Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

by T. W. Allies

The annalists[264] of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God's authority we have this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo, that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was that among the kings there should be one, already most [pg 507] powerful by the extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800. Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of things. So far already had Arius [pg 508] anticipated Mohammed. Against this confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power, and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above, by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ's religion, and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused. The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East; had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer [pg 509] with Christian name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian. Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.

Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out:[265] Rome is our common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I. a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of qualities,[266] excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the greatest of [pg 510] Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds of years after his death.

To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter's Basilica, was of itself to change the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory's time the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles; now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800 years, into the civil counsels of princes.

Pipin le Bref,[267] great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was free. There was no written constitution, [pg 512] but it was one power exercised by sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense activity.

The royal commissioners, Missi Dominici, an institution perfected by Charles, carried everywhere throughout his vast empire a knowledge of the laws thus passed, and reported to the sovereign how they were kept. By them the king touched each member of his political body. It was a class of removable functionaries, entirely under the order of the central power. It was composed chiefly, but not always, of bishops and counts. They went four times a year, usually two and two, an ecclesiastic and a layman, to inspect the district entrusted to them. All authorities were subject to this inspection. They reported to the sovereign upon all, and conveyed to him the popular feeling, as well as informed him as to the popular needs. This institution, together with the Champs de Mai, contributed to the empire's unity by maintaining its peace. It checked excesses of power in the great proprietors.

An account is extant how these commissioners acted in one of the remotest provinces, that of Istria. They consisted of two counts and a simple priest. At their arrival they held a public enquiry upon the conduct of the religious and civil authorities. The patriarch of Grado was obliged to appear in person, together with all the bishops and counts of the province. After that they considered the conduct of the duke John. The patriarch and the duke were alike compelled to give pledges to amend what had been wrongly done. All felt that [pg 513] Charlemagne himself was behind his commissioners; and when they departed it was with the full assurance that their visit had not been in vain. It will be right to take this instance as representing the government of Charles everywhere, and at all times. For the first time since the origin of Frank society a power existed, each of whose acts indicated a resolution to maintain the general good and to impregnate the whole nation with the spirit of the sovereign.

In all this government the model of the Christian hierarchy was before the mind of Charles, and in the strength of union with it he worked. What is so singularly civilising in his power is the extinction in his personal character as ruler of anything local, bounded, and particular, together with the maintenance of every right in every place. The Pope was the head of the Church, and he looked upon himself as the head of the State; the Pope was surrounded in every province by bishops, his colleagues and coadjutors; they worked together in one mass. So Charles willed that his dukes and counts should work with him in one mass for one end, the pacific unity of his great empire. The act of the Pope[268] in making him Roman emperor helped him greatly to conceive of himself as the secular head of a Christian brotherhood of peoples, as the Pope was its spiritual head. But the act which made him emperor did not give him secular dominion over any people not already subject to him. For instance, it did not subject to him the Saxon kingdoms in Britain. He was not territorial, but [pg 514] moral leader and president in the council of kings; their chief in the defence of the Church. He did not take from the Greek empress or her successors any temporal lordship; though the Greek pride long refused to acknowledge him as an equal. The Pope remained what he had been from the time of Stephen II., an independent sovereign in the Papal State: he had not given himself a master in erecting a new empire. In fact we see Leo III. retain the exercise of his secular sovereignty, and the emperor appear only as defender of St. Peter's landed inheritance. Leo III. maintained the right of his own officers against the interference of some imperial commissioners, and distinguished accurately the limits of the State of the Church, from the imperial realm. He took measures against Arab inroads, to secure his State in full independence. What he needed was the emperor's support against the violent party spirit of the time; against such deeds as the intrusion of a Pope upon the Apostolic See by armed force; against the assault upon a Pope by conspirators. This the authority of the emperor in Rome secured. For that he had a jurisdiction, as the Patricius had before. For this the Romans took an oath to the emperor as well as to the Pope; to the one as protector and advocate, to the other as temporal lord.

If in all this action Charlemagne had before him the model of the Christian hierarchy, not only his own vast kingdom, but all the nations of the West had spread out before them in the forty-six years of his reign, but especially in the last fourteen, when he had become, by the Pope's act, emperor of the Romans, the cordiality [pg 515] of union between the two great powers of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. The positive and intrinsic effect of the Holy See as the inflexible rule of doctrine and of justice on the Teuton features of the several northern tribes was seen when a man of immense natural capacity wielded so great a power in close conjunction and amity with it. What can be further than the action of Charles in the Champs de Mai, in the Missi Dominici, in a legislation which considered all the needs and desires of the subject, while it was supreme and final in its authority, from the condition of the northern tribes when they broke into the empire. The Vandals howled around the walls of Hippo when St. Augustine was repeating the penitential psalms on his death-bed; while Charles kept under his pillow St. Augustine's City of God, and strove to rule his empire for the maintenance of the Christian faith. He was accomplishing that union of many nations in one political bond as members of the same religion which Augustine himself, the most clear-sighted of saintly historians, was unable to contemplate. The mixture of earth with iron in the feet of the great heathen statue had wrought its dissolution; but the Teuton monarch, who mounted on his knees the steps of St. Peter's, kissing each separately, at the beginning of his career pledged his faith to the Pope over the tomb of the chief apostle, and before it ended he had given a final check to the intestine struggles of disunion. He had more than equalled the work of Constantine. The great Roman was indeed personally, though imperfectly, Christian. How much there was of [pg 516] policy, how much of faith in his conversion is a problem too hard to solve; but he was baptised on his death-bed, and the delay was probably of disastrous import to his inward life; and his empire was, in a great degree, still unconverted and heathen. His latter years were especially faulty in his practical execution of the relation between the Two Powers. From his time forward his own special foundation at Byzantium declined more and more, until the emperor who represented him became, in Leo, the Isaurian, and his son Kopronymus, the greatest enemy of the Church. But Charlemagne by his real union with St. Peter's successor, imparted Roman order, Christian civilisation, and civil constitution to that mass of seething peoples. If in the five hundred years succeeding Constantine his work deteriorated more and more, until the city which he wished to be the head of Christian empire yielded half of it to the Saracen, and then became the very seat of schism, the West, in the five hundred years which followed Charlemagne, saw a family of Christian and Catholic nations surround the throne of the chief apostle, nations which his Primacy had called into existence when he placed the imperial diadem on the head of “Charles Augustus, crowned of God”.