What a lineage to behold! It comes as no great surprise that in the world of amateur genealogy, being descended from imperial royalty is considered of high cachet. Sometime at the end of the 13th century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry. This was the location of the very first new human to be identified, a century later, in the valley of Joachim Neander-Neanderthal man. He had changed his name from Neumann to a Greek version with the same meaning: new man.

This pedigree, by gorgeous chance, also contains Joachim Neumann, a 17th-century German Protestant preacher, who sought peace and meditation away from the political machinations and church hullabaloo of Dusseldorf in a small cave near the river Dussel. We can trace a path directly from his fruitful loin: It begins with his son Louis the Pious, via Lothar, Bertha, Willa, Rosele, eight men called Baldwin, and so on through the ages until it reaches the 21st century in a Dutch family called the Backer-Dirks, whose family tree all the way back to the king is publicly available online. Royal lineages are historically the only ones to get documented well until the modern era, and CharlemagneвЂ™s lineage is bountiful. These kin included Charles the Younger, Pippin the Hunchback, Drogo of Metz, Hruodrud, Ruodhaid, Adalheid, Hludowic, and not forgetting Hugh, and he consolidated his reign by installing many of his sons in positions of power across the expanding empire. He capitalized on his fatherвЂ™s good political relations with the Vatican, and in 800 was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St PeterвЂ™s Basilica, an event so momentous that Charlemagne marked it by giving Leo one of the great medieval relics as a thank you-the Holy Prepuce, better known as JesusвЂ™ foreskin.ДЄ fecund ruler, Charlemagne sired at least 18 children by motley wives and concubines, including nine by his second wife, Hildegard of Vinzgau.

He battled the Saxons to the northeast, the Lombards in Italy, and Muslims in Spain. Charlemagne stepped up as his successor, and continued the expansion with aplomb. He was the son of Pippin the Short, an aggressive ruler of France who expanded the Frankish kingdom until his death during the return journey from a campaign against the persistently rebellious realm of Aquitaine in 768. In many European languages, the word вЂњkingвЂќ is itself derived from CharlemagneвЂ™s name. The very fact that this account exists-probably the first biography of a European ruler-is testament to how important he was (or at least was seen to be). Even Einhard, his dedicated servant and biographer, wouldnвЂ™t get drawn into the specifics of CharlemagneвЂ™s early life in his fawning magnum opus, The Life of Charles the Great. The precise place of his birth is also unknown, but itвЂ™s likely to be in a town such as Aachen, now in contemporary Germany, or LiГЁge in Belgium. If youвЂ™re not, be patient, and weвЂ™ll come to your own very regal ancestry soon enough.ДЄlong with Alexander and Alfred, Charlemagne is one of a handful of kings who gets awarded the post-nominal accolade вЂњthe Great.вЂќ His early life remains mysterious and the stories are assembled from various sources, but it seems he was born around 742 A.D., just at the time when the Plague of Justinian was dispatching millions at the eastern edge of the moribund Roman Empire. I am making an assumption that you are broadly of European descent, which is not statistically unreasonable but certainly not definitive. Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator your ancestor.

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