Astral Codex Ten

Charlemagne

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Charlemagne

Article

Charlemagne is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 01, 2023 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “every European alive today is a descendant of Charlemagne”; “the sacred banner of Charlemagne”; “the sword of Charlemagne”. It most often appears alongside Europe, French, Abraham Davenport.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 01, 2023
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
43: You might have heard that “every European alive today is a descendant of Charlemagne”. Not because Charlemagne was particularly fecund, but because the math of exponentially increasing ancestors per generation (ie 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents) means every European is descended from everyone who lived during Charlemagne’s era who left any descendants at all. This is true, but most Europeans don’t have any of Charlemagne’s genes. The genome isn’t infinitely divisible, and sometimes by coincidence a child will end up without any genes from one specific great-X-grandparent. This effect is strong enough that even though you might have ten million ancestors from Charlemagne’s era, you only carry genes from a few thousand of them! This post explains the details.
Inline links: This post explains the details
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
It was. In the other direction. The King of France raised his levies, called up the royal knights, hired mercenaries, invited in allies. All mustered beneath the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of Charlemagne, and this massive army went to catch the English, the English backed off rapidly while looking for defensive terrain, the French pushed on, the English started planting stakes and caltrops, the French attacked - and the English massacred them.
But also she kept doing miracles, and this terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English. Most of them are minor things - calming a horse with the Cross, hearing a soldier who would die in the next engagement blaspheming and saying "do you swear, and you so near to death?", predicting when she'd be injured in advance, not dying of infection when shot, telling the Duke d'Alencon "move or you'll get hit by a cannonball,” he moves and a couple of minutes later there's the cannonball47 killing someone else, and so forth and so on. And then there was the sword. Joan sent a letter to the town of Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois requesting that they kindly look behind (or under, she doesn't remember exactly what she said) the altar for a rusty sword with five crosses on the hilt, clean the rust off and send it to her. So they did. (We have reports of this from both Joan and the priest who mailed it to her.) Rumors that this was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, demonstrate decisively that there no lily that someone will not determinedly gild, but whatever the sword's provenance it became part of the legend of Joan of Arc.
Inline links: 47
She continues: “You thought to deceive me and it is yourself above all whom you deceive, for I bring you better succour than has reached you from any soldier or any city: it is succour from the King of Heaven. It comes not from love of me but from God himself who, at the request of Saint Louis and Saint Charlemagne*, has taken pity on the town of Orleans, and will not suffer that the enemies have the bodies of the lord of Orleans and his town.’” Which is when the wind changes direction.