The Age of Charlemagne is the watershed of the history of the present era. The rough barbarian flood that poured over Western Europe reaches in that age a turning point of which Charlemagne is eminently the incarnation. The primitive physical features of the barbarian begin to be blunted, or toned down by a new force that has lain latent in him, but that only then begins to step into activity--the spiritual, the intellectual powers. The Age of Charlemagne is the age of the first conflict between the intellectual and the brute in the principal branches of the races that occupied Europe. The conflict raged on a national scale, and it raged in each particular individual. The colossal stature, physical and mental, of Charlemagne himself typifies the epoch. Brute instincts of the most primitive and savage, intellectual aspirations of the loftiest are intermingled, each contends for supremacy--and alternately wins it, in the monarch, in his court and in his people. _The Carlovingian Coins; or, The Daughters of Charlemagne_ is the ninth of the brilliant series of historical novels written by Eugene Sue under the title, _The Mysteries of the People; or, History of a Proletarian Family Across the Ages_. The age and its people are portrayed in a charming and chaste narrative, that is fittingly and artistically brought to a close by a veritable epopee--the Frankish conquest of Brittany, and, as fittingly, serves to introduce the next epopee--the Northman's invasion of Gaul--dealt with in the following story, _The Iron Arrow Head; or, The Buckler Maiden_. DANIEL DE LEON. New York, May, 1905. PART I. AIX-LA-CHAPELLE CHAPTER I. AMAEL AND VORTIGERN. Towards the commencement of the month of November of the year 811, a numerous cavalcade was one afternoon wending its way to the city of Aix-la-Chapelle, the capital of the Empire of Charles the Great--an Empire that had been so rapidly increased by rapidly succeeding conquests over Germany, Saxony, Bavaria, Bohemia, Hungary, Italy and Spain, that Gaul, as formerly during the days of the Roman Emperors, was again but a province among the vast domains. The ambitious designs of Charles Martel had been realized. Childeric, the last scion of the Merovingian dynasty, had been got rid of. Martel's descendants took his seat, and now the Hammerer's grandson wielded the sceptre of Clovis over an immensely wider territory.