From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 182-206.
CHAPTER XI
Carolus Augustus
The events described at the end of the last chapter happened in August 797. In the autumn of the following year, when Charles was resting at Aachen from the fatigues of a Saxon campaign on the banks of the Elbe, there appeared before him two Byzantine ambassadors, Michael, aforetime Patrician of Phrygia, and Theophilus, a priest of Blachernæ, who, on behalf of the Empress Irene, sought for and obtained the restoration of friendly relations between the empire and the kingdom. The covenant of peace was ratified by the return of an illustrious Greek captive, Sisinnius, brother of the Patriarch Tarasius, who had been taken prisoner probably in the Apulian war of 788.
But a far more distinguished visitor than either Michael or Theophilus was to visit Charles’s court in the following year, and to plead in lowlier fashion for his help. To understand the nature of this visit we must go back for a few years and glance at the events which had been happening not in the New, but in the Old Rome.
On the day after Christmas Day, 795, died Pope 183 Hadrian I. after a long and eventful pontificate. The relations between him and Charles had not been always friendly, for Hadrian had found that no more than the Lombard king would the Frank grant the exorbitant demands for towns and lordships which were unceasingly urged in the name of St. Peter. Still there had been a certain similarity of spirit and temper which had drawn these two strong men together, and, as we have already seen, Charles mourned for the death of Hadrian as if he had been the dearest of his friends.
On the death of Hadrian, Leo III. was immediately elected to the papal throne. He was a Roman by birth, an intimate from his childhood of the Lateran palace, and had gone through the regular gradation of ecclesiastical offices till he had reached the high position of papal vestararius. It would seem probable that he was the candidate most acceptable to the clerics of the Roman Church, though the result showed that there was a large party among the great lay-officers of the papal court to whom his elevation was by no means welcome. He was, at a crisis of his fortunes, accused by bitter enemies of adultery and forgery, but no proof was offered of these charges, and there seems no reason to believe that his moral character was not stainless. There are some indications, however, that he was not loved by the people of Rome. Possibly his temper may have been harsh: possibly too they were beginning to chafe under the yoke of the dignitary who but lately was their spiritual pastor, sometimes their champion, but who now asserted himself as their sovereign.
Immediately on his elevation, Pope Leo sent 184 messengers to Charles announcing his election and carrying to him the keys of St. Peter’s tomb and the banner of the city of Rome. This act of submission to the great Patrician of Rome, to whom the pope looked for confirmation of his rights and protection from his enemies, was represented in the celebrated mosaic in the Triclinium of the Lateran palace, of which a tolerably accurate seventeenth-century copy still exists on the outside wall of the oratory called the Sancta Sanctorum, immediately in front of the Lateran. In it the Apostle Peter, of colossal size, is represented sitting with the keys on his lap. Before him, on his right, kneels Pope Leo, to whom he is giving the pallium; on his left “our lord Carulus,” to whom he gives a banner; and underneath is an inscription in barbarous Latin stating that the blessed Peter gives life to Pope Leo and victory to King Charles. Charles is represented as wearing a moustache, but no beard. He has a broad pleasant face and is crowned with a conical diadem.
The Frankish king replied to the new pope by sending to him his friend and chaplain Angilbert, bearing a letter in which he dilated on the various duties which Providence had assigned to its sender and its receiver. “It is ours with the help of the divine piety externally to defend the Holy Church of Christ by our arms from all pagan inroads and infidel devastation, and internally to fortify it by the recognition of the Catholic faith. It is yours, most holy father, with hands raised to God like Moses, to help our warfare; that by your intercession the Christian people may everywhere have the victory over its enemies, and the name 185 of our Lord Jesus Christ may be magnified throughout the whole world.” At the same time Angilbert brought the share of the Avar booty which Charles had set aside for Hadrian, but which came too late to gladden the heart of the aging pontiff.
This exchange of embassies took place in 796. Two years later the Christian world was horrified by the news of a brutal outrage enacted in the streets of Rome. On the 25th of April 798, the pope was mounted and preparing to ride forth from Rome along the Flaminian Way, in order to celebrate what was called the Greater Litany, a religious function which had taken the place of the heathen Robigalia and in which the Divine protection was implored for the springing corn against the perils of blasting and mildew. Suddenly, ere he had emerged from the city, he was set upon by a band of ruffians who had been lying in wait at the church of St. Silvestro in Capite, on the right hand of the Corso. They tore him from his horse, they belaboured him with cudgels; according to one account they tried to practise upon him the Byzantine atrocities of pulling out the eyes and cutting out the tongue; at any rate they left him speechless and helpless in the solitary street, for all his long train of attendants, as well as the crowd which had gathered after him to go forth in bright procession along the Flaminian Way, forsook him and fled.
There is some reason to suppose that this attack was an outburst of civic fury, exasperated by some acts of the unpopular pontiff; but there is no doubt that the movement was directed by two men, Paschalis and Campulus, who were high in office in the papal household, 186 and one or both of whom were nephews of the pope’s predecessor Hadrian. A lurid light is shed by this fact on the heart-burnings and angry disappointments which were often caused among the clients of a deceased pope by the election of his successor.
After suffering many indignities the unhappy Leo was dragged at night to the monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cœlian hill. Here he was closely confined for some days, but he recovered somewhat from his bruises, and sight returned — miraculously the next generation said — to his injured eyes. By the help a faithful servant, his chamberlain Albinus, he succeeded in escaping — probably by a rope — down the wall of the convent, and was taken by his friends to St. Peter’s. Here he was soon in perfect safety, for the Frankish duke of Spoleto, Winighis, who had heard of the murderous assault, came with an army to his rescue and escorted him to his own city, a safe stronghold among the mountains of Umbria. The foiled conspirators, who had heard with terror of their victim’s flight, vented their rage on the house of Albinus, which they gave to the flames. Probably for many subsequent months anarchy ruled in Rome.
In the disturbed state of Italy, and with Rome given over to his unscrupulous foes, the only resource left for the pope was in the protection of Charles; and to his court, or rather to his camp, for he was immersed in the Saxon war, Leo III. repaired in the summer of 799. It was now more than forty-five years since a pope (Stephen II.) had crossed the Alps on a similar errand. Much had happened in the interval. The monarchy of the “most unspeakable” Lombards had been overthrown; the successor of St. Peter had become one of the great 187 princes of the earth; and yet, as Leo must with sadness have reflected, not even sovereignty had brought safety. “Wounded in the house of his friends,” the Bishop of Rome had received from the hands of his own courtiers and subjects treatment infinitely more cruel and contumelious than any that the much vituperated Lombard had ever inflicted on his predecessors. Musing on these things Pope Leo doubtless saw that the day-dream of a papal sovereignty extending over all Italy could not be realised. Rather must he make his Frankish friend and protector stronger in Italy. The Patrician of Rome must take some higher and more imposing title, and must be induced to give more assiduous attention to the affairs of the Italian peninsula.
As in that earlier papal visit Charles, then a lad of twelve, had been sent to meet Stephen II., so now did Charles send his son Pippin (a young man of twenty-two, and the crowned king of Italy) to meet Pope Leo. Pippin escorted the venerable guest into his father’s presence. Pope and king embraced and kissed with tears. The clergy in the papal train intoned the Gloria in Excelsis, and the nobles and courtiers round added their joyful acclamations. This meeting took place at Paderborn, where Charles had built a new and splendid church in the place of the edifice often destroyed by the Saxons. In this church Pope Leo hallowed an altar, which he enriched with relics of the protomartyr Stephen brought by him from Rome, and assured the king that by the powerful intercession of that saint the church would be preserved from future devastation.
Leo remained probably for about two months, from July to September, at Paderborn, in constant intercourse 188 with Charles. Much would doubtless be said in the conferences between the two potentates concerning the condition of the Church, the heresy of the Adoptians, the Iconoclastic controversy, and above all concerning the charges brought against the pope’s character by his relentless enemies in Rome. Was there also something said about that great event towards which, as we know, the course of history was tending, the bestowal of the imperial title on Charles? Here we have only conjectures to guide us, but in these conjectures we must take account of one most powerful influence upon which I have hitherto been silent, the influence of the absent, but continually consulted Northumbrian, Alcuin.
Alcuin, born of a noble Anglian family about the year 735, and therefore some seven years older than Charles, was brought up from childhood in the monastic seminary of York, and there drank in with eager lips the learning, deepest and best of its day in all Europe, which the celebrated school imparted to its pupils. Bede, it is true, had died about the time of Alcuin’s birth, but from Bede’s pupil Ecgbert, Archbishop of York (732-766), and from his successor Ælbert (767-778), he acquired a knowledge, not only of theology, but also of many secular arts and sciences. To astronomy he was led by the intricate calculations and endless discussions concerning the true date of Easter. But in the archiepiscopal library, as Alcuin himself tells us, there was also a respectable collection of the Latin classics, Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius are all enumerated by him, as well as Aristotle, who was probably represented only by a Latin translation. To the study of these authors the young Northumbrian gave many industrious years; 189 Virgil especially was long the master of his soul, and the legends of a later generation told how the visit of an evil spirit to his cell was necessary to frighten him away from the nocturnal study of the Mantuan bard into the repetition of the Psalms appointed for the midnight service. Certain it is, however, that he did not forsake the study of profane authors, until they had thoroughly permeated his style. Although an ecclesiastic he wrote Latin, both prose and verse, of which no Roman in the first century need have been ashamed. To pass from the continual barbarisms, obscurities, puerilities of Gregory of Tours, of Fredegarius, or even of the authors of the Liber Pontificalis, to the easily flowing prose, or hexameter verse of Alcuin is like going from the ill-spelt productions of a half-educated ploughman to the letters of Cowper or the poetry of Goldsmith.
Alcuin has been called the Erasmus of the eighth century, and though in one respect the comparison is too flattering, since the Northumbrian did but little for critical science, it gives on the whole not an incorrect impression of the literary position of this man, the “child and champion” of the Carolingian Renascence. It is evident that he and the men with whom he associated, Angles, Saxons, or Franks, were tired of the barbarism which had pervaded Europe for three centuries, and looked back with longing, perhaps sometimes with unwise longing, to the great days of Roman supremacy and peace. Even their Teutonic names were to them somewhat of a humiliation. In the literary circle or academy which formed itself in Charles’s court, chiefly under Alcuin’s influence, the members assumed classical names (like the Melancthon and Œcolampadius of a later 190 Renascence), and corresponded with one another under these disguises. Thus Alcuin himself was Flaccus Albinus, Riculf (afterwards Archbishop of Mainz) was Damœtas; Angilbert, Charles’s chaplain, was Homer; Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg, was Aquila. The name of the great king himself was David, a name admirably chosen to express his piety, his success in war, and his love of women.
The event which brought “Albinus” and his “dearest David” together was a journey which Alcuin undertook to Rome in 781, in order to obtain the pallium for his friend and superior, Eanbald II., Archbishop of York. Alcuin himself was at this time, and in fact throughout middle life and old age, only a deacon, though from his learning and piety he wielded more influence than many bishops. Returning from Rome, he met Charles at Parma, and was entreated by him to return to Frank-land on the accomplishment of his mission. He protested that he could only do this with the consent of his king and his archbishop, and these consents having been obtained he returned to Charles’s court and resided there, a sort of literary prime minister, from 782 to 796, with the exception of a visit to his own country between 790 and 792. Though apparently he never entered the monastic state, he received from Charles, as a piece of preferment, the headship of two abbeys, that of Bethlehem at Ferrières and that of St. Lupus at Troyes. In 796, feeling the need of repose, he obtained his master’s reluctant permission to retire to the great monastery of St. Martin at Tours, which was placed under his rule, and where he spent the remainder of his days. This absence from the court is a fortunate thing 191 for us, for to it we owe the letters between Charles and Alcuin, of which a considerable number are still preserved, and which show both king and deacon in no unpleasing light. Sometimes Alcuin advises the king to treat the conquered Saxons and Avars tenderly, and not to gall them with the yoke of tithes. Sometimes he explains to his royal friend the meaning of the terms Septuagesima and Sexagesima. Then he enters into long discussions about the calendar, the date of Easter, the intercalations necessary to bring the solar and the lunar years into harmony. The king half mischievously refers these calculations to the well-taught pages of his palace, who discover in them some errors, which, after much mutual banter, the elder scholar is compelled to acknowledge. Always, however, the intercourse is friendly, sincere, elevating. The king does not patronise, and the deacon does not cringe. One cannot but feel in reading these letters that both men were made to be loved.
Such was the man who, as there is every reason to believe, had whispered to many of his friends the fateful word “Imperator” before Pope Leo III. arrived, a hunted and half-blinded fugitive, at Charles’s court.
In the month of May (799) Alcuin had written to his royal master a remarkable letter, commenting on the tidings which Charles had sent him of the assault on Pope Leo. From this letter it will be well to extract some sentences.
“To his peace-making lord King David, Albinus wishes health. I thank your Goodness, sweetest David, for remembering my littleness and making me acquainted with the facts which your faithful servant has brought to my ears. Were I present with 192 you I should have many counsels to offer to your Dignity, if you had opportunity to listen or I eloquence to speak. For I love to write concerning your prosperity, the stability of the kingdom given you by God and the advancement of the Holy Church of Christ. All which are much troubled and stained by the daring deeds of wicked men which have been perpetrated, not on obscure and ignoble persons, but on the greatest and the highest.
“For there have been hitherto three persons higher than all others in this world. One is the Apostolic Sublimity who rules by vicarious power from the seat of St. Peter, prince of the apostles. And what has been done to him, who was the ruler of the aforesaid see, you have in your goodness informed me.
“The second is the Imperial dignity and power of the second Rome. How impiously the governor of that empire [Constantine VI.] has been deposed, not by aliens but by his own people and fellow citizens, universal rumour tells us.
“The third is the royal dignity in which the decree of our Lord Jesus Christ has placed you as ruler of the Christian people, more excellent in power than the other aforesaid dignities, more illustrious in wisdom, more sublime in the dignity of your kingdom. Lo! now on you alone the salvation of the churches of Christ falls and rests. You are the avenger of crimes, the guide of the wanderers, the comforter of the mourners, the exalter of the good.
“Have not the most frightful examples of wickedness now made themselves manifest in the Roman see where of old there was the brightest religion and piety? These 193 men, blinded in their own hearts, have blinded him who was their true head. There is in that place no fear of God, no wisdom, no charity. What good thing can you look for where these are absent? These are the perilous times long since foretold by Him who was Himself the Truth, and therefore the love of many waxes cold.”
Alcuin then advises his royal friend to make peace if possible with the “unutterable” people (the Saxons), to forbear threats in dealing with them and to intermit, at any rate for a time, the exaction of tithes. Evidently this prudent counsellor felt that the affairs of Italy had now the most pressing claim on his master’s attention, and that it would be wise to concentrate all his forces for the solution of the problem which there awaited him.
It was then to a monarch thus prepossessed in his favour by the representations of one of his nearest friends that Leo III. appealed in the interview at Paderborn. The pope’s accusers sent their representatives to the Saxon towns, repeating the charges of adultery and perjury, and claiming that the pope should be called upon to deny the truth of these charges on oath. Privily they gave him the advice of professed well-wishers that he should give up the contest, lay down his papal dignity and retire in peace to some convent. But the king, while reserving investigation into these charges for some future assembly to be held in Rome, showed by his conduct that he attached to them but little importance. After several weeks’ sojourn at Paderborn, Leo was dismissed with all honour from the camp and was escorted by royal missi reverently back to Rome, where he received an enthusiastic 194 welcome from his penitent subjects (30th November 799).
The close of this year was saddened by the tidings of the death of those two brave champions of Frankish civilisation, Gerold and Eric. In the spring of 800, Charles set forth on an expedition into Neustria, a part of his dominions which he had apparently not visited for two-and-twenty years. Piratical raids of the Northmen seem to have been the determining cause of this expedition, the object of which was to put the coast of the Channel in a proper state of defence. He also, however, received the submission of some Breton chiefs who had long been in a chronic condition of revolt; he made the round of his villas and country palaces in Neustria; and above all he visited the tomb of St. Martin at Tours, and had a long spell of close and confidential intercourse with his friend Alcuin. Here at Tours his fifth and last wife Liutgard died (4th June 800), and her illness probably lengthened his stay in that city. At length, after revisiting Rhine-land and holding a placitum at Mainz (August 800) he began his last and most celebrated journey into Italy.
Having rested for seven days at Ravenna, where he probably inhabited the palace built by Theodoric wherein the Byzantine exarch had dwelt, he marched down the coast of the Adriatic to Ancona. From thence he despatched his son Pippin to lay waste the territories of that unruly vassal Grimwald of Benevento. Charles himself proceeded through the Picene and Sabine districts by the old Via Salaria, and arrived at Nomentum, fourteen miles from Rome. Here he was met by the pope, who accosted him with every show of humility 195 and deference. Pope and king supped together at Nomentum, and then Leo returned to arrange for the triumphal entry into Rome. Next day (24th November 800) this great pageant was enacted. The banners of the city of Rome borne by citizens, the gilt crosses borne by ecclesiastics, came in long procession to meet the great Patrician. Groups of citizens and of the foreigners resident in Rome, Franks, Frisian, Saxons (among the latter doubtless many of our own countrymen), stationed at intervals along the Salarian Way, thundered forth their laudes as the king rode by. St. Peter’s Church, now as before, was the goal of his pilgrimage, and on the broad marble steps stood the pope, with all his train of bishops and clergy, to welcome him. He sprang from his horse, mounted the steps (not now apparently on his knees), and after receiving the papal blessing went in and paid his devotions at the tomb of St. Peter.
The chief business which had brought King Charles to Rome was, of course, the enquiry into the brutal assault on the pope and the clearing of his character from the charges brought against him. Already the Frankish missi who accompanied Leo to Rome had held a preliminary enquiry, the result of which was that Paschalis and Campulus had been sent across the Alps to Charles for judgment. Now apparently they returned in his train, not so much to defend themselves on the score of the outrage (for their guilt was too clear) as to prove, if they could, their oft-repeated accusations. A great synod was assembled at St. Peter’s on the 1st of December, and opened by a speech from the king. According to the papal biographer, the ecclesiastics composing the synod all with one accord declared: 196 “We do not dare to judge the Apostolic see, which is the head of all the Church of God; for by it and by the Apostle’s vicar we all are judged, but the see itself is judged of no man, and this has been the custom from old time.” Whether this high papal doctrine was proclaimed and accepted or not, it certainly seems as if Paschalis and Campulus entirely failed to make good their charges; but the pope offered, if his conduct were not drawn into a precedent against his successors, to accept the challenge to clear himself by oath from the charges brought against him. It is possible that the pope was only slowly brought to make this concession, for it was not till more than three weeks after the assembling of the synod that the next step was taken. On the 23rd of December, in the presence of the Roman clergy, as well as of the Frankish followers of the king, Pope Leo appeared in the ambo of St. Peter’s, bearing a copy of the four gospels, which he clasped to his breast, and then he swore with a loud and clear voice: “Of all those charges which the Romans, my unjust persecutors, have brought against me, I declare in the presence of God and St. Peter, in whose church I stand, that I am innocent, since I have neither done those things whereof I am accused nor procured the doing of them.”
The result of the whole investigation was that Paschalis and Campulus and their accomplices were found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, a sentence which, on the intercession of the pope, was commuted to perpetual banishment into Frank-land.
During the weeks that the papal trial was proceeding Charles, of course, abode in Rome, whether in one of the old imperial dwellings on the Palatine, or as an honoured 197 guest of the pope at the Lateran we are not informed. It was observed that now, as on the occasion of a previous visit to Rome, out of courtesy to the pope he laid aside his Frankish dress — a tunic with silver border, a vest of otterskins and sable, and a blue cloak — and wore instead, after the Roman fashion, a long tunic and a chlamys over it, shoes also made like those of the Romans, instead of his Frankish boots with stockings and garters.
It was precisely during this month of December that by a fortunate coincidence, the priest Zacharias, whom more than a year before Charles had sent on a mission to the holy places, returned from the East. Two monks came with him, from Olivet and St. Saba, sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and bringing by way of blessing from that ecclesiastic the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of Calvary, of Jerusalem and Mount Zion, together with a consecrated banner. A more striking testimony to the world-wide fame of the Frankish emperor could hardly have been rendered than this, which must have been meant to invest Charles with a kind of protectorate over the most sacred sites in Christendom.
The pope’s solemn oath of self-exculpation was sworn on the 23rd of December. Two days later was transacted that yet more solemn ceremony by which the Patriarch of the Western Church, thus purged from the stains which his assailants had sought to cast upon his character, bestowed upon his royal champion that title which set him highest among the rulers of the Christian world. The scene was again laid in the great basilica of St. Peter, a building, of course, utterly unlike to the vast Renaissance temple of Bramante and Michael 198 Angelo. There, on Christmas morning, Charles the Frank was worshipping before the Confessio or tomb of St. Peter. The stately Roman chlamys hung around his shoulders; the crowd that filled the basilica could see with satisfaction the dainty Roman buskins of the kneeling monarch. When he rose from prayer Pope Leo approached him, placed upon his head a costly golden crown, and clothed him in the purple mantle of empire. “Then,” says the papal biographer, “all the faithful Romans, beholding so great a champion given them, and knowing the love which he bare to the Holy Roman Church and its vicar, in obedience to the will of God and St. Peter, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, cried out with deep accordant voices: ‘To Charles, most pious and august, crowned by God, the great and peace-bringing emperor, be life and victory!’ ” Thereupon the people sang their jubilant laudes, and the pope performed that lowly adoration wherewith his predecessors had been wont to greet a Valentinian or a Theodosius.
The deed was done, and the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted a thousand years, and only in the days of our fathers was shattered by the fist of Napoleon, was established, or (as Alcuin and Leo would have said) was re-established in Europe. It was a revolution, no doubt, that was enacted on that morning of the 25th of December 800. It could not have been justified out of the Digest or the Code. According to all the maxims of legitimacy which had prevailed for many preceding centuries, Charles was an usurper and Leo an intermeddling traitor. And yet, if one could go back still earlier to the first days of the empire, the bestowal 199 of the imperial title on Charles was not so utterly lawless a proceeding. The Roman Imperator in those early centuries was not by any elaborate process elected, but was always acclaimed. Acclaimed by the army, it is true, but also by the people, and there were doubtless many soldiers of the militia cohortalis of Rome present among the crowd who shouted for life and victory to the peace-bringing emperor. When acclaimed by army and people the Cæsar was, or ought to be, accepted by the Senate; and there are some indications that after centuries of suspended animation a body calling itself the Senate was at this time existing in Rome and consenting to the elevation of Charles. And these bodies, Senate, people, army, however insignificant in themselves, were at any rate Roman: they belonged to the true old Rome; they trod the forum of the republic, and looked up to the Palatine of the emperors; they were not like the bastard Romans of the Bosphorus, who chattered in Greek and wore the robes of Asia, but who had usurped for so many centuries the profitable trademark of the Senate and People of Rome. So, though there was but one precedent — and that the bad one of Maximin the Thracian — for conferring the dignity of emperor on a man of purely Teutonic descent, and though it is quite impossible to find a place for the chief actor, the Bishop of Rome, in the drama as played by all the earlier Cæsars, we may on the whole conclude that Charles became Roman Emperor by as good a title as any who had worn the purple since the days of Theodosius.
What were the chief causes which led to this great change in the political constitution of Europe? They 200 have been already hinted at, and we shall probably not be wrong in enumerating them as follows.
First. — The great revival of classical learning, due chiefly to the labours of Anglo-Saxon scholars; a movement of which men like Bede and Alcuin were the standard-bearers. The minds which were influenced by this revival perceived plainly that the interests of civilisation, and to a certain extent of Christianity, had been in past centuries identical with those of the great Roman Empire; and from a genuine revival of that Empire (not from a mere ephemeral reconquest of certain cities or provinces by a spatharius or cubicularius setting sail from Constantinople), they anticipated, not altogether erroneously, great gains for the civilisation and the Christianity of the future.
Second. — The anomalous position of that which called itself the empire, which for the first time in its history found itself under what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of a woman,” and that woman the murderess of her child.
Third. — The brutal attack on Pope Leo made by the disappointed kinsmen of his predecessor. This event may well have produced an important change in the attitude of the pope towards the question of reviving the empire in the west. Before that day of April when he was assaulted by his own courtiers and left half dead in the streets of Rome, he may (as has been already hinted) have looked forward to a time when he should reign over the best part of Italy, subject to no king or governor; and when whispers reached him of the use of the words “Emperor” and “Imperial” by the learned ecclesiastics of Charles’s court he may in that 201 mood of mind have shown that their proposals were little to his taste. After that fatal day, his reluctance, if he had any, to see one man in the Italian peninsula holding an indisputably higher position than his own, was changed into eager acquiescence in the scheme. He was willing, nay anxious, to see the purple robe encircling the stalwart limbs of the Frankish conqueror, if only he himself might take shelter under that robe from the dagger of the assassin.
In all this it may be truly said that we have failed to consider one important factor in the problem, the desires and ambitions of Charles himself. Unfortunately a mystery which we cannot penetrate hangs over that very subject. One of his most intimate friends, his secretary Einhard, expressly says that Charles “at first so greatly disliked the title of Emperor and Augustus that he declared that if he could have known beforehand the intention of the pope he would never have entered the church on that day, though it was one of the holiest festivals of the year.”
It used to be assumed that this reluctance on the part of Charles to receive the new dignity was only a bit of well-played comedy between him and Leo, that the Frankish king had been long aspiring to the imperial dignity, and had even put constraint upon the pope to force him to take part in the coronation. More recent discussion has shaken our confidence in this easy solution of the problem: and probably the greater number of writers on the history of this period now hold that Charles was speaking the truth when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the pope’s proceedings. The cause of that dissatisfaction can only be conjectured. Einhard 202 seems to hint that it was fear of the resentment of the Byzantine Cæsars, but this hardly seems a sufficient cause to one who remembers the low estate of the eastern monarchy under Irene.
With much more probability Professor Dahn argues that what Charles disliked was not the bestowal of the title in itself but its bestowal by the pope. He thinks that Charles and his counsellors had already, in 799, virtually resolved on the revival of the empire, that the pope penetrated their design, and determined that if that step were taken he at least would be chief actor in the drama; that by his adroit tactics he, so to speak, forced Charles’s hand, and that the latter, foreseeing the evil consequences which would result form the precedent thus established, of a pope-crowned emperor, expressed his genuine feelings of vexation to his friend Einhard when he said, “Would that I had never entered St. Peter’s on Christmas Day.” Certainly the remembrance of all the miserable complications caused during the Middle Ages by the pope’s claim to set the crown on the head of the emperor would do much to justify the unwillingness of a statesman such as the Frankish king to bind this chain round the limbs of his successors.
But even beyond this it seems possible that Charles’s own mind was not fully made up as to the expediency of accepting the imperial diadem, by whomsoever bestowed. That the plan had been discussed (perhaps often discussed, through many years), by his more highly educated courtiers, cannot be denied. He may have been dazzled by the brilliancy of the position which was thus offered him; and yet the calmer judgment of that foreseeing mind of his may not have been satisfied 203 that it was altogether wise for him to accept it. The Frankish kingdom, as it had been built up by the valour and patience of Charles and his forefathers, was a splendid and solid reality. This restored empire of Rome that they talked of, would be even more splendid, but would it be equally substantial? After all, the whole Roman Orbis Terrarum was not subject to his sway. Was it wise to assume a title which seemed to assert a shadowy claim to vast unsubdued territories? Was it wise to claim for a Teuton king that all-embracing authority wherewith the legists had invested the Roman Imperator? The controversies of Guelphs and Ghibellines, which distracted Italy for centuries, show that these questions, if they presented themselves to the mind of Charles, were questions which greatly needed an answer. And there was also a difficulty, which has perhaps not been sufficiently dwelt upon, arising from Charles’s prospective division of his dominions among his sons. Charles, the eldest, was to succeed him in that Austrasian region which was the heart and stronghold of his kingdom. If any son were to inherit the Imperial dignity, sitting on a higher throne than his brethren and holding a certain pre-eminence over them, that son must be Charles. Yet Pippin, the second son, was the actual king and destined heir of Italy, and would rule over Rome, the city from which the Roman Emperor was to take his title. Here was the germ of probable future embroilments between his sons, such as the prudent Charles may well have feared to foster.
Upon the whole, therefore, it appears a probable conclusion that Charles, though he accepted the imperial crown, accepted it with genuine reluctance, and that he 204 was the passive approver rather than the active and ambitious contriver of the great revolution of 800.
In the summer of 801 Charles recrossed the Alps to his home in Rhine-land. In the thirteen years of life which remained to him he never again entered Italy, but he was, during the greater part of that time, well represented there by his son, the able and courageous Pippin.
A question which doubtless excited much interest in all the Frankish world was, how Charles’s assumption of the imperial title would be viewed at Constantinople. There must have been many among the Byzantine statesmen who bitterly resented it, but Irene’s position was too insecure to permit of her giving utterance to their indignation. It is indeed stated by a Greek chronicler that Charles sent an embassy to Constantinople proposing to unite the two empires by his own marriage with Irene, and that the project was only foiled by the opposition of the eunuch Aetius who was scheming to secure the succession for his brother. Whether this be true or not (and the entire silence of the Frankish authorities on the subject is somewhat suspicious), there is no doubt that a friendly embassy from Irene appeared at Charles’s court in 802, and was replied to by a return embassy, consisting of Bishop Jesse and Count Hrodgaud, who were despatched from Aachen in the same year, and that this embassy may have carried a declaration of love from the elderly Frank to the middle-aged Athenian. But not in such romantic fashion was the reconciliation of the two empires to be effected. While the bishop and the count were tarrying at Constantinople they were the unwilling spectators of a palace-revolution, which possibly may have been hastened by their presence 205 and by the fear of a treaty, wounding to the national pride. On the 31st October 802, Irene was deposed and the Grand Treasurer of the empire, Nicephorus, was raids to the throne. Irene’s life was spared, but she was banished to an island in the Sea of Marmora, and afterwards to the isle of Lesbos, where according to one account she was so meanly supplied with the necessaries of life by her penurious successor, that this proud and brilliant lady had to support herself by spinning. She died on the 9th August 803.
Again the precariousness of the new ruler’s position compelled him to assume a courteous tone towards the Frankish sovereign. Charles’s ambassadors were accompanied on their return journey by three envoys from Nicephorus, a bishop, an abbot, and a life-guardsman, who were charged with many professions of amity and good-will to the Frankish king. In all this, however, there was no sign of recognition of Charles as Emperor, and for any such recognition Charles apparently waited for eight years in vain.
In 806 there was actual war between the two states, the bone of contention being the little island-state of Venice, which was now rising into commercial importance and in whose obscure and entangled history two parties, a Frankish and a Byzantine, are dimly discernible. After a long time a fleet from Constantinople appeared for a second time in Venetian waters, but was not able to prevent the victory of Pippin, who made a grand attack by land and sea, and subdued apparently the cities of the lagunes, whose capital at this time shifted to the Rialto. This occurred in 810, but in the same year there appeared at Aachen an ambassador 206 from Nicephorus who probably, amid the usual unmeaning professions of friendship, conveyed a hint that his master might be willing, for a suitable compensation, to recognise Charles as Roman Emperor. On this hint, for which had waited with statesmanlike patience, the Frankish monarch acted. He expressed his willingness to surrender the Adriatic territories, Venetia, Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia to “his brother Nicephorus” and sent Heito, Bishop of Basel, with two colleagues to settle the terms of the new treaty.
Unhappily, when Heito and his colleagues arrived in Constantinople they found a change in the occupant of the palace. Nicephorus had fallen in battle, a most disastrous battle, with Krum, the King of the Bulgarians (25th July 811); but his brother-in-law and successor Michael Rhangabé, was abundantly willing to confirm the proposed accommodation with the most powerful sovereign of the west. In truth the suggestion must have come at a most welcome season, for Constantinople was just then as hard pressed by the Bulgarians as she had even been by the Avar or the Saracen. So it came to pass that yet another embassy from the Byzantine court appeared in Aachen in January 812. A formal document containing the terms of the treaty of peace was handed to them by Charles in the church of the Virgin, and possibly the counterpart was received from the ambassadors. But the essential point was, that they sang a litany in the Greek tongue in which they hailed the Frankish sovereign as Imperator and Basileus. That was a formal recognition of Charles’s equality, and thenceforth no one could doubt that there was an Emperor by the Rhine as well as by the Bosphorus.