proved to be futile. The popes had not the material force at
their command which would have made them adequate to the
position. The strong arm of the Frankish kings had alone
Coronation of Charle-magne as emperor of the West.
delivered them from the Lombards: the same strong
arm, they found, was needed to deliver them from
the wild nobility of their own city. So they turned
to the power which was strong enough to undertake
the task which they could not themselves attempt,
and they invited the Frankish king to become the
representative of the imperial conception they cherished.[1] In
the year 800 central Italy ceased to date its documents by the
regnal years of the Eastern emperors; for Charlemagne was
crowned emperor in their stead.
The king of the Franks was well fitted for the position which he was chosen to fill. He was king of a stock which had been from the first Athanasian, and had never been tainted, like most of the Germanic tribes, by the adoption of Arian tenets. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had saved Europe from the danger of a Mahommedan conquest by his victory at Poitiers (732); his father, Pippin the Short, had helped the English missionary Boniface to achieve the conversion of Germany. The popes themselves had turned to the Frankish kings for support again and again in the course of the 8th century. Gregory III., involved in bitter hostilities with the iconoclastic reformers of the East, appealed to Charles Martel for aid, and even offered the king, it is said, the titles of consul and patrician. Zacharias pronounced the deposition of the last of the Merovingians, and gave to Pippin the title of king (751); while his successor, Stephen II., hard pressed by the Lombards, who were eager to replace the Eastern emperors in the possession of central Italy, not only asked and received the aid of the new king, but also acquired, in virtue of Pippin’s donation (754), the disputed exarchate itself. Thus was laid the foundation of the States of the Church; and the grateful pope rewarded the donation by the gift of the title of patricius Romanorum, which conferred on its recipient the duty and the privilege of protecting the Roman Church, along with some undefined measure of authority in Rome itself.[2] Finally, in 773, Pope Adrian I. had to appeal to Charles, the successor of Pippin, against the aggressions of the last of the Lombard kings; and in 774 Charles conquered the Lombard kingdom, and himself assumed its iron crown. Thus by the end of the 8th century the Frankish king stood on the very steps of the imperial throne. He ruled a realm which extended from the Pyrenees to the Harz, and from Hamburg to Rome—a realm which might be regarded as in itself a de facto empire. He bore the title of patricius, and he had shown that he did not bear it in vain by his vigorous defence of the papacy in 774. Here there stood, ready to hand, a natural representative of the conception of Empire; and Leo III., finding that he needed the aid of Charlemagne to maintain himself against his own Romans, finally took the decisive step of crowning him emperor, as he knelt in prayer at St Peter’s, on Christmas Day, 800.
The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 marks the coalescence
into a single unity of two facts, or rather, more strictly speaking,
of a fact and a theory. The fact is German and secular: it
is the wide de facto empire, which the Frankish sword had
conquered, and Frankish policy had organized as a single whole.
The theory is Latin and ecclesiastical: it is a theory of the
necessary political unity of the world, and its necessary representation
in the person of an emperor—a theory half springing
Theory
of the Carolingian empire.
from the unity of the old Roman empire, and half
derived from the unity of the Christian Church as
conceived in the New Testament. If we seek for
the force which caused this fact and this theory to
coalesce in the Carolingian empire, we can only answer—the
papacy. The idea of Empire was in the Church; and the
head of the Church translated this idea into fact. If, however,
we seek to conceive the event of 800 from a political or legal
point of view, and to determine the residence of the right of
constituting an emperor, we at once drift into the fogs of centuries
of controversy. Three answers are possible from three points
of view; and all have their truth, according to the point of
view. From the ecclesiastical point of view, the right resides
with the pope. This theory was not promulgated (indeed no
theory was promulgated) until the struggles of Papacy and
Empire in the course of the middle ages; but by the time of
Innocent III. it is becoming an established doctrine that a
translatio Imperii took place in 800, whereby the pope transferred
the Roman empire from the Greeks to the Germans in the
person of the magnificent Charles.[3] One can only say that, as
a matter of fact, the popes ceased to recognize the Eastern
emperors, and recognized Charles instead, in the year 800; that,
again, this recognition alone made Charles emperor, as nothing
else could have done; but that no question arose, at the time,
of any right of the pope to give the Empire to Charlemagne, for
the simple reason that neither of the actors was acting or thinking
in a legal spirit. If we now turn to study the point of view of the
civil lawyer, animated by such a spirit, and basing himself on
the code of Justinian, we shall find that an emperor must derive
his institution and power from a lex regia passed by the populus
Romanus; and such a view, strictly interpreted, will lead us
to the conclusion that the citizens of Rome had given the crown
to Charlemagne in 800, and continued to bestow it on successive
emperors afterwards. There is indeed some speech, in the
contemporary accounts of Charlemagne’s coronation, of the
presence of “ancients among the Romans” and of “the faithful
people”; but they are merely present to witness or applaud,
and the conception of the Roman people as the source of Empire
is one that was only championed, at a far later date, by antiquarian
idealists like Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi. The
faex Romuli, a population of lodging-house keepers, living upon
pilgrims to the papal court, could hardly be conceived, except
by an ardent imagination, as heir to the Quirites of the past.
Finally, from the point of view of the German tribesman, we
must admit that the Empire was something which, once received
by his king (no matter how), descended in the royal family as an
heirloom; or to which (when the kingship became elective) a title
was conferred, along with the kingship, by the vote of electors.[4]
But apart from these questions of origin, two difficulties have still to be faced with regard to the nature and position of the Carolingian empire. Did Charlemagne and his successors enter into a new relation with their subjects, in virtue of their coronation? And what was the nature of the relation between the new emperor now established in the West and the old emperor still reigning in the East? It is true that Charlemagne exacted a new oath of allegiance from his subjects after his coronation, and again that he had a revision of all the laws of his dominions made in 802. But the revision did not amount to much in bulk: what there was contained little that was Roman; and, on the whole, it hardly seems probable that Charlemagne entered into any new relation with his subjects. The relation of his empire to the empire in the East is a more difficult and important problem. In 797 the empress Irene had deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI., and usurped his throne. Now it would seem that Charlemagne, whose thoughts
- ↑ According to the view here followed, the Church was the ark in which the conception of Empire was saved during the dark ages between 600 and 800. Some influence should perhaps also be assigned to Roman law, which continued to be administered during these centuries, especially in the towns, and maintained the imperial tradition. But the influence of the Church is the essential fact.
- ↑ In the 5th century the title patricius came to attach particularly to the head of the Roman army (magister utriusque militiae) to men like Aetius and Ricimer, who made and unmade emperors (cf. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, iv. 537, 545 sqq.). Later it had been borne by the Greek exarchs of Ravenna. The concession to Pippin of this great title makes him military head of the Western empire, in the sense in which the title was used in the 5th century; it makes him representative of the Empire for Italy, in the sense in which it had been used of the exarchs.
- ↑ See the famous bull Venerabilem (Corp. Jur. Canon. Decr. Greg. i. 6, c. 34).
- ↑ Even on this view, an imperial coronation at the hands of the pope was necessary to complete the title; but this was regarded by the Germans (though not by the pope) as a form which necessarily followed.
