obtained the imperial crown ; how, in other words, the
empire was transferred from the Greeks to the Franks.
That this Translation was a reality no one thought of
doubting, t The empire of Charles was no mere resus-
citation of the extinct and forgotten empire of the west ;
it was the continuation of that universal empire, whose seat
Constantine had established at Byzantium, but whose
existence there was now held to have terminated by the
succession of a woman, the empress Irene : the throne of
her predecessor, Constantine the Sixth, remained un
occupied. The empire therefore went back to its right
ful seat, and its title devolved upon Charles. His Lombard
kingdom, added to the greatness of his Frankish domain,
qualified him, without a competitor, for a supremacy to
which he was called by the will of the Roman people,
expressed through their spokesman, pope Leo the Third.
Such was the conception admitted without dispute for
centuries after the decisive event of the middle ages had
taken place. u The only differences in its statement con
cern the relative shares of the emperor, the pope, and the
Roman people in the transaction. It was well understood
to be a sudden prompting of divine inspiration, the vehicle
of which was necessarily the pope ; but all accounts alike
recognise the confirmation of the Roman people, and x the
Frankish records narrate that the pope completed the
ceremony of coronation by adoring the emperor ; thus
recognising the sanctity of his person in a manner which
is highly significant when we remember the ideas held of
the relative positions of pope and emperor in later ages.
It is plain that any view which did not attribute the whole validity of the Translation to the official act of Leo the Third could not find favour with the new school of ecclesiastical politicians.[1] In the contest concerning
- ↑ It was common to seek the inception of the scheme in the policy of Hadrian the First (see Alvaro Pelayo i. 41) or even to throwitbacktothetimeof Stephen the Second. The latter view owed its popularity to Bernard of Parma s gloss on the Decretals (see Doiiinger, Kaiserthum Karls des Grossen 398) and was accepted by Martinus Polomisand acrowd of later chroniclers (ib. pp. 400-412).
