Sources

The coronation itself was significant for many reasons. Constitutionally it made the Pope and Charles traitors to the eastern Emperor. Charles apparently realised this, and, again being a widower, proposed marrying Irene, the eastern Empress, in order to unite the two parts of the Empire and thus avoid trouble.[311:3]But so frequently had the Pope and the Romans broken their allegiance to the East, that this act was not generally viewed as a rebellion. Furthermore, they assumed that they stood upon the lofty ground of right in making the transfer. Henceforth, in the western lists of Emperors, Charles was made to follow Constantine VI. as the sixty-eighth successor of the first Roman Cæsar.[311:4]In 812, the eastern Emperor was induced to recognise his western brother's imperial title. The old Roman Empire was now restored in the West on a Germanic rather than a Roman basis, a fact which revealed the new and decisive Germanic element in the West. Both the Emperor and the Pope were benefited beyond measurement by the change, and it is difficult to say which the more. A Frankish ruler and his family had become the successors of the Cæsars. The Pope assumed that he had created the Emperor and henceforth insisted upon the necessity of papal consecration to the validity of imperial power.[312:1]The Pope had received a powerful defender and a master who laboured unceasingly to build up the Church. The foundation was laid for the two rival theories of the relation of Church and state, viz., the papal theory and the imperial theory. Henceforth, both Pope and Emperor have a new meaning and a different career. A new chapter in mediæval history and in European civilisation was introduced. Christmas 800 "was the most important day for the next thousand years of the world's history."[312:2]

The results of the rule of Charles as Emperor (800-814) will now be considered:

1.Religious.As Emperor, Charles regarded himself, like the early Cæsars, as the head of the Church. Hence he spent the winter of 800-801 in settling religious affairs in Italy. He insisted on rigid obedience in the hierarchy and the subjection of all ecclesiastical authority to the imperial will. "The Church had to obey him, not he the Church." The Pope was his chiefbishop in his capital city, but always treated with filial respect and consideration. The bishops were his sworn vassals, like counts. The appellate power of Rome was never once used during his rule. He held the appointment of the higher clergy in his own hands, though after 803, he permitted the appearance of a popular election.[313:1]He issued edicts on Church matters with as much authority as in purely secular affairs. In fact, in his laws the political and religious are so blended that they can hardly be separated.[313:2]His conception of the relation of the Church and state has played a vital part in the history of Europe down to the present time. That relationship was stated by Charles in these words: "It is my bounden duty, by the help of the divine compassion, everywhere to defend outwardly by arms the Holy Church of Christ against every attack of the heathen and every devastation caused by unbelievers, and inwardly to defend it by the recognition of the general faith. But it is your duty, Holy Father, to raise your hands to God, as Moses did, and to support my military services by your prayers."[313:3]It is very evident that in his mind the old Roman idea of the relation of Church and Empire was dominant. The connection of Church and state, which Constantine founded, he established on a firmer basis. The initiative and decision of all ecclesiastical cases were in his hands.[313:4]He called Church councils and presided over them just as he summoned his privy council. The council of Arles (813) sent him its canons to be changedand ratified at will.[314:1]Discipline, faith, and doctrine all came within his jurisdiction. He even putfilioqueinto the Nicene Creed against the Pope's remonstrances (809).[314:2]In short, he organised, systematised, and controlled the Church in all its branches as a necessary part of his theocracy.[314:3]He ruled as a David, or a Josiah rather than an Augustus or a Constantine. Churchmen of ability held seats in the civil assemblies and were given important political positions. The Church was forced to contribute soldiers and money to maintain the Empire,[314:4]although the clergy themselves in 801 were forbidden to participate in military life. At the same time, he gave the Church for the first time the legal right to collect tithes, bestowed rich gifts, and endowed monasteries, splendid churches and cathedrals. No wonder a satirical priest complained that the power of Peter was confined to heaven, while the Church militant was the property of the king of the Franks.

The Pope and clergy gladly acquiesced in the usurpation of Charles as they did in that of Constantine and even gave him the papal title of "Bishop of Bishops" and "David." The grateful Pope Adrian in a council of fifty-three bishops gave him the right to name successors for the Holy See.[314:5]This was little more, however, than the transference to Charles of a right exercised by all the eastern Emperors. Stephen IV. decreed that no Pope could be elected save in the presence of imperial delegates (815).[314:6]Pope Paschal III. had the great patron of the Church canonised. Even the Patriarch of Jerusalem recognised him as the head of Christendom and sent him the keys of the Holy Sepulchre on Mount Calvary and the flag of the city.[315:1]

2.Political.Charles clearly differentiated between his office as king and as Emperor. In recognition of his new dignity, he laid aside his German royal costume, and donned the Roman imperial tunic, chlamys, and sandals.[315:2]He ordered that "every man in his whole realm be he clergyman or be he layman, shall renew to him as Emperor the vow of fidelity previously taken to him as king," and that "those who have not yet taken the former vow, shall now do likewise, even down to boys twelve years of age" (802).[315:3]Rome was the capital of his Empire; Aachen, of his German kingdom. He divided his Empire among his three sons as kings, but the death of two of them left Louis both king and Emperor.[315:4]The Empire which he carved out with the sword was now unified and ruled by imperial law instead of tradition and custom. His Empire embraced all western continental Europe except central and southern Spain and southern Italy. It included Germans as well as Romans, Slavs, Celts, and Greeks, and was held together by an imperial army.[315:5]It united the Teutonic civilisation with the Romanic on a Christian basis. It was divided into twenty-two archbishoprics.

Charles, as the new Constantine of the West, was theabsolute sovereign of this realm. His laws covered every detail in the whole life of his people.[316:1]Bishops were forbidden to keep falcons; nuns must not write love letters; the kind of altar pieces used in Churches was specified; priests were not to wear shoes in divine services. A pure life was ordered for monks. Instructions were given to farmers for feeding hens and roosters; the kind of apples to be grown was prescribed; wine-presses and not feet-presses were to be used. Even the prices of food and of clothes were regulated by law—a fur coat, it was decreed, should sell for thirty shillings, a cloth coat for ten shillings.[316:2]The Empire was divided into districts and marks, ruled over by imperial "missi" and counts, who executed their master's will.[316:3]Yet notwithstanding these magnificent and successful efforts to thwart the Teutonic tendencies to localisation, each tribe was permitted to retain its own laws, its hereditary chiefs, and its free popular assemblies of freemen.

Charles never recognised the validity of the papal theory of the right of the Pope to crown and depose kings by virtue of his own coronation in 800. When he associated his son Louis with him in rule (813), Louis entered the Church with the king's crown already upon his head. Charles then ordered him to take the royal crown off and put on an imperial crown which lay on the Church altar. Neither the Pope's presence nor his sanction was asked. After Charles's death, however, the Pope carried the crown of Constantine to Germany and coronated Louis with it (816), and,before that time, his biographer does not call him Emperor.[317:1]

3.Educational.The reign of Charles the Great stands out as the sun between the intellectual night that preceded and the daylight that followed his rule.[317:2]He employed the Church as the best means for furthering the education of his Empire. The clergy and monks became the teachers and writers; the monasteries and churches were used as the seats of learning—the schoolrooms and schoolhouses. He issued important educational laws which practically created a very crude public school system and required all boys to have a general elementary education. His purpose was to make good Christians and good subjects.[317:3]The centre of his whole educational system was his famous "Court School," the very heart of Christian culture in Europe. In it, called from every section, were the leading scholars, divines, poets and historians of Europe. In addition to helping to educate the young princes of the country, they engaged in important literary activities. They compiled a German grammar, collected old German songs and minstrels, corrected the Latin Bible, wrote the Caroline books, collected manuscripts, revived the classics, and studied the Church Fathers.[317:4]

A careful analysis of the character of Charles the Great shows that he was a sincere Christian and faithful churchgoer, a great almsgiver and very kind to the poor, and a man who devoted his life to the upbuildingof a Christian civilisation.[318:1]Yet he was guilty of deeds which a higher conception of Christian morals condemns as un-Christian. He sacrificed thousands of lives to his passions and ambitions; for thirty years he waged a war of extermination against the Saxons and murdered more than 4000 prisoners in cold blood. Like Mohammed, he made his motto, submission to Christianity or death. Christians of that day, for the most part, pronounced his policy right, although some of the greatest, like Alcuin, denounced it. He had nine wives and concubines, and, like Henry VIII. of England, had little conscience in disposing of them. He was not highly cultured, yet he spoke Latin with ease and knew some Greek. When an old man, he learned to write and deserves great credit for the manner in which he encouraged education. He cultivated the society of the most cultured men in Europe and from them imbibed much. At meals he had read the heroic deeds of his ancestors, or some work of the Church Fathers like Augustine'sCity of God. As a warrior and statesman, only Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, and Constantine before his day can be compared with him. He was the first and greatest of all the German Emperors. Since his time, only Otto the Great, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon the Great, have any claim to rank as his peers. The Moses of the Middle Ages, he left an indelible stamp of his genius on Germany and France, continues to be the only common hero of both of these great nations, and through them modified the whole western world.[318:2]

Eight years before his death, Charles the Great made his three sons kings.[319:1]This act would have proved fatal to the Empire. Charles must have known from the writings of Gregory of Tours, the dangers of such an arrangement. The division made among his sons was unnatural, because it lacked unity in race and territory, but the death of Charles and Pepin, the eldest and second sons, prevented imperial suicide. Charles the Great then solemnly crowned the surviving son, Louis, as Emperor in 813. Louis the Pious (814-840) sought to preserve both the Carolingian practice of division and the integrity of the Empire. At Aachen, in 817, to prevent the Empire's being "broken by man lest thereby a scandal, to the Holy Church might arise," Louis made his eldest son, Lothair, co-Emperor, and, with the consent of the people, crowned him.[319:2]The younger sons were made kings butsub seniore fratre. Their territorial districts were clearly defined and elaborate instructions were given about their various relations.[319:3]In 819, Louis married again and soon a fourth son, Charles the Bald, appeared to complicate matters (823). Louis then made a new division of the Empire in order to provide for the new claimant.[319:4]A long list of territorial changes, and disgraceful, ruinous, internecine wars resulted.

Louis the Pious died in 840, and was succeeded byLothair as sole Emperor. His brothers, Louis and Charles (Pepin was now dead), rebelled against him and forced him to restrict his possessions to Italy and a narrow strip running from Italy to the North Sea (843). But Lothair, tired of the cares of this life retired to a monastery in 855 after dividing his imperial territory among his three sons.

As a result of the Carolingian policy of division, the Empire so skilfully constructed by Charles the Great, was almost destroyed. Division of rule meant division of resources. The successors of Charles the Great were men of inferior ability. His son, Louis the Pious, was a weak, easily influenced ruler and completely under the thumbs of the clergy. He made some noble efforts to reform the court, but only aroused the enmity of the aristocracy. Lothair, Louis II., and Charles the Bald were Emperors of as short-sighted a policy and of as little ability. Civil wars were almost incessant; nobles held in subjection by the great Charles reasserted their independence; the Northmen,[320:1]Slavs, Hungarians[320:2]and Saracens began to make disastrous inroads; imperial laws were disregarded; and by the end of the ninth century, the Empire of Charles the Great was little more than an empty title hardly worth fighting for.[320:3]

Another significant result of the decline of the Carolingian Empire was the rise of modern states. By the treaty of Verdun in 843,[320:4]Louis the German (d. 876) was given Germany east of the Rhine; Charlesthe Bald (d. 877) received what is approximately France of to-day; and Lothair as Emperor (d. 855) was left Italy and a narrow strip to the North Sea with the two capitals in it. To confirm the treaty of Verdun, Louis and Charles with their followers, took the famous Strassburg oaths.[321:1]Louis and the French army took the oath in Latin; Charles and the Germans took it in German; and this is the first recognition in Europe of differences of race and language as a basis for political action.[321:2]The treaty of Meersen[321:3]in 870 completed the separation of Italy, Germany, and France by dividing the "strip of trouble" given to Lothair in 843. Here was the beginning of mediæval and modern France, Germany, and Italy. The Carolingian Empire virtually ended with Charles the Fat (888). Disintegration soon divided Europe among a multitude of petty feudal sovereigns with warring policies and interests.[321:4]

Ecclesiastically, the Papacy was immediately strengthened. The supremacy of the state over the Church, which Charles the Great established and which Louis the Pious had inherited, but did not use to much advantage,[321:5]was removed. Thisrelease from secular control furnished an excellent occasion and opportunity for the rapid growth of the papal theory which culminated in the lofty claim of Pope Nicholas I. to independence of imperial control and supremacy over it. Again and again the Pope was called upon to act as arbitrator in the disputes and wars. The power of bishops and metropolitans was likewise increased and for a similar reason, but the general decline in civilisation carried the Church inevitably with it. The anarchy and confusion which resulted, formed an excellent cover for the promulgation of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. Ultimately the Papacy was weakened by the decline of the Empire and the rise of national states, because there was a tendency to create national churches and to set up kings who questioned the Pope's claim to political supremacy. Indirectly it led to the Protestant Revolution.

FOOTNOTES:

[289:1]Justinian,Inst., i., ii., 6.

[290:1]Eph. vi., 5; Col. iii., 22; Tit. ii., 9; 1 Pet. ii., 18.

[290:2]Rom. xiii., 1-7;cf.Heb. xiii., 17; 1 Pet. ii., 13.

[290:3]Rom. xiii., 6-7.

[290:4]See Tertullian,Lib. ad Scap., for a later recognition of the divine right theory.

[290:5]1 Peter ii., 13, 14.

[290:6]Tertullian,Apol., c. 5 and 26.

[291:1]Tertullian,Apol., c. 34; c. 42;De Corona Milit., c. 11;De Idololatria, c. 17. See Milman, bk. ii., ch. 7.

[291:2]Milman, ii., 231; Gibbon, ch. 16.

[292:1]Ranke,Hist. of the Popes.

[292:2]The title was used down to the time of Gratian in 380.

[293:1]Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 15.

[293:2]See Schaff, iii., § 13.

[293:3]Ibid., § 22, 23.

[294:1]Harduin, i., 543; Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 13ff.

[294:2]Cod. Theod., lib. xvi, tit. ii., 1, 15.

[294:3]Harduin, i., 1538.

[294:4]Ib., ii., 559.

[294:5]Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 15.

[295:1]Theodoret, v., 3.

[295:2]Socrates, iv., 29.

[295:3]Goldast,Const. Imp., iii., 587; Harduin, i., 1238.

[295:4]Harduin, i., 842.

[295:5]The laws relating to the Church passed between the time of Constantine and the promulgation of the Theodosian Code in 438 are mostly contained in the sixteenth book of that code. The laws passed between 438 and 534 are found in the Justinian Code which was published in revised form in that year. See Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 16.

[296:1]Goldast, iii., 95, 615.

[296:2]Cassiodorus,Varior., ix., 15.

[297:1]These laws are found in the Justinian Code and in theNovellæ, and cover the period from 534 to 565. Excellent translation by Moyle, Oxf. 1889.

[297:2]Novellæ, 42.

[297:3]The 134th Novella is a small code in itself.

[298:1]Greenwood,Cathedra Petri, ii., 163.

[298:2]Baronius,Ann., 587, § 5.

[299:1]Bk. ii., letters 62, 65.

[299:2]Bk. iii., letter 65. Comp. bk. v., letter 40. Greenwood,Cathedra Petri, ii., 233.

[299:3]Bk. vi., letter 2.

[299:4]Anastasius,Biblioth., No. 81.

[300:1]Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 31.

[302:1]SeeCh. XII.

[303:1]Hardwick,Hist. Christ. Ch. in M. A., 54.

[303:2]Lea,Stud. in Ch. Hist., 84-87.

[303:3]Richter, 36.

[303:4]Robinson,Readings, i., 120.

[303:5]Bede, v., 10;Migne, vols. 86-88.

[303:6]Waitz, iii., 23, note 3.

[303:7]Cf.Thatcher and McNeal, No. 43.

[304:1]Richter, i., 200.

[304:2]Robinson,Readings, i., 120; Ogg,Source Book, § 14; Pertz, i., 136.

[305:1]Ogg,Source Book, § 14; Thatcher and McNeal, No. 6.

[305:2]Robinson,Readings, i., 122.

[305:3]Pertz, i., 293; Thatcher and McNeal, No. 44.

[305:4]Ib., No. 6; Robinson,Readings, i., 122;Migne, lxxi., 911. The title of "patrician" was introduced by Constantine. It was the name of a rank, not of an office, and was next to that of Emperor and consul. Hence it was usually conferred upon governors of the first class, and even upon barbarian chiefs whom the Emperor might wish to win. Thus, Odoacer, Theodoric, and Clovis had all received the title from the eastern court. Later it was even given to Mohammedan princes. It was very significant now that the Pope assumed the imperial right to confer it, because it was plainly an illegal usurpation. It made Pepin practically the viceroy of Italy and the protector of the Papacy. (See Smith and Cheetham.)

[306:1]Migne, lxxxix., 1004; see Robinson,Readings, i., 122; Greenwood,Cathedra Petri, iii., 388.

[306:2]Muratori, iii., 96;Migne, cxxviii., 1098.

[306:3]Thatcher and McNeal, No. 45. (Baronius,Ann., 755;Migne, cxxviii., 1099.) See Wiltsch,Geog. and Statistics of the Ch., i., 264.

[306:4]Gibbon, ch. 59.

[306:5]See "Donation of Constantine" in Henderson, 319.

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