by Jeff Sypeck.

Ecco. 267 pages. $25.95.

 In the year 801, a Jew named Isaac traveled from Baghdad across North Africa and then the Mediterranean Sea with an elephant named Abul Abaz, a gift from the caliph Harun al-Rashid to the Frankish Emperor Karl, later to be known as Charlemagne.

If you somehow missed that tidbit in History 101, be sure not to miss Jeff Sypeck’s Becoming Charlemagne, a fascinating account of Karl’s rise to power and then into myth. It’s not just the engaging sidebars (although who doesn’t want to read about elephants in boats?), but rather the way Sypeck insists on introducing history’s little folks too, all those men and women who tried to survive while the high and mighty were conducting their business and pursuing their wars.

What Sypeck is interested in, after all, is the Karl of fact, the husband, father, and popular monarch, rather than “the idol,” Charlemagne, the figure imitated by Napoleon and admired by Hitler, the “idealized creature of books, statues, and preposterous stories.”

Sypeck never loses sight of the sparsely populated land Karl ruled, “400,000 square miles of countless cultures and tongues.” With his base in Aachen, which he much preferred to Paris, Karl loved to hunt, loved the sound of his kids running through stony halls, loved the relaxed day-to-day routines far more than the world of political intrigue and showy ceremonials.

But it was the intrigues, which he soon mastered, that led to the consolidation of his empire. Sypeck describes in wonderful detail the Byzantine empire and Queen Irene, the Arab world of Harun al-Rashid, and the nation-state headed by Pope Leo III.

The background is just as compelling: the Frankish farmers, the Jewish merchants, the daily life in the Round City of Baghdad, the assassins, architects, politicos and clerics, and the dubious joys of travel in the Middle Ages, “seasickness, rats, brackish water, and food barrels infested with maggots.”

Becoming Charlemagne covers a lot of bases but uses as its focal point the year 800, when the pope crowned Karl in Rome, essentially subordinating his authority to Karl’s. And although the book moves chapter by chapter only from 796 A.D. to 843, Sypeck manages to bring in crucial events in ancient Rome and the roots of Byzantium and the Abbasid Empire as well. And he does so with quite a sense of the dramatic, achieved partly by using choice examples (elephants in boats), but also by relating events that were occurring simultaneously in different parts of the globe, a kind of “meanwhile, back at the ranch” approach that generates a nice sense of the ironic.