Charlemagne 

Here's a statuette of Charlemagne mounted on his horse. Ugly chap, wasn't he? Of course, you wouldn't have dared say while he was alive so it's not really quite fair now that he's been dead for about 1200 years. Do you see the little ball in his hand? No, he is not going off to play tennis with a funny racquet. The ball is called the orb, or orbis terrarum, which means "the sphere of the lands (of the world)." It is a medieval world globe, so don't try to hand me any guff about how the people back then believed that the world was flat and that Columbus was some sort of a genius. He thought that the world was shaped like an egg.

1. Charlemagne and his advisors managed a "renaissance" in which they attempted to re-create the Roman Empire of the West as best they could. The central piece of this effort was the concentration of authority in a central government, and they were almost certain to have failed in this effort.

They failed to address the basic problems of the West: the decay of the economic infrastructure (roads, bridges) and the loss of the manufacturing and monetary subsidy that the West had obtained from the East as long as both were under the control of a single imperial authority.

Most important, however, they failed to address the problem caused by the division of the state among the king's heirs according to the traditional inheritance practice of gavelkind. It was only luck that had kept the Frankish realm in the hands of a single ruler from 751 to about 830.