CHAPTER XI
Karl and Rome.—His visits to that city.—The offences and troubles of Leo III.—The coronation of Charlemagne.—The Pope’s adoration of the Emperor.—Alcuin’s famous letter to Karl prior to his coronation.—Two great Roman forgeries, the Donation of Constantine and the Letter of St. Peter to the Franks.
We must now turn to the connexion of Karl with Rome, and especially to Alcuin’s advice to him in the matter of declaring himself or being declared emperor. It is a highly noteworthy fact that the Englishman Boniface was the most trusted counsellor of Charlemagne’s father Pepin at the time when it was proposed to raise him from Mayor of the Palace to King of the Franks, and that Alcuin the Englishman was the most trusted counsellor of Charlemagne himself, when it was under consideration that he should be raised or should raise himself from King of the Franks to Emperor of the West.
In 773 Pope Adrian had invited Karl to come to Italy and rid him of the oppressions of the Lombards. The Pope’s messenger could not get through by land, by reason of the Lombard power, and he went by sea. Karl agreed to do as the Pope asked. He went with all his force to Geneva. There he divided his army into two parts, sending his uncle Bernard with one portion by the Mons Jovis (the great St. Bernard, called the Mount of Jove because of the statue of Jupiter Peninus placed at its summit) and himself went by the Mont Cenis. The two parts joined at Clusae on the south side, between Susa and Turin, and proceeded to the siege of Pavia, the Lombard capital. Karl spent his Easter at Rome, and on his return to Pavia took the city and captured the king with his family and treasure.
At this visit he was received at Rome with the highest honours. In return, he confirmed and enlarged the donation of Pepin his father, adding, it is said, large parts of Italy—indeed, almost the whole peninsula. He laid the deed of gift on the tomb of the Apostle Peter.
Karl visited Rome again in 781, and it is this visit that from one point of view most concerns us, for it most concerned the course of Alcuin’s life.
Karl had been to Rome again in the year 787, to visit Pope Adrian and settle terms with the Duchy of Beneventum. He had purposed to devastate the duchy, its bishoprics, and its monasteries; but in council with his bishops and chief men he determined to accept hostages, including the two sons of the hostile Duke, who did not himself dare to see the angry face of Karl. Karl completed his visit by adoring the tombs of the blessed Apostles, and paying there his vows; another sign that the great object of visits to Rome was to visit the tombs of the twin princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul. He then returned to France and rejoined his wife Fastrada, his sons and daughters, and his court, at Worms.
The all-important visit to Rome came at the end of the year 800. Pope Leo III, elected in 795, had been seized in the spring of 799 by his opponents, among whom two nephews of the late Pope, Adrian, played a leading part, and an attempt had been made to put out his eyes and cut out his tongue. He recovered[172] and escaped, and was called—or fled—to Karl at Paderborn. Leo had on his consecration sent to Karl, as the Patrician, the standard of Rome, the keys of Rome, and even the keys of the tomb of St. Peter, in recognition of his supremacy, the Eastern Emperor Constantine VI being disregarded. Karl was therefore doubly bound to take cognisance of the Pope’s case. There were very grave charges against Leo. Alcuin names[173] adultery and perjury; but he writes very strongly against subjecting Leo to trial on these charges. He has read, he says, that by a canon of the blessed Silvester there must be not less than seventy-two adverse witnesses of blameless life if a pontiff was to be brought to trial. He has read in other canons that the Apostolic See judges, is not judged. What pastor, he asks, in the Church of Christ can be immune, if he who is the head of all the churches is overthrown by malefactors?
We may compare with this the reasons which another member of the trilogy of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics and scholars, St. Aldhelm, gave at Rome against condemning the Pope of his time, Sergius, for alleged immoral practices. The reasons were three. First, it was a wretchedly base thing to suspect their own pontiff of crimes. Next, what influence could the Roman pontiff have with the Britons and other nations across the seas, if he was attacked by his own citizens? Lastly, it did not seem likely, it could not be true, that one who remembered that he was set over the whole world would entangle himself in such a sin as this. Unhappily, for long periods in the history of the Papacy, it not only was likely, it was undoubtedly and overtly true.
Leo was received by Karl with great honour, and was sent back to Rome to resume his high office. Karl followed him[174] towards the end of the next year, 800, and was received by him at the twelfth milestone from Rome “with the greatest humility and the greatest honour”. This was on November 23. The next day Leo with great pomp received Karl on the steps of the basilica of St. Peter, made an oration to him, and led him into the church. Seven days later, on December 1, Karl convoked an assembly, and expounded to them his reasons for coming to Rome, the first and most difficult being the need of a judicial inquiry into the charges against the Pope. It turned out that no witness appeared to substantiate the charges; but that seems to have been regarded as insufficient, and a formal abjuration was made by Leo. The Pope, Eginhart[175] says, in the presence of all the people, in the basilica of the blessed Peter the Apostle, carrying in his hands the Gospel, ascended the ambo, and invoking the name of the Holy Trinity, purged himself by oath from the crimes laid against him[176].
On the most sacred day of the Nativity of the Lord, Karl attended Mass at St. Peter’s. As he rose from prayer before the Confessio[177] of the Apostle, Leo placed on his head a crown, the whole Roman people acclaiming—“To Charles Augustus, crowned by God the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, life and victory!” After which the Pope adored him, that is, prostrated himself before the emperor and kissed his feet, as had been the custom with the former emperors. The title of Patrician was abandoned, and Charlemagne became Imperator and Augustus.
This is not the occasion for discussing the debated question whether the Pope acted on an impulse of gratitude, or was guided by a desire to interpose the most powerful personage in the West between Rome and the Emperor of the East; or the equally debated question whether Karl was an active and understanding receiver of the new burden of honour and responsibility; or the question what sort of right the Pope had to take such a step. To my mind the most pointed question is whether the Pope skilfully forestalled Charles by suddenly crowning him, in order to prevent his making himself emperor and crowning himself. But we cannot pass by without a word of comment the remarkable fact that the Pope performed the barbaric, Byzantine, humiliating, ceremony of prostration before the emperor and kissing his feet in adoration, as earlier Popes had had to do to earlier emperors. It is this same barbaric custom of what is technically called adoration, that the Popes, who used to perform it to their imperial superiors, have now for some centuries expected others to perform to them—the kissing of the Pope’s toe as it is called by some, of the Pope’s foot by others. The state of the foot of the great bronze figure of St. Peter in his church at Rome certainly renders the former the more accurate phrase.
It is clear that Karl had for many months been carefully considering the question of assuming the imperial crown in asserted succession to the Emperors of the West, who had come to an end three centuries and a half before.
Ep. 114.
This is the letter which Alcuin wrote to Karl at this most critical point in the history of Europe, a letter which has been described as the most important of all which Alcuin is known to have written. His remark that Karl’s position was higher and his power for good greater than that of the Emperor of the East and that of the Pope, has been understood to mean that Karl would do well to restore in his own person the Empire of the West, so as to be supreme in title as well as in fact. The date is May 799.
“To the peace-making Lord David the king, Flaccus Albinus greeting.
“We give thanks to thy goodness, most clement, most sweet David, that thou hast deigned to have in mind our littleness, and to note down for us that which thy faithful servant hath told us by word of mouth. And not for this only do we give continual thanks to thy piety, but for all the boons which thou hast conferred upon me from the day on which my littleness became known to thee. Thou didst begin with the very best for me, thou hast gone on to better still. Wherefore with continual prayers I pray the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, that having granted thee all that is best in earthly felicity, He may deign to grant to thee eternally the far realms of everlasting beatitude.
“If I were present with thee I would urge very many things on thy venerable dignity, if opportunity were afforded for thee to hear and for me to speak. For the pen of love is often wont to stir the deep things of my heart, to treat of the prosperity of thy excellency, the stability of the kingdom to thee by God given, and the profit of the holy Church of Christ. The Church is perturbed by the multiform wickedness of evil men, and stained by the nefarious attempts of the vilest, not of ignoble persons only, but of some also among the greatest and highest. This is matter for deep fear.
“Up to this time, there have been three loftiest persons in the world. One, the apostolical sublimity, which is wont to rule by vicarial office the see of the blessed Peter, chief of the Apostles. What has been done against him who has been the ruler of that see, thy venerated goodness has taken care to make known to me. Another, the imperial dignity and secular power of the second Rome. How impiously the governor of that empire has been deposed, not by those of another race, but by his own people and fellow citizens, is becoming known everywhere. [This was Constantine VI, Emperor of the East, who had been affianced to Karl’s daughter Rotrudis some eighteen years before, but had been forced by his mother Irene to break the contract. In 797, two years before Alcuin’s letter, Irene had deposed him and put out his eyes; she was now reigning alone.] The third is the royal dignity, in which the dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ has placed thee, more excelling in power than the other dignities named, more clear in wisdom, more sublime in dignity of reign. Lo, on thee alone the whole safety of the churches of Christ has fallen and rests. Thou art the punisher of crimes, thou the guide of the erring, thou the consoler of them that mourn, thou the exalter of good men.
“Is it not the case that in the see of Rome, where the greatest piety of religion once shone clear, the very worst examples of impiety have burst forth into view? They themselves, blinded in their own hearts, have blinded their own Head. There is not seen there fear of God, or wisdom, or love: what good thing can be there if nothing of these three is found there? If there had been fear of God they would not have dared, if there had been wisdom they would never have wished, if there had been love they would by no means have done, what they have done. These are the perilous times, foretold of old by the very Truth, because the love of many grows cold.
“The care of the head must never be neglected; it is a less evil that the feet suffer than the head.
“Let peace be made with those wicked Saxons, if that can be done. Let threats be to some extent relaxed, so that men may not be hardened and driven away, but may be kept in hope until by wholesome counsel they be brought back to peace. Hold on to what has been won from them, lest if they are allowed to gain a little, the larger part be lost. Keep safe your own sheep-fold, that the ravening wolf devour not it. Let such labour be spent on outside affairs that no loss be suffered in your own affairs. Some time ago I spoke to your piety about the exaction of tithes: that it is decidedly better to abstain from the exaction, even for a considerable time, until the faith has got its roots fixed in the hearts, if indeed that Saxon land be held worthy of the choice of God. Those who have gone away were the best Christians, as is well known; and those who remained have continued in the dregs of wickedness. For by reason of the sins of the people, Babylon has become the habitation of devils, as it is said in the prophets.
“None of these things can have been overlooked by thy wisdom; for we know how well learned thou art in the sacred scriptures and in secular histories. From all of these full knowledge has been given to thee by God, that by thee the holy Church of God among a Christian people may be ruled, exalted, and preserved. What reward may be given by God to thy best devotion, who is able to say? For eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”
Alcuin ends his letter with a pair of hexameters and some elegiacs, both because Karl was interested in his versification, and—we may suppose—because high-flown compliments, from which Karl was not averse, come better in so-called poetry than in prose.
“From lofty heaven may Christ in mercy mild
Thee rule, exalt, defend, adorn, and love.
The holy stars of the sky, the grasses of the green earth,
All things together cry, May David prosper alway.
The earth and the sky and the sea, the men and the birds and the beasts,
Cry with concordant voice, Father be it well with thee.”
As we are dealing with the relations of the Papacy with the Franks, it may be well to say here something that ought to be said about the demands of the Popes for money and territories. The two demands which may on the whole be called the most monstrous of all the long series, were made, the one probably, the other certainly, in Alcuin’s time: one by Hadrian, to influence Karl, the other by one of his predecessors to influence Karl’s father, Pepin.
A ridiculous document was produced by the Popes, probably about the middle of this eighth century, with which we are dealing. It was called the Imperial Edict of Donation. Its alleged author was Constantine the Great. It professed to give to Silvester, the Bishop of Rome in Constantine’s time, and to his successors, the Imperial Palace (that is, the Lateran) and the City of Rome; all the provinces, districts, and cities of the whole of Italy; and, in the Latin copy of the forgery, all islands. The islands are absent from the Greek copy of the forgery. It was on the strength of this forged donation of islands that a later Hadrian, the one English Pope, Hadrian IV, professed to be the owner of Ireland, and gave it to our king Henry II just four centuries after the time with which we are dealing. Muratori was of opinion that this audacious forgery was concocted between 755 and 766, that is, when Alcuin was from twenty to thirty years of age, and while Offa was king of Mercia. In 774, when Karl had conquered the Lombards, he went to Rome, as we have seen; ratified the donation of his father Pepin, of which we must next speak, and laid the deed of donation on the altar or on the tomb of St. Peter in the ancient basilica of St. Peter. The original deed of Karl’s donation has, so far as is known, long since perished; its terms are at best only vaguely known. It is said to have comprehended the whole of Italy, the exarchate of Ravenna, from Istria to the frontiers of Naples, and the island of Corsica. Karl, then, ratified the forged Donation of Constantine, at that time a quite recent forgery. The whole story, however, is very vague, and historians differ considerably in the deductions which they draw from the inadequate records. They differ almost more widely as to the date at which the document was first brought forward, the dates ranging from 760 to 1105. Of the fact of the forgery there is no question; it cannot be denied, and so far as I know no one of the Romans now is bold enough to deny that it is a forgery. There is one point in the forgery which has an important bearing on a very important question, namely, the true basis of the reputation of the city of Rome as the chief ecclesiastical centre of the Church of the West. Constantine is made to declare, in this forged donation, that it was by the merits of St. Peter and St. Paul that he emerged from the font at baptism cleansed of his sins. More than that, he is made to declare that he makes this enormous donation to the blessed chiefs of the Apostles, Peter and Paul, and through them to Silvester, the Bishop of Rome. Either, then, at the time of the forgery it was completely recognized as a fact that the Popes claimed their sovereignty on the twin authority, in the twin name, by the twin princeship, of Peter and Paul; or it was completely recognized at the time of the forgery that in the earliest times, and notably in the time of Constantine the Great, whose baptism took place in the year 337, Rome did base its claims to pre-eminence on its possession of the relics of St. Peter and St. Paul, and on the twin supremacy of those two princes of the Apostles, and, therefore, that it might stand the test of the touchstone of history, it was essential to use the twin names of Peter and Paul; if it had been Peter alone, it would have been detected as a forgery. See [Appendix D].
When we come to the document which was produced for the purpose of influencing Pepin, Karl’s father, we pass out of the atmosphere of vagueness, and find ourselves face to face with a scandalous, an impious, fact. Pope Stephen II[178], who held the Papacy from 752 to 757, was reduced to extremities by the arms of the Lombard kings of North Italy. He went in person to Pepin, king of the Franks, to entreat him to come over and succour the city of Rome and the domain of St. Peter. To show how difficult it is to be sure about facts of history when the chroniclers have a partisan bias, it may be mentioned that the Italian chronicler states that Pepin went to meet Stephen, and on meeting him dismounted from his horse, prostrated himself on the ground before the Pope, and then walked to the royal residence by the side of the Pope’s palfrey. The Frankish chroniclers say that the Pope and his clergy, with ashes on their heads and sackcloth on their bodies, prostrated themselves as suppliants at the feet of Pepin, and would not rise till he had promised his aid against the Lombards.
The king lodged Stephen in the monastery of St. Denys for the winter, and well on into the next summer. There Stephen was attacked by an illness so dangerous that his recovery was regarded as a miracle, due to the intercessions of St. Dionys, St. Peter, and St. Paul; where again we notice the twinship of St. Peter and St. Paul as regards the protection of the Pope, with the local saint added. After the return of the Pope to Rome, he was besieged by the Lombard king, who vowed not to leave him a scrap of territory the size of the palm of his hand. The Pope sent to Pepin a letter of entreaty and threat. The king, he said, hazarded eternal condemnation. He had vowed to secure to St. Peter the vast donation to which reference has been made, and St. Peter had promised to him eternal life. If the king was not faithful to his word, the Saint kept firmly the donation, as it were the sign manual of the king, and this he would produce against him at the day of judgement.[179] The envoys came late in the year, and the king could not conduct an army into Italy in the winter. In February, 755, or a little earlier, Stephen wrote another letter, with a literally awe-full account of the horrors of the siege, which had then lasted fifty-five days. He conjured Pepin to come and help, “by God and his holy Mother, by the powers of the heavens, by the apostles Peter and Paul, and by the last day.” The collocation and the order of these adjurations is significant. Still Pepin did not come. The Pope then resorted to the blasphemous proceeding which it has seemed necessary to describe. We may suppose that the Pope’s metaphorical statement—that St. Peter had Pepin’s sign manual to a document which would be produced against him at the day of judgement—had suggested to the harassed mind of the Pope the idea that an immediate letter from St. Peter himself would be more effective than the threat to produce signatures at the day of judgement; and that if the letter was addressed to the Franks at large, and not as the former letter to Pepin and his sons, the whole nation would be terrified into prompt action. However that may have been, a letter[180] was written with the heading: “Peter, called to be an Apostle by Jesus Christ the Son of the living God ... and [after a long paragraph] Stephen the prelate of the catholic and apostolic Roman Church, ... to the most excellent kings Pepin, Charles, and Carloman, with all the bishops, abbats, priests, and all monks; all judges, dukes, counts, military officers, and the whole people of the Franks.” The letter begins with the words “Ego Petrus Apostolus”, I, Peter the Apostle. In it St. Peter adjures those whom he addresses to rescue Rome from the Lombards, making a special appeal that his own body, which suffered torture for the Lord Jesus Christ, may be preserved from desecration. “With me,” he proceeds, “the Mother of God likewise adjures you, and admonishes and commands you, she as well as the thrones and dominions and all the host of heaven, to save the beloved city of Rome from the detested Lombards. If ye hasten, I, Peter the Apostle, promise you my protection in this life and the next; I will prepare for you the most glorious mansions in heaven; I will bestow upon you the everlasting joys of paradise. Make common cause with my people of Rome, and I will grant whatsoever ye may pray for. I conjure you not to yield up this city to be lacerated and tormented by the Lombards, lest your own souls be lacerated and tormented in hell with the devil and his pestilential angels. Of all nations under heaven, the Franks are highest in the esteem of St. Peter; to me you owe all your victories. Obey, and obey speedily, and, by my suffrage, our Lord Jesus Christ will give you in this life length of days, security, victory; in the life to come, will multiply His blessings upon you, among His saints and angels.” That little summary is only about a twelfth part of the length of the letter itself.
The letter brought Pepin with a great host; he overcame the Lombard king; and he bestowed on the Pope as a donation, by right—it would appear—of conquest, not only what are called the States of the Church, but also—and that in the teeth of the ambassador of Constantine Copronymus, the Emperor of Constantinople, who demanded its restoration to the Eastern Empire—the whole exarchate of Ravenna. Thus it was that the Pope became a temporal sovereign over vast portions of Italy. St. Peter’s letter was probably the most important letter never written.