities, though, put half the city in a murky fog (the EU just last week delayed new methane rules for a year, to keep prices in check ahead of winter) and left a serious taste of petrol on your lips. Delicious yes, but since we were here on business – not for a good time, but a long time – I talked Karl out of sleeping on the beach next to a refugee camp (he thought this was very good vlogging material) and instead get onto that damn ferry.
Once across the channel — “like the Normans ahah,” Karl kept belting into my ear — the air had become significantly fresher than before, the guffaw of seagulls sounded friendlier, and our prospects of finding jobs and being socially accepted seemed much improved. Resisting the lure of the historic seaside town of Brighton with its rundown Grand Hotels and vibrant LGBTQ community – again hard to explain to Karl – we settled on sleeping under the cliffs of Dover, ready to defend ourselves against any beach invasions with a Swiss army knife (Karl was super impressed with the inbuilt toothpick and said that sort of technology could make Europe great again).
While absolutely no defence was necessary, Karl got very worked up when BBC 2 radio announced the next morning that, for the first time in a year, two illegal boat crossings had arrived in Kent the previous night and that Interior Minister Shabana Mahmood was opening an investigation into it; Having no papers himself, Karl got pretty worried, but I was able to quickly divert his attention with the delights of an 8 am McDonald’s Egg Bacon McMuffin. A quick swim in the Kentish sea beforehand, followed by the search for the Golden Arch, did the job easily.
I tried to avoid talking Politics for the next leg of our journey — the decline and fall of Europe had become one of Karl’s talking points; apparently, he had seen it all before — as we crawled past London’s impressive skyline. Suddenly my fellow traveller caught sight of a couple of goth girls with blue hair and tattoos: they reminded him, he said, of Julius Ceasars Bellum Gallicum, where the future emperor encounters blue-skinned, tattooed folk on the beaches of Britannia. Karl thinks not much has changed since and is thrilled by that insight; the Brits, he says, were still a wild people. You should see them at a dinner party, I say, although he doesn’t understand my remark. To avoid creating any further “enthusiastic outbursts” from the man I suspect can neither read nor write properly, I hold off on showing him James Cameron’s Avatar series. The Navi would have confused him too much.
Next, we arrive in a minor University town, close to the city of Grantchester, North of London. We are told it has a rich academic history, though, rooted in Scholasticism, theology, Latin and Greek studies, and, of late, producing cutting-edge theories such as Quantum singularity, demand-side economics, or the School of intellectual history. We soak up the medieval “flair” of the city, as Karl likes to say, and both seem to be walking down “Nostalgia Avenue”…
Looking to the past, we conclude that the Carolingian revival of learning in the 9th century would not have been possible without the continuation of monastic study in British towns like these; here, ancient wisdom was preserved while the rest of Western Europe had fallen under a shroud of darkness. Karl tells me that the so-called Carolingian Renaissance was largely enabled by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin from York, who became the emperor’s Master of the Palace School. After all, the 8th-century Charlemagne had few other options than importing the best and brightest from Europe’s periphery; already by the end of the 6th century, the number of Roman libraries in use had dropped down to virtually zero from more than 29 in the fourth century (A similar trajectory in public libraries today worries Karl a great deal too ). Interestingly, not only did the institutional study of ancient texts return with the solidification of Charlemagne’s rule, but innovations also emerged, such as the invention of Carolingian minuscule, a new script that made copying much easier and more legible compared to Roman handwriting. It was on the back of that script that later medieval monasteries could preserve the Latin texts, which eventually ended up in the hands of the humanists in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Renaissance followed.
Modern-day Karl can’t really be bothered with the fine print of all this, and neither can I, so we head to the Granta pub for a pint of Neckoil. Karl thinks the beer’s name is hilarious and tries to drink seven of them over lunch, from which I have to stop him and instead introduce him to a better drug: coffee. Two double espressos later and plenty of sugar – Karl has never even tasted anything similar and is positively buzzing at this point – he says he wants to get his life in order, start contributing to a pension fund, and study computer sciences. Miraculous, the effects caffeine can have! If there really is a link between New World imports of caffeine and tea – which replaced pubs with coffee houses and brawls with debate – and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, here is live proof! I hear England’s oldest café in Oxford dates back to 1650, which aligns well enough with the Scientific Revolution, when Francis Bacon laid the foundations of empiricism in his Novum Organum, yet tragically died from a bacterial infection while stuffing a chicken with ice in an attempt to build the first freezer. This feels like something very Karl-coded, too; although E. coli is practically afraid of that man.
After a long-winded journey all the way to Leicestershire, back to London, Calais and Dunkirk – where French Gendarmerie stop the car at four in the morning, and we are being yelled at to stay in the car (I always thought this was just a thing in the US; I will have to ask John Steinbeck about it), we finally arrive in sunny, blissful, international Brussels. It is a treat, like their little chocolates, to be savoured one tiny bite at a time. As such, I get to attend a rousing lecture by the renowned historian Timothy Garton Ash at the Leuven University Campus in central Brussels, just in time to round off my European Travel Week.
During the presentation, Charlemagne is peacefully sleeping on the chair next to me – he doesn’t need this lecture, for he knows his stuff already – but I am electrified as Garton Ash delivers a history of Europe and its challenges in the present world. The scholar has just written a book titled The History of Europe in 7 and 1/2 Chapters, Europe as the oldest and newest continent in the world (you may guess the meaning), which is conspicuously available for sale outside the lecture halls… And I thought he was here just for the 600th anniversary of the University of Leuven…
We learn, for example, that the Catholic University of Leuven exemplifies one of Garton Ash’s core factors in understanding Europe: Christianity, the bedrock of our shared culture. Many of our values, such as the respect for and equality of human lives – something the pope emphasised again this week on his tour in France – and learning have been enabled by the Christian faith. Also important in this context, if sometimes brushed under the table by liberals, argues Garton Ash, is the common fear of Islam encircling the European mainland for over a thousand years. New World discovery and colonial expansion may not have happened as early or as widely if European states like Portugal hadn’t sought a passage around Africa to weaken Muslim foes in the Eastern Mediterranean from the back.
Just as significant to Garton Ash is the Roman Empire as the single most important identity card for any European State with a certain ambition. Right from the supposed fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, people had tried to recreate it. For instance, Theodoric the Great (an Ostrogoth and King of Italy) made a famous promise in 500 AD to the then-still-existing Roman Senate to protect and keep inviolate whatever Roman Emperors had previously decreed. Needless to say, the next important restoration of Rome occurred under Charlemagne, and his Latin motto, Renovatio imperii – the renovation of the Empire – speaks to his designs. His coronation in Rome by Christianity’s spiritual leader, the pope, served as the powerful founding myth for the Holy Roman Empire, which, as Garton Ash argues, became the most successful empire in European History. Voltaire was wrong to quip that it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire; instead, Garton Ash argues that it was all three and that it offered the most stable and long-lasting political union the continent had ever known. Over 1000 years in existence, it ceased only when Napoleon abolished it in 1806 and made himself the next emperor, wearing a Caesarean laurel crown.
Next to these empires, only the Habsburg Empire still evokes widespread nostalgia today, for the important reason that it struck the right balance between diversity and union and successfully recalibrated that balance over long stretches of time. This is Garton Ash’s main historical deduction and recommendation for our own times: to find that balance in the political make-up of Europe, not centralising government too far, but certainly not allowing states to spiral into nationalist, independent projects either, which would only ever lead to war.
The EU’s external challenges today are threefold: it faces military challenges from Russia, political challenges from the US, and economic challenges from China. All three players have an interest in dismantling the current political structure on the continent and in playing its member states off against each other. Ironically, far-right and, to some degree, far-left parties seek closer national ties with all three of those challengers in some way or another, thereby eroding the very political fabric that guarantees the current peace and prosperity. They aren’t patriots; this should be an easy line of attack! While the European response to Russia’s war against Ukraine has been robust, this is less obvious in regard to the other two countries, and the question remains whether the EU is strong enough to take on all three at the same time.
Since 2005, Europeans have lived in the best Europe ever, with the most liberties and opportunities. However, it is now more endangered than at any time during the post-war period, and its survival is far from certain ahead of a long 2027 super election year that might see Marine Le Pen emerge as the French president.
If the past few days on the road have taught me anything, other than that Karl has poor small talk, it is about the wealth of cross-cultural exchanges, the diversity of people, and the shared sense of European heritage that the EU enables at its best. It has also shown me that nationalist feelings are back anywhere you go, religious strife is permeating every one of those countries again, and many feel their economic liberty has been stymied by the state. At the same time, travelling five countries in five days shows you that while the arteries of European integration are alive and perhaps better than ever, there are so many parts of the European mainland – from sovereign infrastructure, cities and the countryside – that ever more resemble wastelands. After all, Karl’s cultural anxieties might have a ring of truth to them.
Amid all these internal and external challenges, Garton Ash finished his speech by calling on the young generation in the room to do what is necessary: to defend Europe. Nobody could do it but them. He urged them to win back the discourse on social media from the political fringes and to go out into the country and the member-states and fight for it there. To defend Europe.
As I ponder the meaning of all this, reaching back to the incredible, rich and often cruel history our continent has produced and think about what its future should hold, I notice a transformation on my right. With a wry smile on his face, Karl’s body seems to be fading from my view, growing thinner and more transparent until he suddenly vanishes completely. Then, close to my ear, I hear my travel companion’s voice once more, shouting a “Bon voyage, mon amie, et bonne chance!” while I seem to make out the familiar sound of somebody cracking open a Neckoil can: After all this, Karl must finally be in heaven.
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