CHAP. IV. Accession of A.D. 796. Belief in the Roman Empire not extinct. the years of his reign to date documents. Southern Italy, which had received only a slight infusion of Teutonic blood, and to which the Greek tongue-its use recently increased by an immigration of Greek refugees during the Iconoclastic troubles was still familiar, had remained loyal to the East Roman princes, and continued to form part of their realm till the rise of the Norman kingdom in the eleventh century. In A.D. 796 Leo the Third succeeded. Pope Hadrian, and signalized his devotion to the Frankish throne by sending to Charles the banner of the city and the keys of the holiest of all Rome's shrines, the confession of St. Peter, asking that some officer should be deputed to the city to receive from the people their oath of allegiance to the Patrician. He had soon need to seek the Patrician's help for himself. In A.D. 798 a sedition broke out: the Pope, going in solemn procession from the Lateran to the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, was attacked by a band of armed men, headed by two officials of his court, nephews of his predecessor; was wounded and left for dead, and with difficulty succeeded in escaping to Spoleto, whence he fled northward into the Frankish lands. Charles had led his army against the revolted Saxons: thither Leo following overtook him at Paderborn in Westphalia. The king received with respect his spiritual father, entertained and conferred with him for some time, and at length sent him back to Rome under the escort of Angilbert, one of his trustiest ministers; promising to follow ere long in person. After some months peace was restored in Saxony, and in the autumn of 799 Charles descended from the Alps once more, while Leo revolved deeply the great scheme for whose accomplishment the time was now ripe. Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Caesar of the West resigned his power into the hands of the senate, and left to his Eastern brother the sole headship of the Roman world. To the latter Italy CHAP. IV. had from that time been nominally subject; but it was only during one brief interval between the death of Teia the last Ostrogothic king and the descent of Alboin the first Lombard that his power had been really effective. In the further provinces, Gaul, Spain, Britain, it was only a memory. But the idea of a Roman Empire as a necessary part of the world's order had not vanished: it had been admitted by those who seemed to be destroying it; it had been cherished by the Church; it was still recalled by laws and customs; it was dear to the subject populations, who fondly looked back to the days when despotism. was at least mitigated by peace and order. We have seen the Teuton endeavouring everywhere to identify himself with the system he overthrew. As Goths, Burgundians, and Franks sought the title of consul or patrician, as the Lombard kings when they renounced their Arianism styled themselves Flavii, so even in distant England the fierce Saxon and Anglian conquerors used the names of Roman dignities, and after a time began to call themselves imperatores and basileis of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of Mohammedanism,' a vast religious community which was also a vast temporal dominion, had brought out the common Christianity of Europe into a fuller relief, while the march of Saracenic invasion exposed Italy to terrible dangers. The False Prophet had left one religion, one Empire, one Commander of the faithful: the Christian commonwealth needed more than ever an efficient head and centre. Such leadership it could no wise 1 From A.D. 712, when the Musulmans conquered Spain, till the fall of the Ommiyad dynasty in A.D. 750, the power of the Khalifate stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. After A.D. 800 the Roman Empire in the East and the Romano-Frankish Empire in the West corresponded to the two Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova. CHAP. IV. Motives of the Pope. find in the Court on the Bosphorus, shaken by the Arab conquests, and growing ever more alien to the West. The name of 'respublica,' permanent at the elder Rome, had become long since obsolete in the Eastern Empire. Its government, which had from the first been tinged with a Greco-Asiatic colour, had now drifted away from its ancient traditions into the forms of an Oriental despotism. Claudian had already sneered at 'Greek Quirites':" the general use, since Justinian's time, of the Greek tongue, and the difference of manners and usages, made the taunt now more deserved. The Pope had no reason to wish well to the East Roman princes, who, while insulting his weakness, had given him no help against the savage Lombards, and who for nearly seventy years" had been contaminated by a heresy the more odious that it touched not speculative points of doctrine but the most familiar usages of worship. In North Italy their power was extinct: no pontiff since Zacharias had asked their confirmation of his election: nay, the appointment of the intruding Frank to the patriciate, an office which it belonged to the Emperor to confer, was of itself an act of rebellion. Nevertheless their rights subsisted in theory: they were still, and while they retained the imperial name must so long continue, titular sovereigns of the Roman city. Even Pope Hadrian had addressed Constantine VI with studied humility. Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal head; without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman nor by necessary consequence (as was n Several Emperors during this period had been patrons of images, as was Irene at the moment of which I write: the stain nevertheless adhered to their government as a whole. believed) a Catholic and Apostolic Church. For, as will CHAP. IV. be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity seemed to stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for the same thing. Moved by these ideas and pressed by these needs the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are said to have already contemplated, and towards which the events of the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The widowed Empress Irene, famous alike for her beauty, her talents, and her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI: a woman, a usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of a distant city in the East impose a master on the original seat of empire? It was time to provide better for the most august of human offices an election at Rome was as valid as at Constantinople: the possessor of the real power should be clothed with the outward dignity also. Nor could it be doubted where that possessor was to be found. The Frank had been always faithful to Rome: his baptism was the enlistment of a new barbarian auxiliary. His services against Arian heretics and Lombard marauders, against the Saracen of Spain and the Avar of Pannonia, had earned him the title of Champion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He was now unquestioned lord of Western • The nature of the connection between the conception of the Roman Empire and the conception of a Catholic and Apostolic Church-things which to a modern, remembering the long struggle of Church and State, may. seem naturally antagonistic, will be explained in chapter viii. The interest of history lies not least in this, that it shews us how men have at different times entertained wholly different notions respecting the relation to one another of the same ideas or the same institutions. P Monachus Sangallensis, De Gestis Karoli; in Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, ii. pp. 731 sqq. CHAP. IV. Coronation of Charles at Europe, whose subject nations, Celtic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to adopt his customs. In Charles, the hero who united under one sceptre so many races, and whose religious spirit made him appear to rule all as the vicegerent of God, the pontiff might well see, as later ages saw, the new golden head of a second image, erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron. and clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of Constantinople. At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The charges brought against the Pope were heard; his innocence, already vindicated by a miracle, was pronounced by the Patrician in full synod; his accusers were condemned in his stead. Charles remained in the city for some weeks; and on Christmas Day, A.D. 800," he heard mass in the basilica of St. Peter. On the spot where now the gigantic dome of Bramante and Michael Angelo towers over the buildings of the modern city, the spot which tradition had hallowed as that of the Apostle's martyrdom, Constantine the Great had erected the oldest and stateliest temple of Christian Rome. Nothing could be less like than was this basilica to those Northern cathedrals, shadowy, fantastic, irregular, crowded with pillars, fringed all round by clustering shrines and chapels, which are to most of us the types of mediaeval architecture. In its plan and deco So Pope Gregory the Great had written two centuries earlier: 'Quanto caeteros homines regia dignitas antecedit, tanto caeterarum gentium regna regni Francorum culmen excellit.' - Ep. v. 6. Had the Lombards not been neighbours and enemies of the See of Rome, as well as anti-clerical in their sentiments and habits, the restoration of an Empire in the West would probably have fallen to them instead of to the Franks. Alciatus, De Formula imperii Romani. Or rather, according to the then prevailing practice of beginning the year from Christmas Day, A.D. 801. |