Charlemagne was very tall, but not robust

Frank J. Rühli, Bernhard Blümich and Maciej Henneberg

Economics & Human Biology, 2010, vol. 8, issue 2, 289-290

Abstract: The left tibia of Charlemagne, the Medieval "Father of Europe" has been X-rayed and CT scanned to determine his still highly debated stature. We found the healthy bone to be long (430Â mm) but rather not robust (total mid-shaft cross-sectional area 473Â mm2, cortical area 352Â mm2). Reconstructed stature of 1.84Â m falls at about 99% of Medieval heights, which would be ca. 1.95Â m in present-day Europe. Thus, tall stature indeed could have contributed to the success of "Charles the Great" as a king emperor and soldier.

Keywords: Computed; tomography; History; Medieval; Stature (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570-677X(10)00003-1
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:8:y:2010:i:2:p:289-290

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().