Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa

Karolus magnus et Leo papa (Latin: [ka.roː.lʊs maŋ.nʊs ɛt le.oː paː.pa]; lit. "Charlemagne and Pope Leo"), sometimes called the Paderborn Epic or the Aachen Epic, is a Carolingian Latin epic poem of which only the third of four books is extant. It recounts the meeting of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, with Pope Leo III, in AD 799.

Carl Erdmann first brought historians' attention to the Paderborn Epic in 1951, when he argued that it was written before June 800. The epic may have been written in 799, but probably in the decade after, certainly before Charlemagne's death in 814. Henry Mayr-Harting suggests that the court held at Aachen in 802 is the most plausible context of composition.

Janet Nelson says that "one of [Charlemagne's counsellors] surely wrote this poem," and it may have been written by his own biographer, Einhard. Francesco Stella has argued for the authorship of Modoin, whose debt to Virgil in his description of Aachen elsewhere equals that of the Paderborn poet. It was familiar to Ermold the Black, who may have used it for the hunt scene in the fourth book of his Carmina in honorem Hludovici, an epic poem in honour of Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious.

The first two as well as the final books do not survive. Helene Scheck argues that the original, complete poem "recounted Charlemagne's ascendancy" and that consequently "it would seem that the first two sections offer background on Charlemagne's rise and the poem would reach its culmination in the coronation of Charlemagne." Although it must have been more widely disseminated in Ermold's time, the only surviving copy is the single-book fragment preserved in a late ninth-century manuscript.

The conventional title, Karolus Magnus et Leo Papa, derives from the first modern edition by Ernst Dümmler in 1881. A more recent edition by F. Brunhölzl was published under the title De Karolo rege et Leone papa in 1966 and re-published in 1999. Given that the poem as it now exists is not a complete work, Dieter Schaller points out that giving the work any title that translate to "Charlemagne and Pope Leo" is rather inaccurate, as such a move over-emphasizes the importance of merely one of the many events in the larger work.

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