In this week of the course, you will be studying Charlemagne. Charlemagne was truly one of the great leaders of Western history, and the first major political figure to emerge in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome, political unity in Western Europe disintegrated, and there emerged a series of barbarian kingdoms that rose and fell in succession and in size over the ensuing centuries. One of these kingdoms was the Frankish kingdom in what is presently northwestern France/northeastern Germany in the sixth century. The Franks had achieved moderate size by the seventh century, and one of the key figures in the evolution of the Franks was Charles Martel who successfully repelled an Arab invasion of "France" at the Battle of Tours. It was into this Frankish kingdom that Charles, Karl der Grosse, Charlemagne was born. Charlemagne was a warrior, and his entire reign was filled with warfare, In fact, there were very few years of peace during his reign. But those years of warfare allowed him to successfully create the first large-scale political empire in the West since Rome. The Carolingian empire included most of Western Europe from the Pyrenees to Western Poland and a large part of Central Europe also. Charlemagne was able to create this empire by force of arms, but to create the army and use the force of arms, Charlemagne needed an alliance with the church that had earlier been forged by Charles Martel. In essence the terms of that alliance were that the church would support Charlemagne morally and, more important, fiscally with money in return for Charlemagne protecting the church and helping to spread Christianity throughout Europe. That gave Charlemagne access to the money which allowed him to create an army of knights, which allowed him to be victorious in his many campaigns. In addition to the military exploits of Charlemagne, there were whole series of intellectual accomplishments, and this is often called the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne actively promoted education and tried to establish schools to educate as many people as possible, after all his empire needed trained administrators. Charlemagne also undertook a wide-ranging reform of the church, and there was an attempt to revive architecture and building which had ceased to flourish after the fall of Rome. From a historian's point-of-view probably one of his lasting achievements was his order that monasteries re-copy old manuscripts, and so most of the surviving manuscripts that historians have today date from the reign of Charlemagne. The assignment for this week is the Song of Roland paper. Please review the style guidelines for history papers in this course before you begin to write the paper and please make sure that your paper has an introduction, specific paragraphs (each of which deals with a specific point), a thesis and quoted direct evidence from the book to support your analysis. The paper is relatively straightforward in that you are asked to identify and explain some of the characteristics of feudalism, knighthood, during the reign of Charlemagne. The prevailing political system at that time was feudalism, and you will be studying feudalism in greater detail in the weeks ahead, but feudalism was essentially a political relationship, an understanding, between lord and vassal, between king and knight. And so in the paper you will be examining some of the characteristics of the feudal system (Those characteristics could be personal, political, economic or religious, for example.). Please make sure when you write the paper that you are actually writing about specific qualities and not just retelling the story of the epic.