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The Charlemagne of romance is a mythical personage. He is supposed to have been a Frenchman, at a time when neither the French nation nor the French language can properly be said to have existed; and he is represented as a doughty crusader, although crusading was not thought of until long after the Karolingian era.
At the time of his accession, rather more than a hundred and ten years had passed since plunderers, occasionally settlers, from Scandinavia, had changed into acknowledged members of the Western or Karolingian kingdom. The Northmen, changed, name and thing, into NORMANS, were now in all things members of the Christian and French-speaking world.
Innocent tells the Patriarch of Constantinople that the Lord left to Peter not only the whole Church, but the whole world to govern. To the Karolingian age it was the Emperor who was the Vicar of God. The Church reformers, while attacking this title, do not seem to have claimed in words for the Pope a higher title than Vicar of St. Peter.
There was much therefore at the time of William's accession to keep the French kings and the Norman dukes on friendly terms. The old alliance had been strengthened by recent good offices. The reigning king, Henry the First, owed his crown to the help of William's father Robert. On the other hand, the original ground of the alliance, mutual support against the Karolingian king, had passed away.
But French as the Normans of William's day had become, their relation to the kings and people of France was not a friendly one. At the time of the settlement of Rolf, the western kingdom of the Franks had not yet finally passed to the Duces Francorum at Paris; Rolf became the man of the Karolingian king at Laon.
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