Yale professor R. Howard Bloch reads the Charlemagne window at Chartres cathedral panel by panel, treating it as a narrative sequence rather than decoration. He traces Constantine's dream, Charlemagne's conquest of Jerusalem and the relics he brings home, the march into Spain guided by St. James and the Milky Way, the giant Ferracutus, and Roland's betrayal and death at Roncesvalles. Bloch connects the imagery to the Song of Roland and to the Capetian kings' use of Charlemagne's legend to bolster their own legitimacy, noting the furrier donors who paid for the window. The lecture closes on the obscure mass of St. Giles, where an angel's scroll reveals Charlemagne's unconfessed sin. Part of Bloch's Yale course on the Gothic cathedrals of medieval France, the talk uses close visual analysis of stained glass to show how a medieval audience could read dynastic politics, pilgrimage routes, and legend directly out of colored light.