Early in the seventh century a new people and a new faith appeared on the world stage. Until the third decade of that century the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. But in September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had fled from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina: this was the hegira, the event that marks the beginning of the whole Muslim era. Just eleven years later, his followers burst out of Arabia. The following year an Arab army defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk river; two years later still they had taken Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Within twenty years the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then the Muslims turned their attention to the West. Progress across North Africa was somewhat slower, but by the end of the seventh century they had reached the Atlantic, and by 732 – still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland – they had (according to tradition) made their way over the Pyrenees as far as Tours. There, just 150 miles from Paris, they were stopped at last by the Frankish leader Charles Martel.
For Christendom, the effect was cataclysmic. Three of the five historical patriarchates – Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – now existed in little more than name; all the great Churches of North Africa disappeared, save only the Copts of Egypt, who managed to retain a tenuous foothold. The lands that had seen the origins of Christianity were all lost, never to be properly recovered. The Eastern Empire was hideously maimed. The political focus of necessity now shifted northwards and westwards. Perhaps, as the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne suggested, it was Mohammed who made Charlemagne possible.
In Italy, all through the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth, we see two opposing tendencies: on the one hand, a steady weakening of political and religious links with the Byzantine Empire; on the other, an equally steady increase in the power of the Lombards. In 653 Pope Martin I (649–55), though old and ill, was arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to Constantinople, where he was publicly stripped of his vestments, dragged in chains through the city, flogged and deported to the Crimea, dying there soon afterwards; and matters came to a head in 726, when the Emperor Leo III published his fateful edict imposing iconoclasm – a doctrine that, calling as it did for the wholesale destruction of all holy images, was received with horror in the West and caused revolts throughout Byzantine Italy. In retaliation, Leo confiscated the annual incomes from the churches of Sicily and Calabria, transferring their bishoprics, together with a considerable number of others in the Balkan peninsula, from the see of Rome to that of Constantinople. It was the beginning of that long, slow process of estrangement that would end, 300 years later, in schism.
The Lombards, meanwhile, were steadily strengthening their hold. Under the greatest of their kings, Liutprand, they twice – successfully – laid siege to Rome. On the first occasion, in 729, Pope Gregory II (715–31) – at last a Roman-born pope after a long succession of Greeks – confronted Liutprand, who abandoned the siege, feeling guilty enough to leave his arms and armour in St Peter’s as a votive offering; but on the second, ten years later, he and his men were in a very different mood. This time, rather than enriching the basilica, they looted it. Gregory’s successor, Gregory III (731–41), powerless to stop them, looked about desperately for a new ally; and found him – or thought he had – beyond the Alps in Gaul, in the person of Charles Martel.
Charles was not himself a monarch. Technically, he was Mayor of the Palace at the court of the Merovingian king; but the Merovingians were nonentities, and it was in the hands of the Mayor that power effectively rested. Charles had already earned fame throughout Europe as the first man to check the advance of the Muslim army; if he could halt the Saracens, might he not do the same to the Lombards?
Perhaps; but he would not be hurried. He had his hands full in Gaul, and he remained there until his death. In 751, however, his son Pepin – the Short, as he was always called – managed to convince Pope Zachary (741–52) that the holder of the power should also be wearer of the crown. Thus, at the hands of the English Archbishop Boniface, Pepin received his coronation at Soissons, the feckless King Childeric being packed off to end his days in a monastery. Henceforth Pepin was deeply in the Pope’s debt: there was a good chance that any future appeal for aid might have a more sympathetic hearing. In any case the coronation came not a moment too soon; for in that very same year Ravenna was finally captured by the Lombard King Aistulf, and the Byzantine Empire’s final foothold in northern Italy was lost for ever.
Zachary – the last of a long line of Greek popes1 – died in the following year. His eleven-year pontificate had not been easy. He had worked hard to save papal–imperial relations from a complete breakdown – an objective to which his translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues into Greek may or may not have contributed – but the fall of Ravenna had marked a further degree of rupture, and Aistulf was now busy mopping up what was left of Byzantine power in north and central Italy. For the papacy the situation was now desperate, and it was hardly surprising that a Roman aristocrat, Stephen II (752–7), was chosen – rather than yet another Greek – as Zachary’s successor.2
Pope Stephen lost no time in travelling personally to Pepin’s court at Ponthion near Châlons-sur-Marne, where he arrived in the first days of 754. On 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany, he anointed the King, together with his wife and two sons Charles and Carloman, awarding to all three the title that he had just invented: Patrician of the Romans. Meetings between King and Pope continued sporadically over the next six months, and were a triumphant success. Pepin willingly undertook the role of defender of the papacy, promising to recover on behalf of the Pope all the Italian cities and territories that the Lombards had captured from the Empire; and in two major expeditions, in 754 and again in 756, he proved as good as his word, bringing King Aistulf to his knees, putting a client-king, Desiderius, on the Lombard throne and marrying his daughter. After the second campaign Pepin proclaimed the Pope sole ruler of the lands formerly composed of the imperial Exarchate, snaking across central Italy to embrace Ravenna, Perugia and Rome itself.
His authority for this so-called ‘Donation of Pepin’ is, to say the least, doubtful; and in Constantinople the Emperor Constantine V predictably lodged a furious protest. It was at one time suggested that Pepin might have based his action on the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’;3 but recent evidence suggests that this shameless fabrication was not concocted for another half-century. Pepin himself justified it by claiming that his intervention had been for the love of St Peter, and that it was therefore to St Peter that the conquered lands would belong. It remains true that the Papal States which he thus brought into being, however shaky their legal foundation, were to endure for more than eleven centuries.
Pepin died in 768, leaving his kingdom – in accordance with the old Frankish custom – to be divided between his two sons, Charles and Carloman; but Carloman’s sudden death in 771 enabled Charles, ignoring the rights of his young nephews, to make himself sole ruler. Only two months later a tough-minded Roman aristocrat assumed the papal throne under the name of Hadrian I (772–95). He and Charles together continued the work that had been begun by Pope Stephen II and Pepin, further cementing relations between the Frankish Kingdom and the papacy; and when in 773 the Lombard client-king Desiderius forgot his place to the point where he began besieging Rome, Hadrian turned immediately to Charles for help. The Patrician of the Romans lost no time. He marched into Italy, seized the Lombard capital at Pavia, packed Desiderius off to a monastery and – apart from adding ‘King of the Lombards’ to his own steadily growing list of titles – abolished the Lombard Kingdom once and for all. Then, at Easter 774, he decided to come to Rome.
The decision took Pope Hadrian by surprise; but he rose magnificently to the occasion, greeting his royal guest on the steps of St Peter’s – which Charles is said to have climbed on his knees – and showing him every honour. In return Charles reconfirmed his father’s Donation, adding considerably to the extent of the territory concerned, and expressed his intention of imposing unity and uniformity according to the Roman model on all the churches within his dominions. Returning to Germany, he next subdued the heathen Saxons, whom he converted en masse to Christianity before going on to annex already-Christian Bavaria. An invasion of Spain was less successful – though it provided the inspiration for the first great epic ballad of western Europe, the Chanson de Roland – but Charles’s subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and upper Austria resulted in the destruction of their kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation in turn within his own frontiers. Thus, in little more than a generation, he had raised the Kingdom of the Franks from just one of the many semi-tribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.
And he had done so, for most of the time at least, with the enthusiastic support of the papacy. It was nearly half a century since Pope Stephen had struggled across the Alps to seek help from Pepin – an appeal that might more properly have been addressed to the Byzantine Emperor, and probably would have been, if the Emperor Constantine V could only have spared a few moments from his obsession with iconoclasm to turn his attention to Italy. Pepin and Charles, in effectively eliminating the Lombard Kingdom, had succeeded where Byzantium had failed; and Byzantium was to pay dearly for its failure.
The two did not, however, always see eye to eye: and a particular bone of contention was, rather surprisingly, iconoclasm. In 787, in an attempt to settle the issue, the Empress Irene (she was in fact the widow of the Emperor Leo IV, acting as regent for her seventeen-year-old son) summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council, to be held (like the first) at Nicaea. Hadrian duly despatched his legates, carrying a long and closely argued defence of holy images; and the Council most gratifyingly declared in his favour. Charles, however, objected. This sudden rapprochement between Rome and Constantinople was not at all to his liking. Why, he demanded, had he not also been invited to send representatives to Nicaea? In what looks suspiciously like a fit of pique, he ordered his theologians to produce a defence of iconoclasm in the shape of what were called the Libri Carolini; and for a few years his relations with Pope Hadrian were seriously strained. But the cloud eventually passed. A mistake was fortunately discovered in the Latin version of the Council’s findings – ‘veneration’ had been mistranslated as ‘adoration’ – and by the time of Hadrian’s death on Christmas Day 795 the two were once more on excellent terms.
It was just as well that they were; for the climax to the story was now rapidly approaching. The new Pope, Leo III (795–816) – not to be confused with the Byzantine emperor of the same name – could boast neither the birth nor the breeding of his predecessor. There is a theory that he may even have been of Arab stock. From the moment of his elevation he was the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of Hadrian’s family and friends, who had expected the papal throne to pass to one of them and were consequently determined to remove him. On 25 April 799 a group led by the late Pope’s nephew actually attacked Leo in the course of a solemn procession from the Lateran to the church of St Lawrence. They failed in their original intention of blinding him and cutting out his tongue – mutilations that would have obliged him to resign the papacy – but left him unconscious in the street. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome in November, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges levelled by his enemies, including simony, perjury and adultery.
Whether or not the Pope was guilty of these charges was almost immaterial – though Charles certainly had his suspicions. There was another question, infinitely more important: by whom could he possibly be tried? Who, after all, was qualified to pass judgement on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances the answer given by some would have been the Emperor at Constantinople; but the imperial throne was at that time occupied by Irene. That Irene was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, also immaterial; it was enough that she was a woman. The female sex was known to be incapable of governing, and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from even attempting to do so. As far as western Europe was concerned, the Throne of the Emperors was vacant; Irene’s claim to it was merely an additional proof, if any were needed, of the degradation into which the so-called Roman Empire had fallen.
By the time he himself reached Rome in November 800, Charles had been firmly reminded by his chief adviser, the Englishman Alcuin of York, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgement over the successor of St Peter; but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted, Christendom lacked not only an Emperor but a Pope as well, and he was determined to clear Leo’s name. Obviously anything resembling a trial was out of the question; but on 23 December, at the high altar, the Pope swore a solemn oath on the gospels that he was innocent of all the charges levelled against him – and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head.
* * *
Charles had received, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title; the imperial crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, not an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; for it meant that, after more than 400 years, there was once again an emperor in western Europe. There remains the question of why the Pope acted as he did. Not, certainly, to engineer a deliberate split in the Roman Empire, still less to bring about two rival empires where one had been before. There was, so far as Leo was concerned, no living emperor at that time. Very well, he would create one; and because the Byzantines had proved so unsatisfactory from every point of view – political, military and doctrinal – he would select a Westerner: the one man who, by his wisdom and statesmanship and the vastness of his dominions as well as by his prodigious physical stature, stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. But if Leo conferred a great honour on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and sceptre, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, even revolutionary. No pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege – not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift, but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the Emperor whom he had created.
Historians have long argued whether the imperial coronation had been jointly planned by Leo and Charles or whether, as appeared at the time, the King of the Franks was taken completely by surprise. His first biographer, Einhard, quotes him as claiming that he would not have set foot in the basilica had he had any idea of the Pope’s intentions. True, he had never shown the faintest interest in claiming imperial status, and for the rest of his life continued to style himself Rex Francorum et Langobardorum (King of the Franks and the Lombards). Nor, clearly, would he have wished to owe any obligation to the Pope. On the other hand, once the thought of the coronation had occurred to Leo, is it really conceivable that he would not have suggested it in advance to Charles, even if only as a simple courtesy? And for Charles himself, would not the advantages of the imperial title easily outweigh the drawbacks? We are forced to the conclusion that Pope and Emperor had already discussed the idea at length, probably at Paderborn, and that Einhard’s statement – together with Charles’s own later protestations – was disingenuously designed to deflect the criticism that he could not fail to incur.
Of one thing we can be virtually certain: neither Leo nor Charles would have touched the crown had there been at the time a male emperor of Byzantium. The concept of two simultaneous emperors would have been unthinkable; it was the presence of a woman on the Byzantine throne that put an utterly different complexion on the matter. At the same time, that very fact gave Charles a further important reason to accept the crown that he was offered: for now, at this one critical moment of history, he recognised an opportunity that might never be repeated. Irene, for all her faults, remained a marriageable widow – and, by all accounts, a remarkably attractive one. If he could but persuade her to become his wife, all the imperial territories of East and West would be reunited under a single crown: his own.
The reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles’s coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Greek it was an act not only of breathtaking arrogance, but also of sacrilege. The Byzantine Empire was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand, Roman power; on the other, the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and ‘Equal of the Apostles’, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed that, just as there was only one God in heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler here on Earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.
Moreover, unlike the princes of the West, the Byzantines had no Salic law. However much they might detest their empress and even attempt to depose her, they never questioned her right to occupy the imperial throne. So much the greater, therefore, was their anxiety when, early in 802, Charles’s ambassadors arrived in Constantinople; and so much the greater still when they realised that Irene, far from being insulted by the very idea of marriage with an illiterate barbarian – for Charles, though he could read a little, made no secret of his inability to write – appeared on the contrary to be intrigued, gratified and disposed, in principle, to accept.
Her reasons are not hard to understand. Her subjects loathed her, her exchequer was empty. She had reduced her empire to degradation and penury. Sooner or later – probably sooner – a coup d’état was inevitable. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival, an adventurer and a heretic; if he were as uneducated as reports suggested, she would probably be able to manipulate him as easily as she had manipulated her late husband and her unfortunate son. Meanwhile in marrying him she would preserve the unity of the Empire and – in her eyes far more important – her own skin.
There were other attractions too. The proposal offered an opportunity to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the imperial court. Though twenty-two years a widow – during which time she had lived surrounded by women and eunuchs – Irene was probably still in her early fifties, perhaps even younger: what could be more natural than that she should look favourably on the prospect of a new husband at last, particularly one rumoured to be tall and outstandingly handsome, a superb hunter with a fine singing voice and flashing blue eyes? But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank, in his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his name except by stencilling it through a gold plate – just as Theodoric the Ostrogoth had done three centuries before. On the last day of October 802 Irene was arrested, deposed and sent into exile; a year later she was dead.
If Charles had married Irene … the speculation is irresistible, even though – like all such speculations – ultimately sterile. Would the West have taken over the East, or vice versa? Charles would certainly not for a second have considered living in Constantinople: in theory, at any rate, the capital would have moved back to the West. But would the Byzantines have accepted such a state of affairs? It seems most unlikely. A far more probable scenario is that they would have declared Irene deposed and would have crowned a new Emperor in her place – just as in fact they did – effectively challenging Charles to do something about it; and that he, much as he might have wished to retaliate, would have been unable to do so. The distances were too great, the lines of communication too long. He would have been in a humiliating position indeed, and powerless to extricate himself. He might never even have acquired the name of Charlemagne. And who in any case was to know that within a few years of his death his own, Western Empire would effectively crumble away? How lucky he was that the Byzantines took their strong line then rather than later, and that Frankish emperor and Greek empress never came together after all.
Pope Leo III was an unremarkable man: it is one of the ironies of history that he should have been responsible for one of the most momentous acts ever performed by a pope. He had worked his way up through the hierarchy from relatively humble beginnings, and remained essentially a simplistic one, for whom the coronation of Charlemagne meant a simple division of responsibilities. The Emperor would wield the sword: the Pope would fight for the faith, protecting it and extending it wherever possible, and would provide the spiritual guidance for his entire flock – the Emperor included.
All would have been well if Charles could only have seen things in the same way. He had already made a moderately disastrous intervention in the iconoclast debate; in 810 he involved himself yet again in theological matters, this time over another old warhorse, the filioque clause. The original Creed determined by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople had held that the Holy Ghost ‘proceeded from the Father’; to this, from the sixth century on, the Western Church had added the word filioque, ‘and the Son’. By Charles’s time this addition was generally adopted throughout the Frankish Empire, and in 809 it was formally endorsed by the Council of Aachen, his own capital. Two years earlier the Frankish monks on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem had introduced it into their services – arousing furious opposition from the Eastern community of the nearby monastery of St Saba, whereupon they had referred the question to the Pope for a definitive ruling.
Leo was in a quandary. As a devout Westerner, he was perfectly happy with the offending word, for which there was good scriptural authority. On the other hand, he was prepared to admit that the Western Church had had no right to tamper with a Creed that had been drafted by an Ecumenical Council, and relations with Constantinople were already quite difficult enough without sparking off another conflict. His solution was an attempt to have it both ways: to approve the doctrine while suppressing the word itself – which he did, not by means of any inflammatory edict, but by having the text of the Creed in its original form (that is without the filioque) engraved in Greek and Latin on two silver plaques that were fixed to the tombs of St Peter and St Paul. His endorsement of the unity of the two Churches in their joint authorship of the ancient Creed could hardly have been clearer.
Charlemagne, however, was predictably furious. He had grown up with the filioque; if the East refused to accept it, then the East was wrong. And who cared about the East anyway? He was the Emperor now; the Pope should nail his colours firmly to the Western mast and leave those heretics in Constantinople to their own devices. When Leo ordered him to remove the word from his liturgies, he took no action, and sent no reply; and when in 813 he decided to make his son Louis co-Emperor, he pointedly failed to invite the Pope to perform the ceremony.
For centuries popes and emperors were to continue their struggle over the demarcation line between their two authorities, each trying to push it as far as possible into the territory of the other; in the short term, however, the bickering continued for only twenty-five years after Charlemagne’s death in January 814 – when, on the death of Louis in 840, the Carolingian Empire fell apart. From then on, the power of the papacy grew steadily: and before long it was generally agreed that every new emperor must be anointed by the Pope personally, in Rome.
But the imperial disintegration meant that the popes must now assume responsibilities that could previously have been left to the Empire; and now a new and terrible enemy threatened southern Italy. In 827 the Arabs of North Africa had invaded Sicily in strength at the invitation of the Byzantine governor, Euthymius, who was rebelling against Constantinople in an effort to avoid the consequences of having eloped with a local nun. Four years later they took Palermo, and henceforth the peninsula was in constant danger. Brindisi fell, then Taranto, then Bari – which for thirty years was the seat of an Arab emirate – and in 846 it was the turn of Rome itself: an Arab fleet sailed up the Tiber and sacked the city, even going so far as to strip the silver plate from the doors of St Peter’s. No help was to be expected from the Western Empire, which had effectively ceased to exist.
And once again the city was saved by its Pope. In 849, summoning the combined navies of his three maritime neighbours – Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi – and assuming the supreme command himself, Pope Leo IV (847–55) destroyed the Arab fleet off Ostia. The hundreds of captives were sent to join local workmen in building an immense rampart around the Vatican and down as far as the Castel Sant’Angelo: the forty-foot-high Leonine Wall, the most spectacular monument of early medieval Rome, sweeping up from the Tiber to the crest of the Vatican Hill and then down again to the river. It was completed in 852, and considerable sections of it still stand today.
1 It is ironical indeed that the steady breakdown of papal-Byzantine relations should have occurred under Greek popes. Of the twelve elected between John V in 685 and Stephen in 752, only Gregory II (715–31) was a Latin. At the Sixth Ecumenical Council of the Church, held at Constantinople in 680-1, the entire papal delegation was Greek.
2 He is sometimes known as Stephen III. The numbering of the Stephens is a little confused, since the Stephen elected on 23 March 752 died two days later before he could be consecrated. He is therefore not normally counted. In this book the lesser figure will always be used.
3 See Chapter II, see here.