Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (8 page)

Accordingly, the first papal appeal was addressed not to the Merovingian king, but to his mayor Charles, known as
Martel
(‘the Hammer’) after his victory over the invading Moors at Poitiers in 732. Cooperation was frustrated by Charles’s death within a year, followed by renewed Frankish civil war. As the pope’s situation deteriorated after the fall of Ravenna, he took the bold step of assuming the Romano-Byzantine strategy of offering status to a ‘barbarian’ leader in return for submission and support. Acting through Boniface, Pope Zachary crowned Martel’s son Pippin the Short as Frankish king in 751, thereby sanctioning Pippin’s coup overthrowing the Merovingians. Pippin signalled his subordination to the pope at two meetings in 753 and 754 by prostrating himself, kissing the papal stirrup and helping the pontiff dismount. Unsurprisingly, Frankish accounts contain no record of this ‘Strator service’, which was to assume considerable significance in later papal-imperial relations as a highly visible means of demarcating superiority.
⁹
More practically, Pippin invaded Lombardy (754–6), capturing Ravenna and relieving the pressure on Rome without removing it entirely.

The papal-Frankish alliance was renewed in 773 by Charlemagne, Pippin’s eldest son, who answered renewed calls for assistance as the Lombards again tried to assert secular jurisdiction over Rome. The future emperor looked the part at 1.8 metres, towering over his contemporaries, even if he was developing a pot belly from over-eating. Detesting drunkenness and dressing modestly, Charlemagne nonetheless clearly enjoyed being the centre of attention.
¹⁰
Recent attempts to debunk him as a military leader are unconvincing.
¹¹
The Franks were simply the best organized for war of all the major post-Roman kingdoms, as Charlemagne amply demonstrated in his campaign to rescue the pope in 773–4 (see
Plate 4
). Charlemagne besieged Pavia for a year, and its capture in June 774 ended two hundred years of Lombard royal rule. In keeping with Frankish custom, Lombardy was not annexed directly, but preserved as a distinct kingdom under Charlemagne. Following the suppression of a rebellion in 776, Charlemagne replaced most of the Lombard elite with loyal Franks and spent the next three decades
ruthlessly consolidating his authority throughout Francia and extending his influence with new conquests in Bavaria and Saxony.

Foundation of the Empire

The Holy Roman Empire owed its foundation to the pope’s decision to dignify this expansion by conferring an imperial title on Charlemagne. The reasons for this step remain obscure, but can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty. It seems likely that the pope initially regarded Charlemagne as a second Theodoric, the fifth-century Ostrogothic chieftain who acted as Byzantine governor of Italy: a useful, domesticated barbarian king, rather than a substitute for the Byzantine emperor. However, the failure of a Byzantine expedition in 788 to eject the Franks from Benevento, which they had just conquered, seemed to confirm the new balance of power. In December 795 Leo III notified Charlemagne of his election as pope, a favour normally reserved for the Byzantine emperor. Nonetheless, contingency rather than systematic planning characterized the next five years leading to Charlemagne’s coronation.
¹²

Three aspects stand out. First, the Empire was a joint creation of Charlemagne and Leo III, ‘one of the shiftiest occupants of the throne of St Peter’.
¹³
Accused of perjury and adultery, Leo was unable to assert authority over the Roman clans, who orchestrated a mob which attacked him in April 799, nearly cutting out his eyes and tongue – acts of mutilation that were considered to render their victim unfit for office. Already at his accession, Leo had sent Charlemagne a banner and the keys to St Peter’s tomb, symbolically placing the papacy under Frankish protection. Charlemagne was reluctant to assume this responsibility, which could require him to judge and possibly remove a wayward pontiff.
¹⁴

Writing a generation later, the Frankish chronicler Einhard claimed Leo sprang the idea of an imperial coronation when Charlemagne finally visited Rome in November 800. We should not be misled by this typical hagiographic device stressing Charlemagne’s supposed modesty in not seeking worldly ambition.
¹⁵
The details were agreed in advance and carefully choreographed, with the participants fully aware they were taking a significant step. Leo rode 12 miles from Rome to meet Charlemagne, double the usual distance accorded a mere king. The
ambassador from the patriarch of Jerusalem was on hand to present the keys to the Holy Sepulchre. Although the actual site was in Arab possession since 636, this act symbolized Charlemagne’s assumption of the ancient Roman mission of protecting Christianity. Finally, the choice of Christmas Day 800 for the coronation was deliberate. This was not only a central Christian holy day, but that year fell on a Sunday and was believed to be exactly 7,000 years since the Creation.
¹⁶

Just what Charlemagne thought he was getting into is not clear, because – like virtually all medieval emperors – he left no written insight into his motives. His concern was unlikely to have been the purely immediate one of convincing the recalcitrant Saxons to accept his rule.
¹⁷
The Franks had long regarded themselves as rightful rulers over the Saxons and the other Germanic tribes that were not formally constituted as monarchies. Rather, it is more likely Charlemagne saw his accession as a way to consolidate his hold over all Italy, since the former Lombard kingdom only covered the north, whereas the idea of the Roman empire had great resonance throughout the entire peninsula.
¹⁸
Additionally, in accepting the various religious symbols, Charlemagne signalled his partnership with the pope as joint leaders of Christendom.
¹⁹

Alongside the joint effort and careful choreography, the third factor is that it is highly likely Charlemagne believed he was being made
Roman
emperor. The Byzantine throne was technically vacant, since Emperor Constantine VI had been deposed and blinded in 796 by his mother Irene, who assumed power herself. As the first woman to rule openly in Byzantium, her authority remained hotly contested, with her immediate opponents claiming the throne as vacant to legitimize their own counter-coup, which toppled her in 802.
²⁰
This had lasting significance. To its supporters, the Empire was not an inferior, new creation, but a direct continuation of the ancient Roman one with the title simply being ‘translated’ (transferred) by Leo from Byzantium to Charlemagne and his successors.

Spiritual and Secular Authority

Nonetheless, a whiff of illegitimacy still surrounded the Empire’s birth. It was questionable whether the disreputable Leo had the authority to transfer the imperial title to the Frankish strongman, not least since the
pope had already symbolically submitted to Charlemagne by greeting him outside Rome. These specific problems betray the deeper difficulties that contemporaries faced over the relationship between spiritual and secular authority.
²¹
Two biblical passages exemplify this. Jesus’s response to Pontius Pilate’s question ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ was the potentially revolutionary: ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world . . . My kingly authority comes from elsewhere’ (John 18:33, 36). This opposition to secular authority made sense during Christianity’s time of persecution by the Romans, and was underpinned by the doctrine of Christ’s second coming, which suggested the secular world was of little significance. However, the delay in the Messiah’s return made accommodation with secular authority unavoidable, as exemplified by St Paul’s response to the Romans: ‘Every person must submit to the supreme authorities. There is no authority but by act of God, and the existing authorities are instituted by him; consequently anyone who rebels against authority is resisting a divine institution’ (Romans 13:1–2).

Christians owed obedience to all authority, but their duty to God trumped that to secular power. It proved impossible to agree whether they should suffer tyrants as a test of faith or were entitled to oppose them as ‘ungodly’ rulers. Attempts to resolve these tensions also drew on Scripture, notably Christ to the Pharisees: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Mark 12:17). In short, Christian thought tried to distinguish separate spheres of
regnum
, denoting the political realm, and
sacerdotium
for the spiritual world of the church.

Delineation of separate spheres merely raised the new problem of their mutual relationship. St Augustine was in no doubt of the superiority of
sacerdotium
over
regnum
.
²²
Responding to Roman intellectuals’ attribution of the Gothic sack of their city in 410 as the wrath of their former pagan gods, Augustine argued this merely demonstrated the transience of temporal existence compared to the enduring Christian ‘city of God’ in heaven. This distinction was later elaborated by Latin theologians to reject Byzantium’s continuation of a semi-divine imperial office. Pope Gelesius I used the influential metaphor of two swords, both provided by God (see
Plate 1
). The church received the sword of spiritual authority (
auctoritas
), symbolizing responsibility for guiding humanity through divine grace to salvation. The state received the secular
sword of power (
potestas
) to maintain order and provide the physical conditions to enable the church to perform its role. Christendom had two leaders. Both pope and emperor were considered essential to proper order. Neither could ignore the other without negating his own position.
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Both remained locked in a dance that each struggled to lead, yet neither was prepared to release his partner and go solo.

Disagreements were expressed in texts that circulated in only a few handwritten copies and that are much more widely known now than they were at the time. They were position statements prepared to provide arguments to wield in oral debate, rather than to be used as mass propaganda.
²⁴
Their impact on daily life was limited. Clergy and laity generally worked together, while spiritual and secular authority generally proved mutually reinforcing rather than conflictual. Nonetheless, the issues remained clear enough. Secular power was inconceivable without reference to divine authority. Likewise, the clergy could not dispense with the material world, despite waves of enthusiasm for those seeking ‘freedom’ from earthly constraints as hermits or monks. The Franks gave Ravenna to the pope through the
Donation of Pippin
in 754, presenting this as restoring it to the
Patrimonium
, yet they retained secular jurisdiction over the entire area, asserting claims not dissimilar to those of the Lombards they had just displaced.

The difficulties with ultimate authority were obvious at the Empire’s birth. Pope Leo’s public obsequiousness extended – if we believe the Frankish accounts – to prostrating himself before the newly crowned emperor. Yet, moments before, he had placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head in a ceremony invented for the occasion; Byzantine emperors did not use crowns before the tenth century. The coronation thus enabled both parties to claim superiority. It was not in Charlemagne’s interest to contest papal claims directly, since the process of translating his imperial title from east to west required a pope with wide-ranging authority. Thus, the Franks did not seriously question the inventions of previous popes; notably Symmachus, who claimed in 502 on dubious precedents that no secular power could judge a pontiff. Nor did they challenge the
Donation of Constantine
, purportedly dating from 317, but probably written around 760, which presented the pope as temporal lord of the western empire as well as head of the church.
²⁵

From Sacral Kingship to Holy Empire

Other arguments favoured imperial supremacy. The idea of the secular sword elevated the emperor above other kings as ‘defender of the church’ (
defensor ecclesiae
), extending the Franks’ existing Christianizing mission to include repelling external threats from the Arabs, Magyars and Vikings. Defence could also entail combating internal enemies, including corrupt or heretical clergy, thus suggesting a spiritual as well as a military and political mission. Petrus Damiani, shortly to become one of the Empire’s most vocal critics, called the Empire a
sanctum imperium
in 1055. By that stage, many had gone further to assert that the emperor was not merely sanctified, but intrinsically sacred (
sacrum
).
²⁶

Ancient Roman emperors had been regarded as demigods, with Caesar posthumously pronounced divine by the senate. The idea continued under his successors, but the need to respect Rome’s still powerful republican traditions prevented this developing into full, theocratic kingship – something that was further curbed by the conversion to Christianity early in the fourth century. While ancient practice continued in Byzantium, the western Empire emerged amidst post-Roman ideas of piety as a guide to public behaviour.

Charlemagne’s son and successor, Louis I, is known in Germany as ‘the Pious’, but in France as
le Débonnaire
; both soubriquets capture aspects of his behaviour. He was sufficiently sinful to require three rites of penance during his reign, yet devout enough to perform them. His more grievous sins included cloistering his relations to remove them as rivals to his succession in 814, mortally blinding his nephew for revolt, breaking a sworn treaty with his sons, and allowing his marriage to deteriorate to the point of his wife having an affair with a courtier. Interpretations differ whether the Carolingian bishops regarded him as an errant member of their flock or used the rites of penance as show trials to discredit him politically.
²⁷
Either way, Louis certainly emerged stronger, even though he never silenced his opponents.