Coronation of Charlemagne as emperor

By comparison with Adrian, Pope Leo III (795–816) was a man of inferior calibre. Where Adrian had tried to maintain independence by balancing the Byzantine emperor against the Frankish king, Leo from the first showed subservience to the latter. Both in Constantinople and in Rome the situation was unstable. In Constantinople, after troubles reaching back to 790, the empress Irene had her son Constantine VI blinded and deposed in 797 and took his place, the first woman to rule the empire in her own right. Her constitutional position was thus doubtful; Alcuin in the West, in 799, regarded the imperial throne as empty. Meanwhile, in Rome the hostile nobility exploited the opportunity to attack Leo, who in 799 fled across the Alps to his protector, Charlemagne, at Paderborn. Though unfavourably impressed by the Pope, Charlemagne was persuaded by Alcuin to send him back to Rome with a commission, which adjudged the complaints against him false and arrested and deported his accusers. The situation, however, was still uncertain. In view of the plight of both pope and Byzantine emperor, “the whole salvation of the church of Christ” rested (so Alcuin wrote) in Charlemagne’s hands, and in the autumn of 800 he set out for Rome “to restore the state of the church which was greatly disturbed.” On December 23 Leo solemnly purged himself of the charges against him. Two days later, on December 25, a large gathering assembled in St. Peter’s, where the Pope was to consecrate Charlemagne’s son as king. Suddenly, as Charlemagne rose from prayer, Leo placed a crown on his head and, while the assembled Romans acclaimed him as “Augustus and emperor,” the Pope abased himself before Charlemagne, “adoring” him “after the manner of the emperors of old.”

It seems clear that this coronation was the work of the papacy, not of the Frankish king, who is said to have been surprised and angry at it. The immediate beneficiary of the coronation was the pope, whose position henceforth was secure. Charlemagne was left to face its momentous consequences and, particularly, to secure that recognition from Constantinople without which his title was legally invalid. This, according to the chronicler Theophanes, he sought to do by offering marriage to the empress Irene, hoping thus “to reunite east and west.” If so, a revolution in Constantinople and the deposition of Irene in 802 brought the plan to nothing. In any case, the coronation of Charlemagne was an extralegal, indeed an illegal and revolutionary, proceeding. The pope had no right to make him emperor. Nor did the coronation create a new western by the side of the existing eastern empire. A usurper in the eyes of the Byzantines, Charlemagne had not the least prospect of succeeding to the throne of the Caesars. The only imperial territories on which he laid hands were the duchy of Rome and the former exarchate. Otherwise he remained, as before, king of the Franks and of the Lombards. In view of the fact that in 806 he made arrangements to divide his territories among his three sons, one may doubt whether Charlemagne’s empire would have survived had not the two elder sons died before him, leaving the undivided inheritance in 814 to the third son, Louis I the Pious.

Although the immediate context of the imperial coronation of 800 was limited, it had wider connotations. In the first place, the separation between East and West had become an accomplished fact in the political sphere; for, though the intention in 800 was not to divide the empire, this was the practical outcome. In 812, after unsuccessful war and wearisome negotiation, the Byzantine emperor Michael I recognized Charlemagne’s imperial title. It was still a personal title, and Charlemagne was recognized merely as emperor, not as emperor of the Romans; in other words, the emperor in Constantinople maintained his claim to be the only true successor to the Roman Caesars. Furthermore, the recognition was grudgingly given, and later, when Byzantium was stronger and the Carolingians weaker, Michael’s successors refused to extend it automatically to Charlemagne’s successors. Thus the second consequence of the act of 800 was a rivalry with Constantinople, which remained an important factor in imperial history at least until 1204. In the third place, Charlemagne’s coronation involved him and his successors ever more deeply in the ecumenical pretensions of the papacy.

The relationship between the papacy and the Frankish rulers, close for nearly 50 years before 800, was intensified when the Roman see became the first metropolitan church of Charlemagne’s dominions. Religious emperors and their ecclesiastical advisers would henceforward see as the main function attaching to their imperial dignity the promotion of Christian unity. Furthermore, the fact that the pope had crowned Charlemagne emperor—rightfully or not—could not but impress. It was the pope who had taken the initiative. Had he not, in fact, constituted Charlemagne emperor? In Innocent III’s time it was to be argued that Pope Leo III had transferred the empire from the Greeks to the Germans and that his successors could transfer it elsewhere if they so wished. This was a later doctrine; but already to Charlemagne the dangers were evident. Hence when, in 813 after his agreement with Michael I, Charlemagne decided to associate his surviving son, Louis, in the exercise of imperial power, he framed his actions accordingly. The ceremony took place not in Rome but in the imperial chapel at Aachen; the pope was not present; the constitutive act was the acclamation of the gathered Frankish nobility; and Louis either received the diadem from his father or took it with his own hands from the altar. The contrast with the Roman ceremony of 800 was deliberate. Henceforward the conflict between the two contrary views or theories of the empire—the papal and the Frankish—was to be a dominant theme.