The Dark Ages, 476-918

by Charles Oman

In Italy, of course, the tradition of the unity of Christendom under the emperors was in no danger of being forgotten. Appeals to the ancient temporal and spiritual supremacy of Rome were the most powerful items in the Pope’s stock of arguments, when a Gregory or a Zacharias stated his pretensions to patriarchal authority in the West, or denounced the wickedness of the intrusive Lombard. The personal ambition of the Popes was always leading them to indulge in fond reminiscences of the ancient glories of the Empire. The vanity of the degenerate populace of Rome sometimes found vent in futile claims that they, ‘the Roman senate and people,’ really were the heirs of Augustus and Constantine, while the Caesar at Constantinople was nothing more than a mere Greek. |The Empire and the West.| When, by the rupture between Leo the Isaurian and Pope Gregory II., Rome practically passed out of the hands of the Eastern Augustus, it was easy enough for an Italian to maintain that Constantine Copronymus or Leo the Khazar had no longer any true right to use the Roman Imperial title. And the Italian malcontent would add, not, of course, that Rome had ceased to form part of the Roman Empire, but that the title of emperor had passed away from the heretical Isaurian house, and fallen into abeyance, while the empire itself still existed, for its cessation had grown to be inconceivable to the Italian mind.

The Italians, and to a less extent the Franks, were sorely puzzled by the long continuance of the anomalous condition of affairs, when for sixty years the titular emperors had remained heretics, and had failed to maintain their hold on Rome. Nor was the position improved when the Eastern Empire relapsed into orthodoxy indeed, but at the same time passed into the hands of an empress-regnant, a thing repugnant to all those who remembered the ancient Roman horror of a woman’s reign. Irene herself, too, had obtained the crown by such a series of crimes against her son, that not merely constitutional jurists, but all right-minded men shrank, in spite of her extreme orthodoxy, from the idea of recognising in her the legitimate ruler of Rome.

More than once during the long quarrel between the Popes and the Isaurian emperors there had been some talk of electing a separate Augustus to bear rule over Roman Italy,—those districts of the peninsula which were not in the hands of the Lombards. |Tendencies to separation in Italy.| The scheme had not been carried out, mainly because the Popes opposed it, but it had not been forgotten. Now that the greater part of Italy, both Lombard and Roman, was under the rule of a single king, and one well liked both by the Pope and by the Roman people, it would have been strange if the idea of completely repudiating the ignominious dependence of Rome on Constantinople had not been once more mooted. For as long as there remained but one person bearing the Imperial style,—the ruler of the East,—the Pope and his Roman and Italian contemporaries had an uneasy consciousness that their homage ought still, perhaps, to be paid to that person, Greek and heretic though he or she might be.

We may suppose that these doubts hardly troubled the Frankish vassals of Charles the Great, but to his Italian subjects they were a constant source of vexation of spirit; while practically they were liegemen of the Frankish king, they were not quite sure whether in theory they might not still be considered the liegemen of the hated Caesars at Constantinople.

Such thoughts must have been running through the heads of all the Popes who held the Roman See from 773 to 800. But it would seem that it was Pope Leo III. who first bethought him of the easiest way of settling the situation—to declare the king of the Franks Roman emperor, and not merely Roman patrician. A barbarian Augustus would be unprecedented, but not more so than the female ruler of the Empire who now swayed Constantinople. It was evidently the sight of a woman—and a very wicked woman—on the Byzantine throne that gave the final impulse to the desire of the Italians to cut off the last thread of connection with the Imperial line in the East. Their desire must have been well known to Charles himself, but it would seem that he for some time shrank from granting it. Perhaps he feared the responsibilities of the title; more probably he did not see how it legally could be conferred upon him: there was no precedent to settle what person or body in the West could claim to give it, and it was most certain that the court of Constantinople would utterly refuse to grant it, and would view its assumption by a ‘barbarian’ king of the West as a gross piece of insolence.

|Leo III, and Charles.| It would seem that the fervent gratitude of Pope Leo III. for his deliverance by the hand of Charles from certain domestic enemies in Rome, was the active cause of the great ceremony of Christmas Day 800. Leo had been cruelly maltreated by personal enemies in Rome, the kinsmen of his predecessor Hadrian I.; they had seized his person and tried to blind him. But he escaped, fled over the Alps, and took refuge with the great king at his camp near Paderborn, in Saxony. Charles investigated the dispute between Leo and his enemies, and he determined that he would come to Rome and decide the matter in person; meanwhile he sent Leo home under the protection of some Frankish ambassadors. Late in the year 800 Charles moved down into Italy, and held a synod at Rome in which he carefully investigated the conduct of Leo, and pronounced him blameless, while his enemies were executed or thrown into prison. The Pope then purged himself by an oath from all the charges that had been made against him, and was reinstated in his place with much solemnity.

It was only a few days after Charles had thus restored and commended Leo, that the Pope paid the debt of gratitude by crowning his saviour as emperor. The details of this all-important ceremony are curious. The royal and papal courts were thronging St. Peter’s basilica to celebrate the festival of Christmas. |Charles crowned Emperor.| When the service was ended, and while the emperor was still kneeling before the altar in silent prayer, Leo advanced with a diadem in his hand, and placed it upon the bowed head of the great king, crying, ‘God grant life and victory to Charles the Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific Emperor of the Romans.’ Frankish warriors and Italian clergy and citizens joined in the cry, and all present, including the Pope himself, bent their knees to Charles as he rose, and saluted him with the fashion of adoration paid to the ancient emperors.

Charles himself was wont to declare that the ceremony took place without his consent having been obtained, and that he would never have entered St. Peter’s that day, if he had known of the Pope’s intention. Yet there is no doubt that he had seriously taken the matter into consideration long before; it is probable that Leo in his outburst of gratitude for his restoration did no more than force Charles’s hand, by sweeping away by his sudden act the king’s lingering objections to the coronation. He knew that the act would be hailed with joy both by Frank and Roman, and that Charles himself was rather doubtful as to the proper form for assuming the title than opposed to its actual adoption. The way in which the coronation was viewed by the majority of his subjects may be gathered from an extract from the Frankish chronicle of Lauresheim:—‘The name of emperor had ceased among the Greeks, for they were enduring the reign of a woman, wherefore it seemed good both to Leo the apostolic Pope, and to the holy fathers (bishops) who were in council with him, and to all Christian men, that they should hail Charles king of the Franks as emperor. For he held Rome itself, where the ancient Caesars always dwelt, and all these other possessions of his own in Italy and Gaul and Germany. Wherefore, as God had granted him all these dominions, it seemed just to them that he should accept the imperial title also, when it was offered him by the consent of all Christendom.’

That there was much to be said against the legality of the assumption by Charles of his new style, cannot be disputed. Certainly the Pope had no right to give it: nor had there been a precedent for many centuries for the conferring of the imperial title by the decayed body of nobles and the miscellaneous gathering of citizens who might still call themselves ‘the senate and people of Rome.’ Apparently the Pope, when he saluted Charles as ‘crowned by God,’ claimed that the impulse to hail him by the great name of emperor, descended by a direct inspiration from heaven upon the multitude gathered in St. Peter’s. |The meaning of the coronation.| But such a plea would hardly appeal with much force, either to the Byzantine Court or to the modern historian. In truth, there was much to be said for the assumption of the imperial style by Charles, as recognising an accomplished fact, but little for the particular forms by which it was carried out. Most especially did the fact that the Pope seemed to confer the title, by his own act and impulse, prove of incalculable harm in future years. If the coronation of the great king had taken some other form, it would have been impossible for the Popes of later generations to bring forward their preposterous claim to have the power of giving or taking away the imperial crown. The successors of Charles would have been spared many a weary journey to Rome, and many a bitter wrangle with the Holy See, if there had been a formal election-ceremony in which all the nations of the West could have taken part, or if Charles, like Napoleon in a later age, could have placed the crown on his own head instead of receiving it from the pontiff’s hand.

The assumption of the imperial title by the great king had many practical consequences at the moment, and many and yet more important influences upon the history of Europe for long centuries to come.