by Tom Holland
In 768, King Pepin had died after a glorious reign, leaving behind him two sons, Charles and Carloman. These, as was the Frankish custom, had divided up their father's lands, and ruled alongside each other for three uneasy years. Then, in 771, after an illness, Carloman had followed his father into the grave. Charles had immediately laid claim to his dead brother's kingdom. He was not the man to squander the opportunity that God had so evidently granted him. Considerable though his dominions now were, he wanted more. A bare few months after Carloman's death, and he was passing the Rhine, scouring the windswept heathlands of Saxony, embarking upon a ferocious campaign of pacification against 'the brutish peoples' who lurked there 'without religion, without kings'.42 The following year he invaded Italy, and five years after that he crossed the Pyrenees into Catalonia. By the 790s, he ruled an empire that stretched from Barcelona to the Danube, and from Lombardy to the Baltic Sea. Of all the lands of western Christendom, only the British Isles and a few small kingdoms in Spain still remained beyond the writ of the Frankish king. No wonder that monkish chroniclers, astounded by Charles's continent-shaking exploits, would commemorate him as 'le magne', bastard Latin for 'the great': as 'Charlemagne'.
Warfare had long been the activity of choice among the Franks. Back in the days of Childeric, it had served to win them Gaul, after all. Leaders who failed to provide their followers with the spoils of pillage rarely endured for long. No sooner had winter thawed into spring than the Frankish people, dusting down their spears, would prepare to follow their king out on campaign. Charlemagne, whose hunger for booty was insatiable, had inherited to the full the appetites of a primordial line of warrior-chiefs. Yet though he ruled as a Frank, and gloried in the name, Charlemagne was heir as well to traditions more awesome and sanctified still. like his father, he had been anointed with the dreadful power of the chrism, nor ever doubted that he was a new David, that mighty King of Israel, whose enemies the Almighty had broken 'like a bursting flood'.'0 It was in the perfect consciousness of this that Charlemagne made the wastes of Saxony to flow with pagan blood; that he spread even among the barbarous Slavs who swarmed on the outer reaches of the world awful rumours of the wrath and terror of his name; that he returned every autumn from his campaigns with lumbering wagon trains of booty, spoils with which to strengthen the Christian order throughout his vast domains. Just as he had taken it upon himself to push back the frontiers of Christendom, so also, within its boundaries, did he aim for its reform and purification — its' correctio’
Charlemagne himself had little doubt how this was best to be attained. God's will obliged Christian men to show obedience to their earthly lords - and, above all, to their anointed king. There were few Franks disposed to contest this. Resentment of Charlemagne's supremacy, although it never entirely faded away among the greatest of the Frankish lords, was strongly tempered by self-interest. Decades of lucrative warfare had brought Charlemagne unprecedented resources of patronage. The aristocracy, restraining a naturally rumbustious sense of independence, duly knuckled down to playing the part of loyal dependants.
The Frankish bishops too, eager to profit from the great labour of Christian reform, had no hesitation in proffering Charlemagne their submission. In 794, a council of Church leaders drawn from across the Latin West hailed him, in fateful terms, as 'king and priest'. Such a formula was not original: it had long been applied to the emperor in Constantinople. Charlemagne, however, as master of Europe, and the Lord's anointed to boot, felt no obligation to truckle to the exclusiveness of the distant Byzantines. Whereas they had merely preserved a Christian empire, he could argue, he was labouring to bring one back to life. After interminable centuries of chaos, it was the Franks who had restored to the West the benefits of order, and after darkness returned it to the light. 'Once, the whole of Europe was stripped bare by the flames and swords of barbarians.' So wrote Alcuin, a scholar originally from Northumbria, in the north of England, a kingdom far removed from the limits of the Prankish Empire, but who had nevertheless been attracted to Charlemagne's side much like a moth drawn to a lamp. 'Now, thanks to God's mercy,' he exulted, 'Europe burns as brightly with churches as does the sky with stars.'44
Even the Pope himself, St Peter's own heir, had little choice but to acknowledge the Frankish king as head of 'the Christian people'. Fifty years previously, the papacy had negotiated with Pepin almost as an equal - but its bargaining position, as the eighth century drew to a close, had been sorely eroded. Charlemagne, who instinctively regarded bishops as he did everyone else, as his servants, to be exploited and patronised as he saw fit, certainly made no exception for the Bishop of Rome. Back in 774, following his invasion of Italy, he had seized the heavy iron crown of the Lombards for himself, and, from that moment on, the ramshackle state entrusted by Pepin to St Peter had been repeatedly trimmed back in the interests of Lombardy's new master.
So too, and perhaps even more hurtfully, had the papacy's claims to responsibility for the Church. In 796, when news of the election of a new pope, Leo III, was brought to him, Charlemagne was blunt in spelling out how the balance of responsibilities between the two of them stood. His own role, he wrote to Leo, was to defend the Church against pagans, to protect it from heretics, and to consolidate it across the whole span of Christendom by everywhere promoting the Catholic faith. The Pope's role was to lead prayers for the Frankish king's success. 'And in this way,' Charlemagne concluded with gracious condescension, 'Christians everywhere, Holy Father, will be sure to gain the victory over the enemies of God's sacred name.'45
The Holy Father himself, perusing this manifesto, may well have felt less than thrilled by it. Nevertheless, whatever his private disappointment at the attenuated role granted the papacy in Charlemagne's scheme of things, Leo made sure to conceal it. No less than his brother bishops of the Frankish Church, he appreciated that obsequiousness might bring its due reward. Accompanying Charlemagne's letter, for instance, there had rumbled into Rome wagons piled high with treasure, gold looted from the pagans, which Leo had immediately set about lavishing on Rome's churches, and on his own palace of the Lateran. Three years later, in 799, and he had even more cause to bank on Charlemagne. Even though his election had been unanimous, Leo had enemies: for the papal office, which until recently had brought its holder only bills and overdrafts, was now capable of exciting the envious cupidity of the Roman aristocracy. On 25 April, as the heir of St Peter rode in splendid procession to Mass, he was set upon by a gang of heavies. Bundled off into a monastery, Leo succeeded in escaping before his enemies, as had been their intention, could blind him and cut out his tongue. Lacking any other recourse, he resolved upon the desperate expedient of fleeing to the King of the Franks. The journey was a long and perilous one - for Charlemagne, that summer, was in Saxony, on the very outer reaches of Christendom. Wild rumours preceded the Pope, grisly reports that he had indeed been mutilated. When he finally arrived in the presence of Charlemagne, and it was discovered, to general disappointment, that he still had his eyes and tongue, Leo solemnly asserted that they had been restored to him by St Peter, sure evidence of the apostle's outrage at the affront to his vicar. And then, embracing 'the King, the father of Europe', Leo summoned Charlemagne to his duty: to stir himself in defence of the Pope, 'chief pastor of the world', and to march on Rome."16
And to Rome the king duly came. Not in any hurry, however; and certainly not so as to suggest that he was doing his suppliant's bidding. Indeed, for the fugitive Pope, humiliation had followed upon humiliation. His enemies, arriving in Charlemagne's presence only days after Leo, had publicly accused him of a series of extravagant sexual abuses. Commissioners, sent by Charlemagne to escort the Pope back to Rome and investigate the charges against him, drew up a report so damning that Alcuin preferred to burn it rather than be sullied by keeping it in his possession. When Charlemagne himself, in the early winter of 800, more than a year after Leo's arrival in Saxony, finally approached the gates of Rome, the Pope humbly rode out t
o greet him twelve miles from the city. Even the ancient emperors had only required their servants to ride out six.
But Leo, a born fighter, was still resolved to salvage something from the wreckage. Blackened though his name had certainly been, he remained the Pope, St Peter's heir, the holder of an office that had been instituted of Christ Himself. It was not lightly given to any mortal, not even Charlemagne, to sit in judgement on Rome's bishop. In token of this, when the proceedings against Leo formally opened on 1 December, they did so, not within the ancient limits of the city, but in the Vatican, on the far side of the Tiber, in implicit acknowledgement of the rights of the Pope, and the Pope alone, to rule in Rome. Papal officials, displaying their accustomed talent for uncovering ancient documents just when they were most needed, presented to Charlemagne papers which appeared conclusively to prove that their master could in fact only be judged by God. Charlemagne, accepting this submission, duly pronounced the Pope acquitted. Leo, placing his hand on a copy of the New Testament, then swore a flamboyant oath that he had been innocent all along.
And now, having triumphed over his enemies in Rome, he prepared to snatch an even more dramatic victory from the jaws of all his travails. Two days after the Pope's acquittal, Charlemagne attended Christmas Mass in the shrine of St Peter in the Vatican. He did so humbly, without any insignia of royalty, praying on his knees. As he rose, however, Leo stepped forward into the golden light cast by the altar candles, and placed a crown on his bare head. Simultaneously, the whole cathedral echoed to the ecstatic cries of the congregation, who hailed the Frankish king as 'Augustus' - the honorific of the ancient Caesars. Leo, never knowingly less than dramatic, then prostrated himself before Charlemagne's feet, head down, arms outstretched. By venerable tradition, such obeisance had properly been performed only for one man: the emperor in Constantinople.
But now, following the events of that momentous Christmas Day, the West once again had an emperor of its own.
And it was the Pope, and no one else, who had granted him his crown.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
So it was that Charlemagne came to rule as a second Constantine. The emperor's joy was not entirely unconfined. Though he was content to acknowledge the hand of God in his elevation, he was reluctant, as was only natural, to admit that he might owe anything to the Bishop of Rome. The whole coronation, Charlemagne would later declare, had come as a surprise to him, a bolt from the blue. Indeed, 'he made it clear that he would not have entered the cathedral that day at all, although it was the very greatest of the festivals of the Church, if he had known in advance what the Pope was planning to do'.47 Here he spoke, not as an emperor, but as a proudly Frankish king: disdainful of the customs of other peoples; reluctant even to set aside his native dress; pointedly unwilling, when in Rome, to do as the Romans did. While his new title was glamorous, Charlemagne refused to be dizzied by it. He never forgot where his power base lay. He certainly had no intention of alienating his own people by appearing to be in hock to a foreign bishop.
Cause enough, then, for the new emperor to deny all foreknowledge of his coronation. Yet still an aura of mystery lingered around the ceremony. Had Charlemagne truly been as ignorant of Leo's plans as he subsequently claimed to be, then it was all the more eerie a coincidence that he should have been in Rome, and in St Peter's, on the very morning that he was. Eight hundred years had passed to the day since the birth of the Son of Man: an anniversary of which Charlemagne and his advisers would have been perfectly aware. Over the preceding decades, the great programme of correctio had begun to embrace even the dimensions of time itself. Traditionally, just as popes had employed the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople on their documents,
The Empire of the Franks and Charlemagne and his successors
so other churchmen had derived dates from a bewildering array of starting points: the accession of their local ruler, perhaps, or an ancient persecution, or, most extravagantly, the creation of the world. Such confusion, however, to scholars sponsored by the Frankish king, was intolerable. A universal Christian order, such as Charlemagne was labouring to raise, required a universal chronology. How fortunate it was, then, that the perfect solution had lain conveniently ready to hand. The years preceding Charlemagne's accession to the Frankish throne had witnessed a momentous intellectual revolution. Monks both in Francia itself and in the British Isles, looking to calibrate the mysterious complexities of time, had found themselves arriving at a framework that was as practical as it was profound. From whose accession date, if not that of some earthly emperor or king, were years to be numbered? The answer, once given, was obvious. Christ alone was the ruler of all mankind - and His reign had begun when He had first been born into the world. It was the Incarnation - that cosmos-shaking moment when the Divine had become flesh - that served as the pivot around which all of history turned. Where were the Christians who could possibly argue with that? Not at the Frankish court, to be sure. Clerics in Charlemagne's service had accordingly begun to measure dates from 'the year of our Lord' - 'anno Domini’.
Here was a sense of time, Christian time, that far transcended the local: perfectly suited to a monarchy that extended to the outermost limits of Christendom. Charlemagne, crowned upon the exact turning point of a century, could hardly have done more to identify himself with it. Yet there was, perhaps, a further reason why he might have determined upon a coronation in ad 800 - nor was it one that he would have cared to publicise. Although shadow, on that fateful day in St Peter's, would have lain heavy beyond the flickering wash of the candlelight, yet it was not so heavy, perhaps, as the shadow of foreboding that lay across many people's souls. If the moment of Charlemagne's coronation had significance as the dawning of a new Christian century, then so also, according to a very different dating system, did it herald the ultimate in cosmic convulsions. Christ's birth was not the only potential starting point for a universal calendar. It was possible as well, many had long believed, to measure the centuries from the very moment of the earth's creation. Theologians back in Augustine's day had taught that six long millennia would pass, and that then, upon the six-thousandth year of the world's existence, the time of Antichrist would dawn, and the world be brought to an end. Not all Augustine's own magnificent scorn had been able entirely to demolish men's trust in these abstruse calculations. Over and again, preachers had emerged, willing to defy the disapproval of the leaders of the Church, and to remind people of the date long set for the coming of Antichrist. In the decades before Charlemagne's coronation, it seems, such prophets had begun to teem in growing numbers. In 789, a royal decree had been issued, ordering that their letters, if seized, be ceremonially burned. The authorities had good cause to be jumpy. The supposed date of the end of the world, which back in Augustine's day had been many centuries off, was now alarmingly imminent. Few who gathered in St Peter's to see Charlemagne crowned emperor would have been ignorant of it. Measured by the timescale that Charlemagne himself had done so much to promote, the appearance of Antichrist could be expected at any moment. To be precise - anno Domini 801.48
The year passed. Antichrist did not appear. It may be that the leaders of Christendom had never believed that he would. Yet still there remains the mystery of Charlemagne's coronation, and why, astute statesman though he was, astute and fiercely proud, he should have been content to accept the crown from the hands of the Bishop of Rome. Perhaps not all his calculations had been political, after all. Charlemagne held no light sense of his mission. He and the learned scholars in his train, although they did not broadcast the fact, certainly shared in the widespread fear that the world was growing old — and that Europe's master had a duty, 'at this last dangerous period of history, to rule and protect the Christian people'.49 A fearsome responsibility, to be sure. Against the coming of Antichrist, what possible defences could there be? Holy Scripture provided just the single hint. 'You know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time.' By this, theol
ogians were still agreed, St Paul had been referring to the Roman Empire. And now, in the very year anciently foretold as the date of Antichrist's appearance, a Roman Empire had been refounded in the West. If truly a coincidence, then a blessed one indeed.
Not that Charlemagne, once crowned, had any intention of staying in Rome, to rule from there as a Caesar. The city remained an alien and perhaps unsettling place to him. A few months of imperious weight-throwing, and then he was off again, heading back north of the Alps. Just as he had come, so he left: as King of the Franks. Yet there were few in his train who would have doubted that something haunting had occurred to their master in the ancient capital of the Christian faith. Shadowy still it may have been, insubstantial as befitted a dead thing summoned from its grave, and yet the spectre of Rome's vanished empire, battening on to Charlemagne's greatness, had been supplied, after long and stony centuries, with a sudden wealth of nourishment. Only angle the mirror that the Frankish kingdom held up to its own pretensions, and the form of the revenant, seemingly undead, might there be glimpsed. In the wide-flung dominions won by the swords of the victorious Franks, but now newly christened a 'Roman' empire; in the palace complex that Charlemagne, returned from Italy, had begun to raise at Aachen, far distant from Rome, it was true, but beautified with columns redeemed from the city's marmoreal wreckage; in the image of the great emperor himself, that same haughty chauvinist who in real life had accepted only twice to wear the dress of a Roman, but who was portrayed on his coinage adorned with an antique robe and a laurel wreath. Though Charlemagne had always shown himself to be brutally practical in the cause of conquest, he was also a visionary — and his vision was of the distant past. Inevitably so, perhaps. Where else, save backwards, to that of Rome, could Europe's master have looked for the ultimate pattern of a Christian empire? Its ghost shimmered always before him. Even on his very seal, its renewal was inscribed as his mission statement. To the Frankish monarchy, this was what building Christendom's future had come to mean.
