The pope’s solemn oath of self-exculpation was sworn on the 23d of December. Two days later was transacted that yet more solemn ceremony by which the Patriarch of the Western Church, thus purged from the stains which his assailants had sought to cast upon his character, bestowed upon his royal champion that title which set him highest among the rulers of the Christian world. The scene was again laid in the great basilica of St. Peter, a building, of course, utterly unlike to the vast Renaissance temple of Bramante and Michael Angelo. There, on Christmas morning, Charles the Frank was worshipping before the Confessio or tomb of St. Peter. The stately Roman chlamys hung around his shoulders; the crowd that filled the basilica could see with satisfaction the dainty Roman buskins of the kneeling monarch. When he rose from prayer Pope Leo approached him, placed upon his head a costly golden crown, and clothed him in the purple mantle of empire. “Then,” says the papal biographer, “all the faithful Romans, beholding so great a champion given them, and knowing the love which he bare to the Holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of God and of St. Peter, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried out with deep accordant voices: ‘To Charles, most pious and august, crowned by God, the great and peace-bringing emperor, be life and victory!’” Thereupon the people sang their jubilant laudes, and the pope performed that lowly adoration wherewith his predecessors had been wont to greet a Valentinian or a Theodosius.[64]
The deed was done, and the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted a thousand years, and only in the days of our fathers was shattered by the fist of Napoleon, was established, or (as Alcuin and Leo would have said) was re-established in Europe. It was a revolution, no doubt, that was enacted on that morning of the 25th of December 800. It could not have been justified out of the Digest or the Code. According to all the maxims of legitimacy which had prevailed for many preceding centuries, Charles was an usurper and Leo an intermeddling traitor. And yet, if one could go back still earlier to the first days of the empire, the bestowal of the imperial title on Charles was not so utterly lawless a proceeding. The Roman Imperator in those early centuries was not by any elaborate process elected, but was always acclaimed. Acclaimed by the army, it is true, but also by the people, and there were doubtless many soldiers of the militia cohortalis [the imperial guard] of Rome present among the crowd who shouted for life and victory to the peace-bringing emperor. When acclaimed by army and people the Cæsar was, or ought to be, accepted by the Senate; and there are some indications that after centuries of suspended animation a body calling itself the Senate was at this time existing in Rome and consenting to the elevation of Charles. And these bodies, Senate, people, army, however insignificant in themselves, were at any rate Roman: they belonged to the true old Rome; they trod the forum of the republic, and looked up to the Palatine of the emperors; they were not like the bastard Romans of the Bosphorus, who chattered in Greek and wore the robes of Asia, but who had usurped for many centuries the profitable trademark of the Senate and People of Rome. So, though there was but one precedent—and that the bad one of Maximin the Thracian—for conferring the dignity of emperor on a man of purely Teutonic descent, and though it is quite impossible to find a place for the chief actor, the Bishop of Rome, in the drama as played by all the earlier Cæsars, we may on the whole conclude that Charles became Roman Emperor by as good a title as any who had worn the purple since the days of Theodosius.[65]
What were the chief causes which led to this great change in the political constitution of Europe? They have been already hinted at, and we shall probably not be wrong in enumerating them as follows:
First.—The great revival of classical learning, due chiefly to the labors of Anglo-Saxon scholars; a movement of which men like Bede and Alcuin were the standard-bearers. The minds which were influenced by this revival perceived plainly that the interests of civilization, and to a certain extent of Christianity, had been in past centuries identical with those of the great Roman Empire; and from a genuine revival of that Empire (not from a mere ephemeral reconquest of certain cities or provinces by a spatharius or cubicularius setting sail from Constantinople), they anticipated, not altogether erroneously, great gains for the civilization and the Christianity of the future.
Second.—The anomalous position of that which called itself the empire, which for the first time in its history found itself under what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of a woman,” and that woman the murderess of her child.
Third.—The brutal attack on Pope Leo made by the disappointed kinsmen of his predecessor. This event may well have produced an important change in the attitude of the pope towards the question of reviving the empire in the west. Before that day of April when he was assaulted by his own courtiers and left half dead in the streets of Rome, he may (as has been already hinted) have looked forward to a time when he should reign over the best part of Italy, subject to no king or governor; and when whispers reached him of the use of the words “Emperor” and “Imperial” by the learned ecclesiastics of Charles’s court he may in that mood of mind have shown that their proposals were little to his taste. After that fatal day, his reluctance, if he had any, to see one man in the Italian peninsula holding an indisputably higher position than his own, was changed into eager acquiescence in the scheme. He was willing, nay anxious, to see the purple robe encircling the stalwart limbs of the Frankish conqueror, if only he himself might take shelter under that robe from the dagger of the assassin.
In all this it may be truly said that we have failed to consider one important factor in the problem, the desires and ambitions of Charles himself. Unfortunately a mystery which we cannot penetrate hangs over that very subject. One of his most intimate friends, his secretary Einhard, expressly says that Charles “at first so greatly disliked the title of Emperor and Augustus that he declared that if he could have known beforehand the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the holiest festivals of the year.”
It used to be assumed that this reluctance on the part of Charles to receive the new dignity was only a bit of well-played comedy between him and Leo, that the Frankish king had been long aspiring to the imperial dignity, and had even put constraint upon the pope to force him to take part in the coronation. More recent discussion has shaken our confidence in this easy solution of the problem: and probably the greater number of writers on the history of this period now hold that Charles was speaking the truth when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the pope’s proceedings. The cause of that dissatisfaction can only be conjectured. Einhard seems to hint that it was fear of the resentment of the Byzantine Cæsars, but this hardly seems a sufficient cause to one who remembers the low estate of the eastern monarchy under Irene.
With much more probability Professor Dahn argues that what Charles disliked was not the bestowal of the title in itself, but the bestowal by the pope. He thinks that Charles and his counsellors had already, in 799, virtually resolved on the revival of the empire, that the pope penetrated their design, and determined that if that step were taken he at least would be chief actor in the drama; that by his adroit tactics he, so to speak, forced Charles’s hand, and that the latter, foreseeing the evil consequences which would result from the precedent thus established, of a pope-crowned emperor, expressed his genuine feelings of vexation to his friend Einhard when he said, “Would that I had never entered St. Peter’s on Christmas Day.” Certainly the remembrance of all the miserable complications caused during the Middle Ages by the pope’s claim to set the crown on the head of the emperor would do much to justify the unwillingness of a statesman such as the Frankish king to bind this chain round the limbs of his successors.
But even beyond this it seems possible that Charles’s own mind was not fully made up as to the expediency of accepting the imperial diadem, by whomsoever bestowed. That the plan had been discussed (perhaps often discussed, through many years), by his more highly educated courtiers, cannot be denied. He may have been dazzled by the brilliancy of the position which was thus offered him; and yet the calmer judgment of that foreseeing mind of his may not have been satisfied that it was altogether wise for him to accept it. The Frankish kingdom, as it had been built up by the valor and patience of Charles and his forefathers, was a splendid and solid reality. This restored empire of Rome that they talked of, would be even more splendid, but would it be equally substantial? After all, the whole Roman Orbis Terrarum was not subject to his sway. Was it wise to assume a title which seemed to assert a shadowy claim to vast unsubdued territories? Was it wise to claim for a Teuton king that all-embracing authority wherewith the legists had invested the Roman Imperator? The controversies of Guelphs and Ghibellines, which distracted Italy for centuries, show that these questions, if they presented themselves to the mind of Charles, were questions which greatly needed an answer. And there was also a difficulty, which has perhaps not been sufficiently dwelt upon, arising from Charles’s prospective division of his dominions among his sons. Charles, the eldest, was to succeed him in that Austrasian region which was the heart and stronghold of his kingdom. If any son were to inherit the Imperial dignity, sitting on a higher throne than his brethren and holding a certain pre-eminence over them, that son must be Charles. Yet Pippin, the second son, was the actual king and destined heir of Italy, and would rule over Rome, the city from which the Roman Emperor was to take his title. Here was the germ of probable future embroilments between his sons, such as the prudent Charles may well have feared to foster.