> That doesn't work. He shot himself in the head. Was that his plan all along? Clearly that method of analysis has some problems. Perhaps. He did "achieve" a f

> That doesn't work. He shot himself in the head. Was that his plan all along? Clearly that method of analysis has some problems. Perhaps. He did "achieve" a few other things before that point either way. > That's a certain way of viewing history that I dislike. It robs past people of all agency and we never trust anything anyone says. That's way too cynical. It also has no explanatory power. The thing is, we know for a fact that historical writings were highly motivated by propaganda purposes, and/or highly colored by the biases of the writer's culture. Very very few historical sources, especially going back to the middle ages or before, were writing from some intention of having objective history remembered. They were writing for some emperor or another, disparaging their enemies and deifying their families and reigns. Even personal letters, to the extent that we find them, tend to do the same thing. And even looking at more modern sources, you'll often find flagrant bias in reporting, and extraordinary levels of praise or disparagement of the characters involved depending on the source. It is then important to realize that we simply don't have access to the real characters of the people written about, ever. We at best get an idea of what they actually did, but we don't have any idea of their real personalities or intentions or beliefs. We barely know who the worse abuser was between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and we got to see a whole trial with plenty of clear evidence from both of them. We simply don't have any chance of judging what Charlemagne actually believed about virtually anything, or what kind of a guy he was.