by Eamon Duffy
On balance it seems more likely that the Donation of Constantine is the product of subsequent reflection on the events of Pope Stephen’s momentous visit to the court of Pepin, than that the Pope or his advisers already had a clearly worked out papal claim to the sovereignty of Italy. Whatever its origin, however, it shows quite clearly that from 756 onwards the papacy believed that its safety in future lay not in token allegiance to the now powerless Byzantine empire, but in the creation of a territorial state within which the Pope ruled on behalf of St Peter, under the protection of Pepin’s dynasty Within this sancti Dei Ecclesiae Respublica – ‘the republic [that is, state] of God’s Holy Church’ – Stephen seems to have dreamed of including all of imperial Italy and much of the Lombard kingdom. In the end he and his successors had to settle for much less – the duchy of Rome and part of southern Tuscany, and the territory of the old Ravenna exarchate, where the exercise of the Pope’s sovereignty was often sabotaged by the ambitious archbishops of Ravenna.
Constantinople did not easily accept the new situation, and even formed an alliance with the Lombard King Desiderius to expel the Franks from Italy and to recapture the exarchate. The generation after Pepin’s Donation was one of extreme anxiety for the popes. It was also a time of radical instability in Rome itself, for as soon as the papal state came into existence the ruling families of Rome plunged into murderous rivalry for control over it. Allying themselves to the Lombards, the Franks or the old empire, they jostled to have their candidates elected pope. The pontificates of Paul I (757–67) and Stephen III (768–72) saw challenges by the antipopes Constantine and Philip, and the papacy was sucked into a sordid whirlpool of internecine violence and betrayal, punctuated by blindings, torture and judicial murder.
The situation was changed dramatically by the emergence of Pepin’s son Charlemagne (Charles the Great) as sole king of the Franks in December 771, and the election to the papacy in February 772 of Hadrian I (772–95). Charlemagne was to prove a colossus, whose imposition of political unity (of a sort) on much of western Europe captured the admiration and imitation of the kings and leaders of his own day, and has continued to haunt the European political imagination ever since. Hadrian was a tough-minded and devout aristocrat, renowned as a preacher and with a highly successful career in the papal administration behind him. These two strong men, at first wary but eventually admiring allies, gave substance to the association between Frankish crown and papacy which Pepin and Stephen had established. Charlemagne was a sincere son of St Peter, but he was also a man fascinated by the glamour of imperial Rome, which he was determined to recreate in his own realms. He took his role as patrician of the Romans seriously, and he was also intent on extending and strengthening Frankish influence in Italy. When the Lombard King besieged Rome in 773 and Hadrian turned to the Patrician of the Romans for help, Charlemagne decided to deal decisively with this thorn in his and Pope’s flesh. He marched his army into Italy, captured the Lombard capital of Pavia, abolished the Lombard kingdom and added ‘King of the Lombards’ to his other titles.
He then decided to spend Easter 774 in Rome, a move which took the Pope by surprise, but which proved to be a huge success. Hadrian had Charlemagne greeted with all the honours formerly given to the Exarch: Charlemagne for his part showed a gratifying deference to the Apostle and his successor. Going to St Peter’s to meet Hadrian (who had not himself come out of the city to greet him), he honoured the Apostle by kissing each of the steps up to the basilica, at the entrance to which the Pope was waiting. King and Pope took to each other, and five days into the visit Hadrian asked Charlemagne to reconfirm the Donation of Pepin. Charlemagne solemnly made over to him territories amounting to two-thirds of the peninsula, and deposited the document with his own hands on the tomb of Peter.
This was a blank cheque, issued at a point where Charlemagne’s own ambitions in Italy had not yet clarified themselves. The Donation of Charlemagne represented what Hadrian hoped for, not what he or his successors were actually to achieve. Nevertheless, it was an auspicious beginning to a long friendship, and it became clear that each had a good deal to offer the other. Charlemagne believed that his realms would best be consolidated by imposing unity and uniformity on the churches within them: the Roman Church would provide the apostolic norms for that uniformity. Hadrian supplied Charlemagne with a model collection of canons, known as the ‘Dionysio-Hadriana’, to guide his Church policy, and, with some difficulty, given the liturgical diversity which prevailed in Rome, he also sent the King Roman liturgical books, to serve as models for Frankish worship.
The relationship with Charlemagne was not all roses. The King believed that his status as protector of the Roman Church gave him extensive rights of intervention – Hadrian thought of it as interference – in papal territory. In particular, Charlemagne heard legal appeals from citizens of the Ravenna exarchate, a matter which Hadrian thought infringed the rights of St Peter. Charlemagne also took a pugnaciously independent line on the question of Iconoclasm. One of the great successes of Hadrian’s pontificate was his involvement in the Seventh General Council, convened by the Empress Irene at Nicaea in 787, to resolve the problem of Iconoclasm. Hadrian sent legates to this Council, together with a lengthy doctrinal treatise justifying the veneration of images. Both the legates and the papal treatise were warmly received, and the Council adopted the Pope’s teaching, an echo of the triumph of Leo the Great at Chalcedon. Charlemagne, however, was alarmed by this rapprochement between Rome and Constantinople, and resentful that he had been treated as a barbarian king, not having been invited to send bishops to Nicaea. He commissioned his court theologians to produce the so-called ‘Libri Carolini’, a refutation both of Greek Iconoclastic teaching and of the Council’s approval of the veneration of images. Pope and King found themselves badly at odds over an important matter of doctrine and worship. The Frankish opposition to the Council’s approval of the use of images, however, was based on a mistranslation in the Latin text of the Conciliar decrees, which seemed to justify the unqualified adoration of images rather than, as in the Greek, their veneration. The resulting opposition between Hadrian and Charlemagne was successfully resolved at Charlemagne’s Synod of Frankfurt in 794.
Hadrian’s pontificate, however, involved far more than a successful collaboration with the King of the Franks. Though not a great innovator, Hadrian tackled the many problems confronting the papacy within the Patrimony of Peter itself. The most urgent of these was the need to replace the revenues lost by the imperial confiscations in Sicily, southern Italy and the Balkans. Pope Zacharias had made a start by creating a series of Church estates in the countryside around Rome. Hadrian continued this policy with vigour, extending existing holdings and creating six new domuscultae, as these estates were called, like the one at Caprocorum fifteen miles from Rome, the nucleus of which was land he himself had inherited from his family and to which he added by buying out the surrounding farmers. The produce from the Caprocorum estates – wheat, barley, beans, olives, wine and a hundred pigs a year – went to the Church warehouses at the Lateran, where there was a soup kitchen which fed 700 people a week. The domuscultae became the basis for the rebuilding of papal fortunes in the Middle Ages, and they provided the popes with more than their crops, for the tenantry were not only an easily deployed workforce, but a loyal militia in time of danger.
In addition to the building up of papal finances, Hadrian set about repairing the infrastructure and the outward face of the city itself. He rebuilt a series of crucial aqueducts, embanked the Tiber at St Peter’s with 12,000 blocks of tufa, and extended the city’s welfare system by creating new diaconiae and pilgrim hostels. Major rebuilding and repair projects were launched at many of the city’s churches, including St Peter’s, the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Clemente. The huge roof-timbers needed were begged from Charlemagne’s forests in the duchy of Spoleto; Frankish engineers were brought to Rome as consultants. The churches themselves were filled with lavish ornaments – silver-plated i
cons, embroidered coverings for the altars, veils to hang between the columns of the aisles. At St Peter’s he paved the confessio before St Peter’s tomb with plates of silver, and installed an immense chandelier of 1,365 lights. The relics of the saints, pillaged during successive sieges, were moved in from the vulnerable suburban cemeteries to the safety of newly constructed shrine niches in churches like Santa Maria in Cosmedin, arranged in ambulatories where the ever-increasing tide of pilgrims could venerate them.
The pontificate of Hadrian I was upbeat, assertive. But the air of confidence was deceptive. To a great extent the apparent strength of the papacy under Charlemagne depended on the character of the Pope himself, and on Charlemagne’s respect for him. Charlemagne’s biogropher Einhard reported that he cried ‘as if he had lost a brother or a child’ on hearing the news of Hadrian’s death on Christmas Day 795. He had a magnificent Latin verse epitaph, composed by the Englishman Alcuin, carved on a slab of marble and sent to Rome: it records the King’s tears for a lost father.
Hadrian’s successor was another matter. Leo III (795–816) had neither Hadrian’s strength of character nor his aristocratic poise in the presence of kings. He was a modest career cleric of Greek or perhaps even Arab ancestry, and from the outset Charlemagne took a high line with him. The letter in which he acknowledged the news of Leo’s election set out the ‘unbreakable treaty’ which he desired between himself as patrician and Leo as pope, in their joint responsibility for the ‘Christian people’ of Charles’ realms. Its terms must have caused some discomfort in the Lateran. ‘My task,’ Charlemagne told Leo,
assisted by the divine piety, is everywhere to defend the Church of Christ – abroad, by arms, against pagan incursions and the devastations of such as break faith; at home by protecting the Church in the spreading of the Catholic faith. Your task, Holy Father, is to raise your hands to God like Moses to ensure the victory of our arms. Helped thus by your prayers to God, ruler and giver of all, the Christian people may always and everywhere have the victory … and the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ resound throughout the world. May your prudence adhere in every respect to what is laid down in the canons and ever follow the rules of the holy fathers. Let the sanctity of your life and words be a shining example to all.26
Too much should not be made of this largely conventional comparison of the Pope’s prayers to the raising of Moses’ hands while Israel fought the Amelikites. Nevertheless Leo doubtless noted that Charlemagne restricted the Pope’s role to saying his prayers and setting a good example by always sticking to the rules, while the King both defended the Church from its enemies, and oversaw the spread of the Catholic faith.
Leo, however, had more pressing problems than an overweening king on his doorstep. Hadrian’s long pontificate had ensconced a number of his relatives and supporters in the Roman administration, who may have resented the arrival of a parvenu pope with no pedigree. Strong factional rivalries developed in the city, and during a procession of exorcism and blessing round the city in April 799 a crowd led by Pope Hadrian’s nephew Paschalis set upon the Pope and tried to blind him and rip out his tongue. This was an attempt to secure the Pope’s deposition by making him unfit for office, but the job was botched, and Leo recovered both sight and speech. He fled to the protection of Charlemagne at Paderborn. The Patrician of the Romans’ protectorship of the Church was about to be put to the test.
Leo’s opponents also sent messengers to the King, accusing the Pope of a whole series of crimes, including perjury and sexual misconduct. Such serious charges could not be ignored, but it was by no means clear what jurisdiction Charlemagne, or anyone else for that matter, had over a duly elected pope. It was a long established principal that no power on earth could sit in judgement on the successor of St Peter, and Charlemagne’s advisers, including Alcuin, warned him off any form of trial. Charles therefore sent Leo back to Rome under honourable escort, with a Frankish commission of inquiry to examine the charges. In December of the following year, 800, he himself came to Rome to resolve the matter.
Charlemagne was received at Rome with imperial honours. In marked contrast to his careful arm’s-length reception by Hadrian in 774, Pope Leo came twelve miles out of the city to greet him and escorted him to St Peter’s in person. On 23 December the King chaired a council of bishops, abbots and Frankish and Roman nobility in St Peter’s, and when this assembly had disowned any intention of judging the ‘apostolic see, the head of all the churches’, the Pope, on oath, solemnly protested his innocence. Charlemagne would in due course pass sentence of death on the Pope’s opponents, commuted at Leo’s request to exile. It was a victory of sorts for Leo, but also a profound humiliation.
Two days later, on Christmas Day, Charlemagne attended Mass at St Peter’s, and went with gifts to pray before the tomb. During Mass, the Pope placed a crown on his head, and the crowd, ‘at the bidding of God and that of St Peter, keybearer of the kingdom of heaven’ sang three times the ‘Laudes’ or praises reserved for an emperor: ‘Charles, most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-loving Emperor, life and victory’. The Frankish accounts, but not the papal one, record that the Pope then performed the proskynesis, the solemn adoration customary before an emperor, kissing the ground before him. The papal chronicler adds that the Pope also anointed Charlemagne, ‘his excellent son,’ as king.
According to his biographer Einhard, Charlemagne later declared that his coronation as emperor had taken him by surprise, and that he would never have entered St Peter’s if he had known what the Pope intended. This claim can certainly be discounted. It is inconceivable that Charlemagne stumbled unawares into the carefully choreographed ceremony in St Peter’s. The Pope’s Christmas Day Mass was always said in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Its celebration at St Peter’s instead was in itself a notable departure from custom, and a very public indication that something unusual was afoot. Charlemagne’s court theologians had long since adopted the phrase imperium christianum to describe Charlemagne’s authority over his scattered realms. In his palace at Aachen, Charles had already created a complex of secular and religious buildings deliberately conceived of as a ‘second Rome’. It is unlikely that anyone in Charlemagne’s entourage actually planned to establish a Western political empire before 800, but the Frankish court did take the view that the Eastern imperial throne, constantly allied to heresy in any case, was currently vacant (the Empress Irene had recently seized power from her son Constantine V). The papacy – and Christendom – was thus without any protector. The crisis of 799 therefore precipitated a decision. The exact nature of the authority by which Charlemagne, as ‘patrician’, had vindicated Leo and silenced his enemies had been in doubt. Charlemagne’s imperial coronation settled the matter, once and for all.
Charlemagne’s later protests, then, were probably designed to soothe the outraged sensibilities of the court in Constantinople, and to excuse his presumption in making himself emperor in the West.27 If he had any real reservations about the events of Christmas Day 800, they almost certainly focused on the Pope’s role. Thirteen years later, when Charlemagne passed his imperial title on to his son Louis, the ceremony consisted of Charlemagne’s placing a crown on the altar of his palace chapel at Aachen. Louis then himself took the crown from the altar, and put it on his own head. For Charlemagne, imperial power came direct from God, not from any priest, not even the successor of Peter the key-bearer.
The ambiguities of Charlemagne’s coronation were to haunt the history of both pope and empire during the Middle Ages. For the moment, however, they opened an age of renewed and optimistic co-operation between them. Leo celebrated this partnership in a series of mosaics installed in the new buildings he raised at the Lateran. In one scene Christ gives the papal pallium to Peter, while to Constantine he gives the labarum or sign of Christ’s cross and name. In a corresponding picture, St Peter gives Leo the pallium, and hands Charlemagne a spear and banner. The mosaics may well predate the ceremony on Christmas Day 800, but they provide a c
lue to its significance for the papacy. Charlemagne was the new Constantine, anointed to protect and extend the faith under the guidance of St Peter – which for Leo meant under papal guidance.
Charlemagne, however, was unaware that he was the one to be guided. This became evident in a dispute in 810 over the addition of the Filioque clause to the so-called ‘Nicene’ Creed. This Latin phrase declared that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father ‘and the Son’, a belief well supported in scripture and widely held by Western theologians, but rejected in the East as an innovation, since it was not in the original text of the Creed. The Filioque seems to have originated in sixth-century Spain, but spread widely in the West. It was in general use in Charlemagne’s realms, and he considered the Greek denial of it just another example of Eastern heresy. The Pope, however, while accepting the teaching implicit in the Filioque, rejected the right of the Frankish church – or indeed the Roman Church – to make additions to the Conciliar Creed which united East and West. He had the Creed, without the Filioque clause, engraved in Greek and Latin on two silver plaques, which, ‘for the love and safeguarding of the true faith’, he had fixed to the tombs of St Peter and St Paul. This eloquent affirmation of the unity of the Eastern and Western Churches in the faith of the Apostles declared in the ancient Creeds was a striking exercise of the papal office. Leo was guarding both the ancient teaching and the unity of the Churches. In the radical reordering of the political world which Charlemagne’s new empire symbolised, the papacy continued to witness to an older unity, and to hold the bridge between East and West. Leo’s urgent request to Charlemagne to suppress the use of the Filioque in his realms, however, was ignored. It was an ominous indication of the difference of vision, and the problem of demarcation between the authority of Pope and the Emperor.
In the years that followed the death of Charlemagne in 814, the problematic nature of that relationship became more obvious. Pope Leo’s successor Stephen IV (816–17) travelled to Rheims in 816 to anoint and crown Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious. The Pope took with him what purported to be Constantine’s own crown. This was an endorsement of the image of the renewed Constantinian age and empire which both Leo and Charlemagne had favoured, but the ceremony of anointing was a deliberate attempt by the papacy to stake out a role in the making of an emperor, which Louis’ self-coronation in 813 had seemed to challenge.
