Few men have exerted such a lasting influence on the course of Western history as has Charlemagne (742-814). At the height of his power in the early ninth century Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Lombards and Emperor of the Romans, ruled all the Christian lands of western Europe except the British Isles and southern Italy and Sicily. Charismatic, gregarious, energetic and cultured, he initiated and encouraged a renaissance of learning and artistic enterprise that appeared to later generations as a Golden Age. An incomparable general, administrator and law-giver, he was as skilled on the battlefield as in the council chamber, and by sheer force of character held together an empire that rivalled the Byzantines in the East. Russell Chamberlin provides a biography of the man who built an empire to rival the mighty Byzantines.