The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Einhard

(also Eginhard). Born circa 770, in Maingau; died Mar. 14, 840, in Seligenstadt. A figure in the Carolingian renaissance; friend and adviser to Charlemagne.

Einhard was educated in the monastery at Fulda. At the court of Charlemagne he won recognition for his knowledge of science and the arts, and he became an active member of the Academy. He supervised the construction of the cathedral at Aachen and the royal palace at Ingelheim. The Vita Caroli Magni (Life of Charlemagne) written by Einhard in Latin after Charlemagne’s death enjoyed wide popularity in the Middle Ages. The work contains a great deal of factual information, but owing to his adulation of Charlemagne, Einhard distorted his accounts of the emperor’s foreign policy and wars. Some of Einhard’s religious works and more than 60 of his letters have been preserved.

WORKS

Vie de Charlemagne. Paris, 1923.

REFERENCE

Kleinclausz, A. Eginhard. Paris, 1942.

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References in periodicals archive

The war in Aquitaine was the first one by which Pippin III supported his legitimacy as an heir to his father Charles Martell and the beginning of the military successes of Charlemagne who definitively secured Aquitaine for himself from the Vasconian dukes (EINHARD 1911, cap.

Carolingian History and the Historians' Metanarrative

Both court writers, including Einhard, and monastic writers contributed to this effort.

Bouchard, Constance Brittain, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200

Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer.

Charlemagne and Louis the Pious: Lives by Einhard, Notker, Ermoldus, Thegan, and the Astronomer

Some subjects, such as Einhard, Paul the Deacon, Ermold, Angelberga and Alcuin, are associated with the Carolingian courts.

Ego trouble; authors and their identities in the early Middle Ages

Dating back to Roman times, it has at its centre the attractive Einhard Basilika, which has a former Benedictine monastery attached to it, now transformed into a museum where you can learn about the former life of the monks and inhabitants of the town.

A city at the heart of Europe

Dating back to Roman times, it has at its centre the attractive Einhard Basilika which has a former Benedictine monastery attached to it, now transformed into a museum where you can learn about the former life of the monks and inhabitants of the town.

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An "extraordinary range of evidence" is considered, including the popular Vita karoli by Einhard, the Annales regni francorum (RFA), and the revised RFA, along with the less-popular capitularies, charters, letters, minor annals, and poetry.

Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity

Munz follows the account of Charlemagne's biographer Einhard (c.770-840), but the king was wearing ancient Roman ceremonial clothes, the imperial tunic and cloak (chlamys), when he entered St Peter's.

Charlemagne the pragmatist: Hywel Williams revisits an article by Peter Munz, first published in History Today in 1959, and asks who needed whose approval most, the great ruler of the Franks or Pope Leo III?