In the previous lecture, we looked at Charlemagne and the so-called Carolingian renaissance. I only briefly laid out Charlemagne’s life because I am producing a whole series of lectures on him. If you’d like to learn more about him, please listen to that lecture series. I am now turning away from Charlemagne here and looking at the later Carolingians, beginning with his son, Louis the Pious, up through the reign of his grandsons Charles the Fat and Charles the Simple with whom the Carolingian family’s control wanes and dies. While Charlemagne is certainly the most important Carolingian, we will see that it is, in fact, the later Carolingians that begin to roughly define the boundaries between modern-day European countries.