Tomorrow is Christmas Day so, as well as being the anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, it will also be the 1222nd anniversary of the coronation of Charlemagne. The Royal Frankish Annals, written very soon after the event, tell us what happened:
“On the most Holy day of Christmas, when the king rose in prayer in front of the shrine of the blessed apostle Peter, to take part in the Mass, pope Leo raised a crown on his head and he was hailed by the whole Roman people: to the august Charles, crowned by God, the Great and peaceful Emperor of the Romans, life and victory! After the acclamations the pope addressed him in the manner of the old emperors. The name of Patricius was now abandoned and he was called emperor of the Romans.”
But why did this event happen, and why was it significant. Let’s take a look.
First things first, a short potted history of relations between the papacy and the Franks. Before the eighth century, the Franks and the papacy had very little to do with each other. Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 - 604), arguably the most proactive pope of the early Middle Ages, only addressed 30 of his more than 800 surviving letters to Frankish Gaul. The popes’ horizons mostly consisted of Italy and the East, where the enjoyed ongoing yet often very fraught relations with the Roman emperors in Constantinople, whom the popes in Rome were politically the subjects of. Meanwhile, the Lombards, a Germanic people, were building a powerful centralised state in Northern Italy which threatened the areas of the Peninsula remaining under Roman imperial control and the city of Rome itself. And from the 680s, there was a movement from within the city of Rome itself to break free of Roman imperial control and establish a ”Republic of St Peter.”
Things got really nasty in relations between Rome and the city of Constantinople when the Pope got into a nasty little spat with the Roman emperor, Leo IV the Isaurian (nope, not a type of dinosaur, a person from the wild Midwest of what is now Turkey) over whether it was ok to worship images of saints. Leo ended up confiscating all of the lands the papacy owned in southern Italy and Sicily, as well as depriving it of jurisdiction over the churches in southern Italy, Sicily, Ravenna, Venice, Istria and Dalmatia and giving them to Constantinople instead. The popes were livid, and from then on basically dropped the Roman emperors as their protectors and went essentially independent.
But the Lombards were closing in all the same, and the papacy needed a new protector. The pope found one in none other than our old friend, who I’ve written a fair few things about, Charles Martel. You see, Charles was a super successful Frankish statesman and general who had ruled as the prime minister of the Frankish kingdom for almost two decades, ended the civil wars there, fought successful campaigns against the pagan Saxons over the Rhine, defeated and converted the pagan Frisians in the Netherlands and beaten the Muslim Arab invaders of Gaul at Tours in 732 and at the river Berre in 737. Now he looked like the perfect candidate to headhunt as the papacy’s new protector. So the Pope sent envoys to Charles Martel with gifts and was like “yo, how’s it going man? Wanna help me out against these Lombards whenever I need it in return for some nice gifts and moral support.” And Charles Martel was like “sure thing, homie.”
Now Charles Martel died in 741 and his sons, Pippin the Short and Carloman, became joint prime ministers. Carloman found it all a bit too overwhelming - he literally butchered almost the entire tribal nobility of Alemannia (southwest Germany) at a massive show trial at Cannstadt in 746 after they rebelled - so he was like “man, all this politics and war is incredibly depressing. I can’t cope with this anymore. Need a change of scene to something quieter, more mellow.” so he went down to Rome in 747, met the pope and became a hermit at Monte Soracte. Pippin was this left in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. But Pippin continued to be faced with rebellions across the Frankish kingdom, and realised that if he wanted his authority to be respected by all he needed to take over from the Merovingians, who by now were constitutional figureheads even more so than Charles III is now. But how was he going to do it. The Merovingian kings had ruled the Franks unchallenged for more than 250 years - longer than the USA has been around as of today. So how was he going to avoid coming across like an upstart parvenu. The answer was he needed to phone a family friend - none other than the Pope himself. So in 749, he sent the bishop of Wurzburg on an embassy to Rome, and the pope gave him the green light to overthrow the Merovingians, supposedly saying “it’s better to have a king that had real power than one without.” Thus in 751, Pippin deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, in one of the most successful, bloodless coups d‘etat in history. He was elected king by the Frankish nobility at Soissons and then anointed - a relatively new royal ritual that had just reached Frankish Gaul from Ireland and Visigothic Spain, but a powerful way of demonstrating that his royal authority came from God.
But that wasn’t enough. Three years later, Pippin was feeling really anxious. He was a usurper, the last Merovingian king and his son still lived in a monastic jail cell, and many Frankish nobles were now thinking - “if Pippin can have a pop at taking the throne for himself, why can’t we? What really makes him special and unique compared to us? Nothing.” And as it happened the Pope was in trouble as well. The Lombard king Aistulf had conquered the last major outpost of the Roman Empire on the north Italian mainland, Ravenna, in 751, and was now threatening Rome itself. This in 754, Pope Stephen II came north to Gaul, the first pope ever to travel north of the Alps, and in a special ceremony he reanointed Pippin the Short, to bolster his sacred royal authority. But he also did the same to Pippin’s sons, Charles (the future Charlemagne) and Carloman. And to put Pippin’s anxieties to rest once and for all, he made the Frankish nobility swear an oath not to elect any king ever again, except from Pippin’s male descendants.
But now Pippin had to honour his part of the bargain. In 754 - 757, he led campaigns into Italy to bring the Lombard king Aistulf to heel, making him promise to never bother the papacy again. The papacy itself received Latium and the Romagna in central Italy as its own sovereign territories - the 750s are the true birth of the Papal States.
Pippin died in 768, and was succeeded by Charlemagne and Carloman. Carloman died in 771, leaving Charlemagne in sole charge of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombards began to threaten Rome again and the pope was like “Charlemagne, my good friend. I’ve done so many favours for you, like anointing you when you were only six years old. Now come give me a hand against those bloody Lombards, who can’t honour a simple agreement if their lives depended on it.”
So Charlemagne invaded the Lombard kingdom in 774 and after laying siege to the capital Pavia, managed to conquer the highly centralised Lombard kingdom in a matter of months and took the Lombard king Desiderius and his family prisoner. The Pope showed his gratitude to Charlemagne by making him a patrician of Rome. Charlemagne and Pope Hadrian III were pretty good pals and in the Pope’s epitaph, possibly written by Charlemagne’s Anglo-Saxon adviser Alcuin, Charlemagne is described as having basically viewed the pope as a second father.
By the late 790s, things were looking absolutely splendid for Charlemagne. He now had an empire that stretched from the roadless, still mostly pagan Saxony covered with thick forests to the ancient cities of Italy and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. He had just founded a splendid new capital in the Old Roman spa town of Aachen, which one of his court poets claimed was a new Rome with its own forum and senate - some pardonable literary exaggeration thete. Another court poet claimed that Charlemagne’s recent destruction of the Avar Khaganate in 795 - 796 meant that he had surpassed the achievements of Julius Caesar and the pagan Romans because he, unlike them was backed by Christ. Charlemagne’s courtiers nicknamed him king David, after the Biblical hero. and his court was a centre of learning and culture to rival that of Solomon’s. And in 789, Charlemagne had issued the general admonitions, a lengthy administrative document distributed across the whole kingdom which aimed to reform government to make it more centralised and efficient, tackle corruption and injustice, increase education and literacy and build a better, more moral society. So it seemed right, amidst all this euphoria, that Charlemagne make an ambitious statement about his achievements.
Now in 799 that opportunity came. The pope was now Leo III, a man of non-noble background whose father may have been an Arab. The mafiosi aristocracy of Rome and Latium didn’t like that they had an outsider in charge - they wanted someone from the in-group. So they sent a lynch mob of Roman citizens who ambushed the pope when he was on a procession from the Lateran palace to the church of St Lawrence, threw him off his horse, gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue before leaving him naked on the streets to bleed to death. The Duke of Spoleto rescued Pope Leo, who then fled north to seek Charlemagne’s help. Charlemagne was busy for the time being, but in August 800 he came down to give his friend the Pope a hand and teach those unruly Italians a lesson.
Charlemagne arrived at Rome at the head of a massive Frankish army on 24 November and had a triumphal procession in the city to Old St Peter’s with Pope Leo. In early December, Charlemagne convened a judicial assembly in Rome and held an inquest into what had happened last year. The citizens of Rome accused the pope of various crimes. But no witnesses came forward, so Pope Leo himself was like “very well then, let the Lord Jesus Christ and St Peter be my witnesses.” He ascended to the pulpit and put his hand on the gospel, St Peter intervened on his behalf and everyone then agreed the Pope was innocent.
The Pope was now completely in debt to God, St Peter and to Charlemagne. So what was he going to do? How was he going to say thank you and truly repay Charlemagne. Given that Charlemagne was the divinely anointed king of the Franks and Lombards, Patrician of the Romans and the most powerful ruler Western Europe had ever known since the Western Roman Emperors whose empire consisted of all six original member states of the EU plus a few other territories as well, there was only one thing he could really give him now. The Roman imperial title. So on 25 December 800, when Charlemagne went to St Peter’s Basilica to put the mass in Christmas, the Pope gathered together the Roman people, plonked the imperial diadem on Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him the first Western Roman Empire in more than 320 years in front of a cheering crowd. And, as they say, the rest is history.
But hang on a minute. We need to consider some important questions. Was this really a holiday surprise? What were its implications? And how did the still Roman emperors in Constantinople feel about this, given they weren’t consulted about it?
Einhard, Charlemagne’s faithful friend and biographer, readily provides the answers to two of those questions.
“He said that he would not have entered the church that day, even though it was a great feast day, if he had known in advance of the pope’s plan … the Roman emperors were angry about it. He overcame their opposition through his greatness of spirit, which was without doubt far greater than theirs, by often sending ambassadors to them by calling them his brothers in his letters.”
So Einhard claims that Charlemagne was completely taken by surprise about it all. But was he really? Some would suspect that Einhard was just trying to make his dear old friend, the emperor, look modest. When we look more broadly, we can see that Charlemagne didn’t loathe grandeur and ceremony. This was the king, after all, who was nicknamed “David” by Ovid courtiers, who was called “the father of Europe” by the author of an epic poem imitating the style of Virgil’s Aeneid in his lifetime, built a splendid palace in the ancient Roman style at Aachen and who got absolutely hyped when the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, the most powerful ruler west of China, recognised him as an equal by sending him an elephant called Abdul Abbas in 802. The imperial title may have been a surprise Christmas present, but I don’t see any evidence to really suggest that Charlemagne objected to it - on the contrary I think he saw it as literally his crowning personal achievement.
But as Einhard absolutely correctly hints at, the Roman emperors in Constantinople were not happy with it at all. In their view, the pope had shunned them as the latest incident in their ongoing diplomatic row by giving what was not his to give to a Germanic “barbarian” ruler. The pope tried to justify what he had done by saying that there was no Roman emperor so the position was vacant. That was because at the time the Roman Empire was ruled by Irene of Athens who had taken over from her deposed and blinded son Constantine VI (there really is an awful lot of blinding in this period) in 797 - the first woman to rule
in her own right in Roman history, and not the last (more reigning Roman empresses would follow in the eleventh century). Indeed, there was talk of Charlemagne marrying Irene and unifying the two empires. But in 802 Irene was deposed and the new emperor, a Roman general called Nikephoros, was not happy either and so from then until 812 Charlemagne and Nikephoros entered a kind of Cold War in which Charlemagne attacked the Republic of Venice, by now basically independent but still legally part of the Roman Empire. Einhard lightly glosses over this. But in the end, Charlemagne and Emperor Michael I came to a diplomatic agreement to peace and mutual recognition in 813. Still, relations between West and East were soured thereafter. It’s notable that Einhard correctly called Michael and Nikephoros the emperors of the Romans. Later Carolingian writers would call the Romans “the Greeks” instead, a highly insulting term, just like modern historians now erroneously call them the Byzantines - a wholly anachronistic term. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to view the Franks with classically Roman disdain as Barbarian upstarts. The exchange between Charlemagne’s great-grandson, the Emperor Louis II, and Emperor Basil I in 871 makes for fun reading, as both claimed to be the real Roman emperor and called the other a Greek/ German impostor. Many more exchanges like this would come over the centuries, as western and eastern emperors claimed exclusive rights to the ancient Roman legacy - honestly, why couldn’t they have just agreed to share it?
But it’s clear that Charlemagne getting the imperial title didn’t mean he ruled over a new state or that he ruled different. He continued his zeal for centralisation of government, moral reform and promoting education and classical Roman artistic and literary revival, but this has already begun no later than the 780s. And in 806, when Charlemagne drew up a succession plan for his three adult sons, the empire was to be divided equally between the three of them and there was no mention of the imperial title. It was only because only one son, Louis the Pious, outlived his father that the imperial title was able to be passed to future generations and wasn’t just Charlemagne’s personal trophy.
But the popes this meant a big deal. Pope Leo III, before his death in 816, built many additions to the Lateran Palace, and in its great hall he created some amazing mosaics in the apses. Like most art and architecture from the early Middle Ages, they sadly do not survive today, but are mentioned in the ninth century book of the Popes and we have detailed accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some early eighteenth century drawings of them. One of the mosaics shows Charlemagne and the Pope as equals standing below St Peter, and the inscription reads “blessed St Peter, give Pope Leo life and Emperor Charles victory.” Thus it would seem that the Pope saw him and Charlemagne as equals, both deriving their authority from God and protected by St Peter. But given that the Pope was the successor to St Peter, would that mean that the emperor was subject to the pope. Given that the Carolingian emperors were massively more powerful than the popes and de facto led the church in Western Europe, the poles weren’t going to challenge their authority or subordinate them to them. But after the papal revolution of the eleventh century, when the popes became much more powerful, many popes would demand subjection from the German emperors. Indeed, Pope Innocent III, the Uber-Pope of the Middle Ages, would claim he could make whoever he wanted emperor at will, and did so on multiple occasions in the opening decades of the thirteenth century during the great Welf-Hohenstaufen civil war, in which the pope backed both sides at different points. Thus, the memory of the coronation of Charlemagne was not treasured after the Reformation, and even more so in nineteenth century Germany when Otto Von Bismarck was trying to destroy the power of the Catholic Church in the southern regions of the German empire like Bavaria with his kulturkampf - the literal origin of the term culture war. This German historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a big deal of Einhard’s comments, claiming that Charlemagne was a true Germanic king who was reluctant to become a Roman emperor because knew all too well that it was just an evil clerical conspiracy to subordinate the state to the church, which the Prussian monarchy was now working so hard to undo in its newly acquired empire.
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| early eighteenth century drawings of the ninth century Lateran palace mosaics, just before they were demolished, adapted from Paul Edward Dutton (ed), “Carolingian civilisation: a reader”, University of Toronto Press (2009) |
Post-WW2, views of the coronation of Charlemagne have been a lot more positive, as a fusion of three integral elements to modern Europe - the Roman, the Germanic and the Christian. Indeed, Charlemagne’s empire has been seen as a forerunner to the EU, which had the Charlemagne prize for promoting European unity to this day.
Finally, Merry Christmas to one and all!
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| The nativity scene is depicted on the ivory book cover to the Lorsch Gospels (c.800), contemporary to Charlemagne's coronation and most likely by either one of the artists at Charlemagne's court or by the workshops at the royal monastery of Lorsch - a real masterpiece of Carolingian art, showing both the classical Roman artistic inheritance as well as many distinctively Carolingian stylistic features. |
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