While Archbishop Sergius sought to extend ecclesiastical control over the area that had been the exarchate of Ravenna, to the irritation of both Lombard and papal officials, he soon had to confront a more vigorous Lombard leader, Desiderius. The new king established himself in Pavia and ruled for nearly twenty years, from 756 to 774. To secure his hold on the Lombard kingship, Desiderius had sworn to uphold the arrangements made between Aistulf and the papacy, namely, to return the territory of the exarchate to the pope, not to the emperor in Constantinople. But the new Lombard ruler also had his own plans, which brought him into prolonged conflict with the papacy. Under three popes – Paul I (757–67), Stephen III (768–772) and Hadrian (772–95) – Lombard forces repeatedly threatened Rome, and in 767–8 they actively supported an ‘intruder’, Pope Constantine II.
The fate of Rome would now decide the future of Ravenna. Had King Desiderius succeeded in his determination to capture the see of St Peter, he would have secured complete control over Ravenna and its territory in northern Italy. In 757 he met with George, an imperial ambassador, to discuss an alliance with Constantinople, and one year later he embarked on an expansion of his kingdom, first taking over the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, and then advancing to Naples.1 For nine years he persistently refused to return territory to St Peter, provoking great anxiety both in Rome and in Francia. He captured Senigallia (south of Ravenna on the eastern coast) and Castrum Valentis in Campania, and then brought his army to the gates of Rome, only to discover that Pope Paul was dying.2
At this moment of increased danger the city was divided by rival factions – elite military officials based in the surrounding country and clerical bureaucrats of the Lateran palace in the city.3 The news of Paul’s death on 28 June 767 unleashed these rivalries, as Toto, the selfstyled duke of Nepi, gathered an army of supporters in Tuscia and, on 5 July, imposed his brother Constantine, a layman, as pope. Under the threat of military violence, this highly irregular election was then confirmed by bishops George of Palestrina, Eustratius of Albano and Citonatus of Porto, who were forced to consecrate Constantine II. The new pope had to be protected by armed men when he went to St Peter’s to celebrate Mass. Although many in the papal chancellery disputed his elevation to the papacy, it was recognized by King Pippin in Francia. After months of factional rivalry, the Romans who opposed Constantine turned to the Lombards and approached King Desiderius as a figure with sufficient force to remove the ‘intruder’. This resulted in outbreaks of violent disorder and the mutilation of enemies by both sides, until a Roman priest, loyal to the memory of Paul I, was ordained as Pope Stephen III on 7 August 768, partly thanks to Desiderius.4 The Lombards then withdrew from the city and the new pope immediately sent an envoy to the Franks, requesting theological, rather than military assistance. Since King Pippin had died leaving his two sons, Charles and Carloman, to share his inheritance, they agreed to send a party of Frankish bishops to Rome to assist Stephen III in establishing his authority.
Against this very contested local background, Pope Stephen III summoned a council that was attended by the twelve episcopal delegates from north of the Alps, in addition to a large number of Italian bishops. It marked a decisive stage in the process of defining a formal western iconophile response to iconoclasm with the involvement of Frankish bishops, who participated both in the trial of the ‘intruder’, Pope Constantine, and in the justification for religious icons. Their presence in Rome symbolized the rising power of the two young Frankish kings, and demonstrated the Frankish bishops’ mastery of theological texts, as a question of religious practice was used to distinguish Latin from Greek Christendom.
The first and most pressing issue was what to do about the clerics ordained by the illegally installed Pope Constantine, who had held office for just over a year. Many papal officials and priests, including Stephen, had recognized the ‘intruder’, so their error also had to be corrected.5 Further, the council had to decide how to prevent any future repetition of secular interventions in papal elections. When the expope Constantine was examined by the council, he cited the example of Sergius, who had been made archbishop of Ravenna from similarly lay status. This would have embarrassed Archbishop Sergius had he participated; instead, he sent a deacon, John, and a priest, Valentine, to represent him at the council.6 The assembled bishops refused to accept Constantine’s argument, however; they ejected him from the church and decided to burn all the records of his acts as pope. They agreed a series of canons designed to limit the eligibility of papal candidates to clerics trained within the Lateran palace, ‘who had risen through the separate grades and had been made cardinal deacon or priest’.7 This established the committee that would eventually evolve into the conclave of cardinals to elect popes.
The other matter to be addressed was the Roman response to the Byzantine Council of Hieria, which was not discussed until the very last session.8 In 767 King Pippin had hosted a debate about icon veneration at Gentilly in Francia with Byzantine and papal envoys. For the first time Christians from different backgrounds met at a theological discussion of eastern iconoclasm, and the Definition of Hieria was rejected.9 Similarly, the Roman council was bound to condemn eastern iconoclasm and Pope Stephen had instructed participants to bring theological writings that justified iconophile opposition to it. At this session, Archbishop Sergius’ deacon presented a text attributed to St Ambrose on the Acts of Sylvester, among other sources concerning the importance of icons.10 Not surprisingly, the council condemned the iconoclasts and confirmed the iconophile arguments made at the Roman synod held in 731.
The council’s hostility toward Constantinople is demonstrated in one very specific detail: the synod is dated regnante Domino nostro Jesu Cristo, ‘under the rule of our Lord Jesus Christ’, rather than using the regnal years of the eastern emperors, as was usual. This was no small difference. It was a bellwether reflection of Roman loyalty: in times of increased hostility, dating from the Incarnation occurs; when relations are easier, the year is calculated from the accession of the eastern rulers. The new system of identifying the years would also mark a revolution in authority.
In April 769 John and Valentine returned to Archbishop Sergius in Ravenna with the new canons that aimed to prevent the election of any but the most qualified Roman clergy to the papacy. Four months later, Sergius’ death provoked a major crisis in Ravenna. While some of the clergy duly elected Leo the archdeacon as their new archbishop, Michael, the record keeper, scriniarius, appealed to Maurice, duke of Rimini, to assist in his own bid for the position. In an almost identical imitation of the disputed papal election of 767, external military support proved decisive. With the approval of King Desiderius and some leading citizens (iudices Ravennati), the layman Michael was installed by Duke Maurice’s militia while Leo was imprisoned in Rimini. The firm Roman declaration against lay candidates and secular pressures in the election of bishops was totally ignored in Ravenna.
Although Michael sent many bribes and gifts to Pope Stephen and King Desiderius in an effort to gain broader support, the pontiff refused to consecrate him as archbishop. Meanwhile Leo the archdeacon remained under Duke Maurice’s guard in Rimini. This grave division was only resolved by another external intervention, this time by the Franks. In a rather surprising development, the widowed Queen Bertrada had arranged for her eldest son Charles to marry the daughter of King Desiderius.11 The prospect of a Frankish-Lombard alliance caused the pope great fury and the queen travelled to Rome in 770 to explain her intentions to him. In discussions with Stephen III, she suggested that after marrying the Lombard princess Charles would be able to influence Desiderius to return key cities to the see of St Peter and to settle the dispute in Ravenna.12 A Frankish envoy named Itherius was deputed to negotiate with the Lombard king, and another, Count Hucbald, was sent with papal envoys to deal with Michael. According to the Roman Book of the Pontiffs, when the Ravennati learned of this plan, ‘they all immediately rose up against Michael and threw him out of the episcopium in disgrace’.13 Hucbald took the ‘usurper’, backed by the Lombards, to Rome in chains, and freed Leo from prison so that he could be consecrated as archbishop.14 This Frankish initiative consolidated the importance of transalpine forces in the internal problems of the papacy and the city of Ravenna.
In the early 770s, King Desiderius returned to his campaign to win control of Rome and Pope Stephen III intensified his appeals to the Franks for protection. The Lombards used an agent, Paul Afiarta, who held a secular position as chief military officer (superista) of the Roman church, to intercept papal communications with the Franks and to arrange the murder of two notaries. In 772 the short Life of Stephen III concludes with the extreme disorder this provoked in Rome and the prompt election of Hadrian – a typically Roman candidate of noble birth. The new pope considered Afiarta a traitor and asked Archbishop Leo of Ravenna to arrest him. Leo, however, went further and arranged for Afiarta to be put to death in Ravenna, to Hadrian’s intense displeasure.15
Pope Hadrian’s anger was also related to Desiderius’ military threats, which had heightened the desperate tone of Stephen III’s letters to Charles. These letters, preserved in the Codex Carolinus, a collection put together on the king’s orders in 791, document the significance of the novel relationship between the Frankish kings and the bishops of Rome.16 When Pope Hadrian put the request for Frankish military intervention into the mouth of St Peter himself, the urgency of his position became clearer and harder to ignore. In Ravenna, where the possibility of repeated campaigns by transalpine rulers was surely understood, it set up a triangular framework of relations between the Franks and the two cities.17
Eventually, in 773, Charles somewhat unwillingly ordered the Franks to march to the relief of the see of St Peter. In the spring of the next year, using two ancient Roman routes across the Alps, the king set out from Geneva taking the Mont Cenis pass, while his uncle Bernard went over the Great St Bernard. These western passes, used by Pope Stephen II in his adventurous journey to the Franks in 753 and by Pippin when he first entered Italy, gave access to Rome over the Ligurian Apennines and down the western coast of the peninsula.18 In 774 when Archbishop Leo of Ravenna heard that Charles had come down from the Mount Cenis pass and was marching through the valley of Susa, he sent his deacon Martin to assist the Frankish army. Thanks to Martin’s detailed knowledge of the area, the king was able to surprise the Lombards by attacking unexpectedly from the rear, in a battle which proved decisive.19 Desiderius’ Lombard militia were unable to confront the battlehardened Frankish warriors, and Charles established a siege of Pavia that led ultimately to the collapse of the Lombard kingdom.20 He also decided to celebrate the most important Christian feast of Easter in Rome, to Pope Hadrian’s surprise. Charles’s visit offered an opportunity to discuss what was to happen in the Lombard territories to be ceded to papal control, which included ‘the whole exarchate of Ravenna as it once existed, the provinces of the Venetiae and Istria, and the whole duchy of Spoleto and Benevento’.21 The Roman Book of the Pontiffs records that a document of donation was drawn up and placed in the tomb of St Peter, and the king took a copy of the same agreement away with him.22
After the fall of Pavia in June 774, the thirty-year-old Charles put on the iron crown of the Lombards, adding the title king of the Lombards to his already prestigious regal name (king of the Franks and patricius Romanorum). He installed a provisional government in Pavia and sent counts to demand the submission of the most important cities. To ensure that Desiderius had no further opportunity to renege on his promises, Charles took the Lombard king off to Francia in chains, where he died in a monastery.23 His son Adelchis fled from Verona to Constantinople, where he nurtured hopes of returning to reclaim his inheritance. But Charles countered this possibility by maintaining the Lombard kingdom of Italy as a separate political unit. In 781 he appointed his four-year-old son Carloman, renamed Pippin, as subking; made Pope Hadrian anoint him as king of Italy, and, after Pippin’s death, promoted his son Bernard as king. They both ruled under Charles’s orders for nearly forty years, and then Charles’s successor, Louis the Pious, gave Bernard permission to remain king of Italy.24
Once the kingdom of the Lombards had been subsumed into the Frankish sphere, Archbishop Leo of Ravenna cultivated his own relations with the Frankish monarch. He even made a personal visit to Charles, crossing the Alps at some point before 778.25 Just as previous archbishops had often travelled to the imperial court at Constantinople to obtain privileges, so now Leo could see that the Frankish court would better serve his interests. When Pope Hadrian learned of this visit he was understandably outraged.
Leo allowed Ravenna to be used as a prison for enemies of Rome but refused to execute papal orders. He imprisoned one of Hadrian’s counts; denied the papal saccellarius, Gregory, access to Imola and Bologna; replaced papal officers appointed to various cities by his own nominees and, in October 775, broke the seals on a letter that Patriarch John of Grado had written to Hadrian, to learn what plans were being made for action against the Lombards. The pope considered this treasonous because Leo would have revealed the contents of the letter to the Lombard duke of Benevento.
A measure of Pope Hadrian’s anger at Leo’s independence can be found in two letters written to Charles in October and November 775, which denounce the archbishop of Ravenna in very strong language: ‘how false is the faith of Archbishop Leo of Ravenna [who] holds this apostolic loyalty in such contempt . . . and refuses to obey our commands . . . Only that archbishop stands alone in the pride of his savagery.’26 They also indirectly criticize Charles, who had allowed Leo to attend his court when the archbishop tried to further his own ambitions. For the Frankish king, therefore, Ravenna and its ecclesiastical ruler represented a significant force that he could set against the pope; Charles was playing one bishop off against another to enhance his own authority.
The relationship that Archbishop Leo had built up with Charles persisted even after Leo’s death, to Hadrian’s continuing distress. Despite the pope’s wild condemnations, city officials in Ravenna went on regarding the Frankish king as their overlord.27 Hadrian accused two iudices, who had gone directly to Charles, of terrible crimes including the sale of individuals to pagan peoples, and demanded that they should be brought to trial in Rome.28 In 790–91 he was still complaining that the Ravennati and Pentapolenses were seeking justice from Charles rather than coming to Rome as he had ordered. They were denying the pope’s legal authority (dicio).29 So, in spite of agreements dating back to the time of Pippin, Charles’s father, that gave the territory of the exarchate to the heirs of St Peter, Ravenna refused to admit papal control and its government remained disputed – encouraged partly by Charles’s keen interest in it.
Faced with the continuing dispute over who should rule over what had once been the Byzantine exarchate and its capital city, Ravenna, some clerical officials inside the Lateran palace ingeniously devised a document that would demonstrate the pope’s rights to the territory and redefine relations between the church of Rome and the most powerful ruler in the West.30 In their skilful forgery, probably made in 776, they invoked the first Christian emperor, Constantine I, and attributed to him an imperial decree that endowed Pope Sylvester (314–35) with control over the western regions of the Roman world.31 This was intimately linked with the myth that Sylvester had miraculously cured the thenpagan emperor of leprosy, which persuaded Constantine to accept Christian baptism and to entrust ‘the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places and cities of Italy or the western region’ to the pope. The decree continues: ‘we have provided for our empire to be transferred to the eastern regions . . . and for a city to be built in the province of Byzantia’, a reference to Constantine’s new capital. Constructing the Donation to fit fourth-century circumstances, papal officials carefully used genuine imperial laws, Pope Sylvester’s known decrees and particularly his Life as recorded in the Roman Book of the Pontiffs to justify papal rule over the western part of the empire. They also codified the superior authority of the church over lay rulers.
The Donation is more than simply an attempt to legitimate papal sovereignty over Ravenna. It should be seen as part of the underlying change of authority that involved an enormous psychological shift. From the perspective of the Mediterranean as a whole, the most important disruption of established patterns of authority was the permanence of the Islamic conquests. The Arabs’ assault on the Queen City in the early 700s had been rebuffed, but the consequence was not the reestablishment of Roman imperial rule from Constantinople throughout the Near East. On the contrary, the empire was permanently diminished by the Arab occupation of that region, and was forced into its new form as Byzantium, implacably determined to survive – as it did until the Ottoman Turks overran it in 1453. In the mid-eighth century, however, it was unable to defend Italy from the Lombards. But, unlike the Muslim enemy, the Lombards were Christian, as were the Franks. Both respected the authority of the heirs of St Peter and looked to them for guidance. The extraordinary achievement of the early medieval papacy was to inspire and organize an extensive and lasting Christianization of zones and people beyond Byzantium’s reach and under Rome’s spiritual leadership. This process drew distant territories into allegiance to the world of Christendom.
Of all the apostolic churches, Rome was now the only one outside the muchreduced Byzantine empire that had not fallen to the Arabs, as Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem had. In addition, it had two unique and influential legacies: the biblical primacy of St Peter was the first and most vital, recognized everywhere in Christendom, if reluctantly in Constantinople; and the second drew on the senatorial experience, wealth and authority of Old Rome, which fed into the church’s administration and power structures. As a result, it had the will and capacity to exercise its authority over ever more extensive papal territories, although it continued to need a much greater secular power to protect it – hence the approach to an historic new ally north of the Alps. The Donation sprang from a deep sense that legitimacy stemmed from Constantinople. Only now, its imperial authority was used by western representatives to transform their own claims and to strike out in a quite different direction.32
The forgery was not produced in triumph as a discovery, but Pope Hadrian alluded to it in a letter to Charles of May 778, when he anxiously attempted to enforce the monarch’s military duty to return the territory of the exarchate to Rome.33 He noted the fact that Emperor Constantine had granted Pope Sylvester authority ‘in his Hesperiae partibus’ – that is, the West – and added: ‘we have many donations hidden in our sacred archive of the Lateran, and for the guarantee of your most Christian rule we advise you to demonstrate your words by deeds’. While the letter falls into the pattern of earlier appeals, this direct citation of the Donation reflects a claim now supported by a forged document supposedly written in the fourth century at the time of the founding of Constantinople. Through this passing reference and the Donation’s later incorporation into collections of ecclesiastical decrees, it gradually established a legitimacy its drafters were aware it never had. Their inventive care managed to convince nearly all readers for about seven hundred years, although a few challenges to its authenticity were raised (notably by opponents of papal authority such as Hincmar of Reims and Emperor Otto III). Only in the mid-fifteenth century were the inconsistencies of vocabulary and context unpicked by Lorenzo Valla.
In 778 Charles had not reacted with enthusiasm to his role as a ‘New Constantine’, but three years later when he visited Rome with his wife Hildegard to have their two youngest sons anointed and crowned as kings of Italy and Aquitaine respectively, he agreed that the territories of the Ravenna exarchate should be returned to the apostles Peter and Paul.34 In practice the transfer took much longer, partly because archbishops of Ravenna refused to support it. But the fiction behind the Donation of Constantine bore fruit in the permanent presence of Frankish rule in northern and central Italy in alliance with the overall spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome. This marked the fundamental shift of religious and political identity in early medieval Italy, from association with the eastern half of Christendom led by Constantinople to a western assertion of separate and superior power in what was to become known as ‘Europe’.35 In this way the dispute over Ravenna helped to forge western Christendom, in spite of the city’s increasingly marginal position.