Charlemagne

But although [Charles] valued Rome so much, still during all the forty-seven years that he reigned, he only went there four times to pay his vows and offer up his prayers. But such were not the only objects of his last visit; for the Romans had grievously outraged Pope Leo [III], had torn out his eyes and cut off his tongue, and thus forced him to throw himself upon the protection of the King. He therefore came to Rome to restore the condition of the church, which was terribly disturbed, and spent the whole winter there.

And because the name of emperor had now ceased to exist in the land of the Greeks and because they had a women as emperor, it was seen both by the apostolic Leo himself and all the holy fathers who were present in that council and the rest of the people, that hey ought to name as emperor Charles himself, king of the Franks, who now held residence, and the rest of the places which they held in Italy, Gaul, and Germany. For Almighty God conceded all these places into his hands, and therefore it seemed to them to be just, that he--with the aid of God and with all the Christian people asking--should not be lacking that title. King Charles did not wish to deny their request, . . . [but] he so disliked [the title] at first that he affirmed that he would not have entered the church on that day--though it was the chief festival of the church--if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope.

On the most holy day of the Lord's birth, when the king, at Mass before the confession of St. Peter, rose up from prayer, Pope Leo place on his head a crown . . . Then all the faithful people of Rome, seeing the defense that he gave and the love that he bore for the holy Roman Church and her Vicar, by the will of god and of the blessed Peter, the keeper of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, cried with one accord in a loud voice: 'To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor, life and victory.'

This is a composite story, extracted form the four major original sources, of the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy roman Emperor by Leo III in St. Peter's Basilica at Rome on Christmas Day, 800.1 This was certainly a momentous event in the history of Western Europe, but its meaning not at all clear.

We can begin with some questions about one of the principals, Charles, the only king in French history to be called The Great. Was he aware of what was going to take place? Einhard, his first biographer, suggest not; but this is difficult to believe. What did Charles hope to gain from the title that he did not already possess? In order to answer these questions, we shall have to look at events preceding Christmas, 800.

When Pepin the Short died in 768, he divided his lands, as his predecessors had done, between his two sons, Carloman and Charlemagne, who ruled together. Carloman died after three years. Charlemagne quickly dispossessed his nephews and became sole ruler over the Franks. For the first ten years of his rule, Charlemagne, like Pepin and Charles Martel before him, engaged in the traditional business of his house--fighting. He turned western Saxony into a defensive march for Frankish lands, but apart from this, there is nothing to suggest that he entertained any grandiose scheme of conquest. He conquered Lombardy and assumed the crown, an occurrence not surprising in view of the long history of Frankish intervention in that kingdom. Venetia, Istria, Dalmatia, and Corsica fell to him. He blundered badly in Spain, and was barely able to extricate himself form the Moslems.

During his retreat, his rearguard was cut to pieces by the Basques at a pass called Roncevalles. Among those who perished was a count named Roland. Here is the genesis of the Charlemagne of the legends. Three centuries later he had become enshrined in the not inappropriate role of crusader in the Song of Roland. The defeat at Roncevalles was in 778, a year of general revolt throughout his lands. Perhaps it was the newness of the dynasty, perhaps the absence of the king, or perhaps the lack of a band of devoted followers that in later years was to constitute his palatium. Whatever the reason, the fact is that after ten years of his rule the Franks were as unruly as ever. The revolts produced a capitulary that was intended to strengthen administration in the Frankish and Lombard kingdoms: his counts were to see that justice was done; anyone who refused compensation in a blood-feud was to come before the king; no one was to presume to organize a trustis (armed band) with hostile intent.

The end of the crisis of 778 marks the beginning of the central period of Charlemagne's rule, which lasted until 791. It was a period characterized by military conquest and a growing sense of his Christian mission. The two went hand in hand. The great duchy of Bavaria was absorbed, but this absorption left the Franks facing the terrible Avar horsemen who dominated the Slavs of the Middle Danube. The southern slopes of the Pyrenees were taken. Most ambitious were his wars against the Saxons, a fierce pagan people living along the courses of the Weser and Elbe rivers and east of the Rhine. At first, these took the form of punitive expeditions to protect the Carolingian homeland of Austrasia, in the Ardennes, and in the territory between the Meuse and Rhine rivers that were rich trade routes. The Carolingians were also committed to maintain and defend the missionary churches in Hesse and Thuringia.

The richer the Rhineland grew, the more imperative it was to defend it, and beyond the Rhine there was no natural frontier. The conquest of Saxony was a long and bitter affair--eighteen campaigns over thirty years--and it put too great a strain on the resources of the kingdom. It also left it exposed to the fury of the Danes. It was as much a missionary effort as it was a military one. the Church had filled Charlemagne's mind with the missionary zeal of St. Augustine's City of God and had even seen to it that he got a copy of Gregory the Great's letter to Ethelbert of Kent on the subject of racial conversion. The Christian duty of the Frankish king was to extirpate paganism, to convert the heathen, even if it meant bearing the sword in one hand and the Scriptures in the other. It did. The baptism of the lst of the Saxon leader, Widukind (who passed into Saxon legend and was revived as hero by the Nazis) took place in 785.

A series of rebellions brought the central period of Charlemagne's reign to a close. The years 792 and 793 were years of bad harvests and widespread famine, of trouble in Saxony, Italy, and Spain, of a conspiracy against the king led by his favorite bastard, Pepin the Hunchback, which very nearly succeeded. Charlemagne's provisions against a recurrence of rebellion ar of considerable interest for the future. All men were to swear an oath of fealty, or to renew the oath if already taken, in the presence of the king's representatives.

I promise that, from this day forward, I will be the most faithful man of the most pious 'Emperor, my lord Charles, son of King Pepin and Queen Bertha; and I will be so in all sincerity, without deceit or ill intention, for the honor of his kingship, as by right a man ought to behave towards his master. May god and the saints whose relics lie before me grant me their help; for to this end I shall devote and consecrate myself with all the intelligence that God has given me, for the remainder of my life.2

The above is an example of such an oath. It was a serious undertaking with religious overtones. It bound the swearer to complete obedience to the king and to his bannum (justice and order), to the payment of heavy dues, and to the performance of military service. For his part the king promised, through his officers such as counts and special agents (missi dominici), to do justice and to protect the rights of each man. Fealty provided the precarious basis for the ?Carolingian state. Members of the king's inner circle swore an even stronger oath, that of vassalage. The essence of this was obsequium (obedience), which later came to be identified with homage. The king's vassals (vassi dominici) performed their services at court or, as in the case of counts, elsewhere.

They were rewarded with gifts of land, sometimes conditional, sometimes not, from conquered territory and confiscated domains. Furthermore, all free men were encouraged to become vassals of the king's vassals and to follow their lords in the king's wars but not to fight against him.

They years between the rebellions of 793 and the coronation were years of consolidation. Charlemagne reestablished his authority over Saxony, largely by deporting thousands of Saxons, and over the Spanish march and the Middle Danube lands of the Avars. He had extended Frankish rule far beyond anything his predecessors had been able to achieve. He was Patricius Romanorum. More than that had happened, and here we must return to the "growing sense of his Christian mission." In the Admonitio Generalis of 789, a statement of Church policy issued under Charlemagne's name, there is a significant article (No. 62):

"Let peace, concord, and unanimity reign among all Christian people, and the bishops, abbots, counts, and our other servants, great and small; for without peace we cannot pease God." Again we see the shadow of St. Augustine's City of God. "The Admonitia," one authority concludes, "envisages something Roman--a society, a Christian society, living at peace with itself, united under its king and fearing nothing but injustice. The force of this inspiration must not be minimized."3 But we have better testimony than this. There is a letter written by the Englishman Alcuin, about whom more later, to Charlemagne in June 799:

Up until now three persons have been at the summit of the hierarchy in the world:

1) The representative of the apostolic sublimity, vicar of the blessed Peter, prince of the Apostles, whose seat he occupies. What has happened to the actual holder of that See, your kindness has taken care to let me know.

2) There comes next the titular holder of the imperil dignity, who exercises the secular power in the second Rome. In what impious fashion the head of this empire has been deposed, not by strangers, but by his own people and by his fellow citizens, the news has been spread about everywhere.

3) There comes in third place the royal dignity, which our Lord Jesus Christ has reserved to you in order that you may govern the Christian people. It triumphs over the other two dignities, eclipses them in wisdom, and surpasses them.

It is now upon you alone that the churches of Christ lean, from you alone that they await safety, from you, the avenger of crimes, guide of those who err, consoler of the afflicted, upholder of good.4

And when Alcuin begins to use the phrase Christianum Imperium, it becomes clear that he meant to equate the actual power of Charlemagne with the Roman Christian Empire of the liturgy. It was perhaps not accidental that Alcuin sent the revised text of the Old and New Testament as a gift to Charlemagne, timed to arrive in Rome on Christmas day, 800!

So we return to the coronation. No pope had ever before crowned an emperor at Rome. The ceremony had to be borrowed from Constantinople where, incidentally , the placing of the crown on the head of the emperor by the patriarch was never a constitutive act. and the ceremony had to be carefully practiced and staged. It is difficult to believe that the ruler wielding the greatest political power in the West, the rule who had, in fact, already created a Frankish empire embracing much territory that had once been Roman, would have been unaware of these preparations. On the other hand, we need not believe that Charlemagne's inspiration was the old Roman Empire.

As to our second question, the significance of the new title, we can say at the outset that it added nothing of substance to the power he already possessed. It gained him no more authority over the Church than the considerable authority he already exercised. It did, as we shall see, put him in a different juridical position in relation to the city of Rome itself. But his capital remained at Aix-la-Chapelle. As a matter of fact, he never returned to Rome during the remainder of his life. Why, then, did he assume the title? There are strong reasons for believing that he did it in order to raise the empire of the Franks to a position equal to that of Byzantium. Here, titles can be instructive. Charlemagne's new subscription, first used on a precept issued May 29, 801, read: "Charles, the most sere Augustus, crowned by God, great, pacific emperor, governing the Roman Empire, and who through the mercy of God [is] king of the Franks and Lombards."

Two years late he created a new imperial bull, the reverse side of which showed a city gate, surmounted by a cross, over the word ROMA and carried the inscription: RENOVATIO ROMN[I] ("renewal of the Roman Empire".) In 812, Emperor Michael I was for various reasons forced to recognize Charlemagne's title in the West in exchange for Venetia, Istria, and Dalmatia. In the spring of 813, Charlemagne, at Aix-la-Chapelle, crowned his only surviving son, Louis, emperor--without recourse to Rome, without seeking recognition by Byzantium, and with the acclamation his Franks instead of that of the Romans. After that, "governing the Roman Empire" disappears from this title; the city gate, the cross, ROMA and RENOVATIO IMPERII ROMANI disappear from the imperial bull, and in their place appears the inscription RENOVATIO REGNI FRANC[ORUM] ("renewal of the kingdom of the Franks"). Absolute equality with Byzantium had been won.

The initiative for the imperial coronation undoubtedly lay with the papacy. What were Leo III's motives? One grew out of the local result of a riot and conspiracy. Charlemagne's troops had restored him, and two days before coronation Charlemagne had permitted him to clear himself of the charges against him by a purification oath. This vindication placed Leo's opponents formally in the wrong, and enable him, for the first time, to charge them with treason. Now under Roman law, the only official who could conduct a legal criminal action was the urban prefect, an imperial officer. Should the prefect not find in favor of the pope, his judgment could be reversed only by the emperor.

But in 797 Emperor Constantine VI had been deposed, blinded, and put to death by his mother, Irene. For the first time a woman sat on the throne of the Caesars, and the legality of the situation was, at the least, questionable. Leo's position was hazardous. Charlemagne's coronation was a sure guarantee of a decision favorable to Leo, whose legitimacy could not be questioned. And, indeed, it proved to be precisely that. A few days after Christmas, the new emperor heard the case, employing Roman legal procedure, and condemned Leo's opponents to death as traitors. The sentence was commuted to exile at the request of the Pope.

But papal motives also derived from something more fundamental than the concatenation of events in Constantinople and Rome. What was at issue was the irreconcilability of the imperial Byzantine notion of caesaro-papism, and the papal theory of the monarchic form of the government of the Church, which claimed jurisdictional superiority of the Church within the body of believing Christians. In Professor Ullmann's words, "by virtue of the papacy's being part and parcel of the Roan empire, it could not only not offer effective resistance to the roman emperor, but there was also no possibility of obtaining an effective protector and defender. In order to attain these two objectives emancipation from the imperial framework was essential."5

Signs of the progress of the plan of emancipation were not wanting before 800. Charlemagne's Roman-Byzantine title, patricius, had been reinterpreted as being bestowed by the papal curia. The forged Donation of Constantine gave the papacy legal claim to temporal possessions and implied papal authority to shift the imperial crown from Constantinople to Rome. Dating of papal documents no longer made mention of the imperial year. Papal coins replaced imperial ones. A mosaic in the Lateran depicted Charlemagne and Constantine as equals. The papacy had differed violently with Constantinople on matters of dogma in the iconoclastic controversy. In the light of these events, the coronation represents simply another act in the long drama of the papacy's struggle for independence. The coronation set a precedent; it also raised new issues and fresh problems the working out of which belongs to the history of the High Middle Ages.