Charlemagne

Charlemagne

Who: Carolingian king

When: 786-814

The most famous of the Carolingian kings was Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (786-814), under whom the Carolingian renaissance began. Contemporary works portrayed him as just, brave and warlike; the model Roman emperor; or another David. Modern day historians view him as complex, contradictory and sometimes brutal. He loved listening to St. Augustine’s City of God, yet remained illiterate; he was devout, yet forced baptisms rather than converting pagans; he waged successful wars, but destroyed his buffer states, leading to a new round of invasions even before he died.

Charlemagne’s great ambition was to unite the military and learned traditions of the Roman and Germanic worlds with the legacy of Christianity. Early in his reign, he emphasized the military tradition, conquering lands in all directions and subjugating the conquered peoples, carrying out hegemony the likes of which had not been seen since the Roman Empire. He invaded Italy, seizing the Lombard crown and annexing northern Italy in 774. He then moved northward and began a war with the Saxons which lasted for over thirty years. He annexed Saxon territory and forcibly converted the people. In the southeast he fought the Avars; to southwest, he led an expedition to Spain, setting up a military buffer region between al-Andalus and his own realm. By the 790’s, his kingdom stretched eastward to the Saale River (in today’s eastern Germany), to Austria and south to Spain and Italy.

Charlemagne acted in accordance with the old Roman imperial model. He sponsored building programs to symbolize his authority, standardized weights and measures, and became a patron of intellectual and artistic efforts, building at Aachen a capital city that included a church patterned off of one built by Justinian at Ravenna. He appointed missi dominici (“those sent out by the king”), officials from the lay aristocrats and bishops who oversaw his regional governors, traveling in pairs, making circuits of regions of the kingdom. The missi were “to make diligent inquiry wherever people claim that someone has done them an injustice, so that the missi fully carry out the law and do justice for everyone everywhere, whether in the holy churches of God or among the poor, orphans, or widows.”

At some point, perhaps during the 760s, the members of the papal chancery forged a document called the Donation of Constantine that declared the pope the recipient of the fourth-century emperor Constantine’s crown, cloak, and military rank along with “all provinces, palaces, and districts of the city of Rome and Italy and of the regions of the West.” At this time, there was also an emperor in Constantinople who had rights in the West. Pope Hadrian I (772-795) maintained a balance among the three powers, but his successor, Leo III (795-816), did not. Accused by a faction of the Roman aristocracy of adultery and perjury in 799, he fled north to seek Charlemagne’s protection. Charlemagne had him escorted back to Rome and himself followed in late November. On Christmas Day, Leo crowned him emperor and the clergy acclaimed him Augustus. Leo hoped in this way to exalt the king of the Franks, to downgrade the Byzantine ruler, and to enjoy the role of “emperor maker” himself. Charlemagne hesitated about using the title, whether because he feared the Byzantines or resented the papal role in his coronation. After establishing peace with Byzantium, he used a long title, indicating himself to have been crowned by God, governing the Roman Empire in addition to many other duties: “Charles, the most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great and peaceful Emperor who governs the Roman Empire and who is, by the mercy of God, king of the Franks and the Lombards.”