In order to present a general outline of the wars of Charles, we have been compelled more than once to pass beyond the crucial and culminating event of his career, his coronation as Emperor at Rome in the year 800, thirty-two years after he had become King of the Franks. All of his conquests are closely related with this elevation to a dignity revered for its venerable traditions, and yet the conquests alone were not in themselves sufficient to secure such an elevation. The acquisition of the imperial title was the result of a revolution, a change of policy, due as much to the intangible forces that move society as to the concrete details of the career of the Conqueror. Master of Italy as he was after the downfall of Lombard powers, this territorial control simply gave Charles the position once held by another great German prince, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. But Theodoric was not an orthodox churchman as Charles was. It was, therefore, the combination of the orthodox religion, which Charles inherited as the successor of the first Frankish kings, and his sway over the Italian peninsula which prepared the way for the great event of Christmas Day, 800, when he took his place in the line of rulers marked by the names of Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian.

Although close relations subsisted between the Papal territories in Italy and the Frankish overlord across the Alps, there was, nevertheless, in Rome a considerable degree of autonomy. Charles had no thought of exercising the rights of a sovereign on the basis of the title of Patrician, which he had inherited from his father, and on which he had acted when it came to a question of putting an end finally to Lombard autonomy. But it was only at such crises that the need of intervention was felt, and, as we have seen in the case of Pope Stephen, it was the policy of the Holy See to make use of the Frankish King when questions involving the dignity of the Pope could be settled in no other way. This policy was maintained by Stephen’s successors, but it was not easy to induce Charles to undertake to handle thorny problems which involved the position of the Pope in his own city. There was no Frankish occupation of Rome, foreshadowing the condition of affairs there when another Emperor of the Franks protected the Pope from being overthrown by his unwilling subjects through the use of French bayonets. Rome, like other Italian cities, was often in a state of turbulence owing to factional divisions among its citizens. There was already a beginning of that rivalry among Roman families to secure the Papal throne to one of its members that so often brought degradation to the Papacy during the course of the Middle Ages. Upon the death of Pope Hadrian in 795, after a long pontificate of twenty-three years, Leo III became his successor, but it seems that the succession was not altogether satisfactory to the kinsmen of the dead Pope, for they soon proceeded to extreme measures against his successor, seizing his person and trying to blind him. Leo, completely terrorized, seems to have lacked supporters in Rome to defend him, and he sought refuge with the great King at his camp near Paderborn, in Saxony, which was being used as a center for the operations against the recalcitrant Saxon tribes. The matter in dispute between the Pope and his enemies at home turned out to be a complicated one. Charles, in his capacity as Patrician, listened to the charges and countercharges brought by one side against the other. It was evident that justice could not be done at such long range, and, therefore, the King, after sending Leo home under the protection of Frankish ambassadors, moved slowly down into Italy in the year 800.

Charles showed no haste to take up the obligation of settling the differences between the Pope and his discontented subjects. An expedition into Italy was always costly and troublesome. The situation, too, on the Eastern frontier needed his attention, because of the death of Count Gerold and of Erich of Friuli, on whom he depended for warding off the attacks of the Avars and the Slavs. There were matters also in the Western part of his dominions which required his personal supervision. His lieutenants had just won victories over the Bretons and in the Spanish peninsula. New schemes of expansion had to be worked out, and provision made for protecting the sea coast. Besides, he was interested in securing for Eastern Christians dwelling in the dominions of the Saracens, advantages which they were unable to attain through the intervention of the rulers at Constantinople. A way had been opened by the arrival at his court of a monk from Jerusalem, with presents from the Patriarch and relics from the Holy Places. There are hints also of his receiving representatives from the Byzantine province of Sicily, and of direct suggestions from influential quarters in the East, where the rule of a woman, the Empress Irene, was resented, that the great Frankish King should assume the imperial title. He turned his steps towards Rome only when he had made himself familiar with the special needs of the situation brought about by Leo’s policy. Many of his intimate advisers, Alcuin, Engelbert, Am of Salzburg, and Paulinus of Aquileia, had evidently discarded for some time all thought of the possibility of the Frankish ruler assuming the honors and rights which the imperial position, to the minds of that age, could alone bestow. Now everything was changed; the Empire was the one political idea which was common to the German and to the Italian, and it was kept alive by the influence of churchmen, to whom the existence of the Empire was the necessary complement to a Catholic Church. Charles was already acting with a recognized power fully equivalent to that of an emperor. His rule was not local like that of other barbarian kings; the title was needed to complete the political evolution, just as really as it was necessary for his father, Pippin, to give up the rôle of Mayor of the Palace and become “de jure” King of the Franks. This point was made perfectly clear when the general assembly of Charles’ dominions was held at Mainz in August, 800, and the Italian expedition was announced.

In Ravenna a stay of eight days was made by the invading army, and a detachment was sent off to pacify the Lombard Duchy of Benevento. Not far from Rome the King was greeted by the Pope, who then returned to Rome to prepare for the official reception of the ruler, which took place, on November 24th, with the customary ceremonies appropriate to the patrician rank of the visitor. Eight days afterwards, Charles having previously visited the Basilica of St. Peter’s, explained publicly and officially the purpose of his coming to the city, viz.: to investigate the charges against the Pope.

This was an informal and personal process, for, according to the ecclesiastical canons, no one could officially judge a cause in which the Pope was concerned. But Charles’ conception of his duties as Patrician meant no mere perfunctory examination. For three weeks there was a public hearing, like an extra-judicial examination before a referee, of the rumors and charges against Leo’s conduct, a chance being given to each side to ventilate its grievances. It is significant that the Frankish King was won over to the view of his leading ecclesiastics, including Alcuin, that the charges against Leo were without foundation, and were only the product of personal enmity.

The difficulty was to give the decision such a form that, by avoiding a judicial character, it would not infringe upon the Papal prerogative, according to which the Bishop of Rome was not responsible to any earthly tribunal. The bishops themselves explicitly adopted this position by refusing to pass sentence on the head of the Church. After this principle had been accepted, the Pope could declare himself free from guilt. In so doing he was following a precedent set by his predecessors in like circumstances, Marcellinus, Symmachus, and Pelagius I.

So he proceeded on December 23d to exculpate himself by formally declaring his innocence before a great assembly of secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries, expressly mentioning that the proceeding was voluntary and not required by the canons of the Church. In this way the immediate cause of the expedition of the Franks was disposed of, but Charles remained in Rome in order to provide for things needful in the administration of his Italian dominions.

On Christmas Day a multitude had gathered together to celebrate the festival. As the King rose from prayer at the Confession of St. Peter the Pope placed the imperial diadem upon his head. The congregation, acting under one inspiration, joined spontaneously in the acclamation, used in former days in Rome, and still customary at the time at Constantinople,—“Life and Victory to Charles the Pius Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-bringing Emperor.”

Three times the formula was repeated. After this proclamation the Pope reverenced the new Emperor, genuflecting, as was the Roman custom, and probably this act of homage was repeated by all who were present. On the same day the Emperor’s son, Karl, was anointed King by the Pope, just as his brothers, Pippin and Louis, had been elevated to the royal dignity twenty years before. A few days later the Emperor, sitting as supreme judge, condemned to death the Pope’s accusers, sentences which, at Leo’s request, were mitigated to deportation.

The biographer of Charles represents the ceremony of the coronation as a surprise, prepared by the Pope without consulting Charles, and so done not only without his will, but contrary to his desire. The Emperor, indeed, is reported to have said that, if he had known of the Pope’s intention, he would not have visited the Basilica. These words may be interpreted as an expression of the usual formula of humility, frequent in ecclesiastical elections on the part of the successful candidate, or else they may mean that the Emperor objected to the way in which the dignity was bestowed. It will be noted that the act of placing the crown on his head preceded the acclamation of the people’s choice. The details of the ceremonial were copied from the one used at Constantinople, where it had long been the custom for the Emperor to be crowned by the Patriarch. But, according to the political theory of the time, the imperial dignity was not conferred by the receiving of the diadem, but by the election of the Roman people and army, and by the formal act of homage done at the time. The Pope, by his presence, added more solemnity to the occasion, but his intervention added nothing in the way of legal validity to it.

Charles’ own point of view is shown plainly enough in the fact that in 813 he proclaimed his son Louis Emperor and crowned him with his own hands. As he acted here without requesting the coöperation of the Pope, a purely lay method of conferring the imperial dignity may have appealed better to his convictions than that followed in his own case. But there could have been no improvised procedure in the ceremony at St. Peter’s. Charles could not have been made Emperor against his will, nor is it possible to harmonize the details of the ceremony with such an explanation. How could the coronation have been an impulsive act on the Pope’s part, taken without the Emperor’s knowledge, when the diadem was in readiness, and the great congregation were prepared to repeat without confusion the words of acclamation? Such preparations must have had the consent of the Frankish ruler, for it is most unlikely that he should not have known of them. His own objections, therefore, were probably due to certain features of the ceremony actually carried out, those, namely, by which the Pope took the initiative. A stricter following of ancient precedent, at a time when no ceremonial change should have been introduced by which the legitimacy of the succession could be questioned, would have approved itself to Charles. An emperor had to be provided for the West, and scrupulosity in following precedents was desirable, especially in view of the doubt as to whether the Empress Irene could, as a woman, legally hold supreme power at Constantinople.

It must be remembered that there had been several attempts made in the seventh and eighth centuries to revive the connection between Rome and the imperial dignity. But they had failed because there was no considerable and acknowledged political force behind them. Now, under the extensive rule of the Frankish King, the elements required to give an actual validity to the imperial claim were present in an overwhelming degree. Charles was in control of most of the territory once belonging to the empire in Western Europe, and along the Eastern and Southeastern frontiers he had succeeded in extending its limits—a task unparalleled by the achievements in these same regions of the greatest of the Roman Emperors. The Teutonic peoples, who centuries before had made their first appearance as “fœderati,” in the service of the Empire, were now component parts of it, and had definitely entered the sphere of Roman civilization. What Athaulf had deemed to be impossible, what neither Odoacer, Theodoric, nor the Lombard Kings had tried or dared to do, Charles had done, now that, advancing from the title of Patrician, which had been held often by the barbarian rulers, he claimed for the Germans the full right to the imperial name.

In its ecclesiastical relations the revived Empire differed from the old. The Pope had become a factor in the political evolution of the West in a way unknown to the age of Athaulf, Theodoric, or Odoacer. Gregory the Great had turned to the East as a subject of the Roman Empire, to ask aid of his legitimate Emperor; the bishops of Rome, in the eighth century, as equals, turned to the Franks, and of this alliance the ceremony of Christmas Day, 800, was the logical sequence.

For the Germanic peoples the coronation of Charles did not mean absorption into a unified system of absolutism, such as prevailed in the East; but it did mean that the predominant factor in their future was to be their relation in the logical sense to the Italian peninsula, and it is just this relationship in its various phases which was worked out in the Middle Ages, and so it may justly be called the distinguishing mark of the medieval period.

Charles’ assumption of the imperial title did not imply that he ceased to regard himself as the head of a Germanic people, nor was there manifest on his part any intention to shift the existing Teutonic basis of his rule towards a Latin center. For several months after the coronation ceremony he remained in Italy, but the Alps were recrossed in the summer of 801, and during the rest of his life he never again set foot on Italian soil.

With the Eastern Empire, which might have been stirred to active hostility by the introduction of a rival claimant to the imperial throne, relations continued to be good. Embassies passed from one court to another, and it is reported by a Greek chronicler that Charles transmitted officially to the Empress Irene a proposal that the two empires should be united by their marriage. In 803 the Empress Irene died, after her deposition had been brought about by a palace revolution by which Nicephorus, the Grand Treasurer, was placed on the throne. In 806, for a short time, these peaceful relations were broken by a contention over the possession of Venice, whose commercial importance was beginning to be recognized. A Byzantine fleet appeared off the lagunes, but was unable to prevent the coveted islands from being taken by Pippin, Charles’ representative in Italy, who brought the contest to a close in 810 by a combined attack on sea and land. In 812, as a compensation for acknowledging Charles as Roman Emperor, the Adriatic territories, Venetia, Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia, were restored to Byzantine rule.