The Holy Roman Empire. Viscount James Bryce

vulgar human desires and passions. The lofty and fervent mind of Charles was not free from the stirrings of personal ambition: yet these may be excused, if not defended, as almost inseparable from an intense and restless genius, which, be it never so unselfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon everything its grasp and raise out of everything its monument. The policy of the Popes was prompted by motives less noble. Ever since the extinction of the Western Empire had emancipated the ecclesiastical potentate from secular control, the first and most abiding object of his schemes and prayers had been the acquisition of territorial wealth in the neighbourhood of his capital. He had indeed a sort of justification – for Rome, a city with neither trade nor industry, was crowded with poor, for whom it devolved on the bishop to provide. Yet the pursuit was one which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the Popes and give a sinister character to all they did. It was this fear for the lands of the Church far more than for religion or the safety of the city – neither of which were really endangered by the Lombard attacks – that had prompted their passionate appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was now the well-grounded hope of having these possessions confirmed and extended by Pipin's greater son that made the Roman ecclesiastics so forward in his cause. And it was the same lust after worldly wealth and pomp, mingled with the dawning prospect of an independent principality, that now began to seduce them into a long course of guile and intrigue. For this is probably the very time, although the exact date cannot be established, to which must be assigned the extraordinary forgery of the Donation of Constantine, whereby it was pretended that power over Italy and the whole West had been granted by the first Christian Emperor to Pope Sylvester and his successors in the Chair of the Apostle.

      Accession of Pope Leo III, A.D. 796.

      For the next twenty-four years Italy remained quiet. The government of Rome was carried on in the name of the Patrician Charles, although it does not appear that he sent thither any official representative; while at the same time both the city and the exarchate continued to admit the nominal supremacy of the Eastern Emperor, employing the years of his reign to date documents. 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.

      Belief in the Roman Empire not extinct.

      Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Cæsar 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 had from that time been nominally subject; but it was only during one brief interval between the death of Totila 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; was still recalled by laws and customs; was dear to the subject populations, who fondly looked back to the days when slavery 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 before long began to call themselves imperatores and basileis of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of Mohammedanism45 had brought out the common Christianity of Europe into a fuller relief. 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 nowise find in the Court of the Bosphorus, growing ever feebler and more alien to the West. The name of 'respublica,' permanent at the elder Rome, had never been applied to the Eastern Empire. Its government was from the first half Greek, half Asiatic; and had now drifted away from its ancient traditions into the forms of an Oriental despotism. Claudian had already sneered at 'Greek Quirites46 :' the general use, since Heraclius's reign, of the Greek tongue, and the difference of manners and usages, made the taunt now more deserved.

      Motives of the Pope.

      The Pope had no reason to wish well to the Byzantine princes, who while insulting his weakness had given him no help against the savage Lombards, and who for nearly seventy years47 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: they were still, and while they retained the imperial name, must so long continue, titular sovereigns of the Roman city. Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal: without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman, nor by necessary consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church48. For, as will be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for the same thing. Thus urged, the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are said to have already contemplated49, and towards which the events of the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The widowed empress Irene, equally famous for her beauty, her talents, and her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI: a woman, an usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of Byzantium 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 also be clothed with the outward dignity. 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 Europe, whose subject nations, Keltic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to imitate his customs50. In Charles, the hero who united under one sceptre so many races, who ruled all as the vicegerent of God, the pontiff might well see – as later ages saw – the new golden head of a second image51, erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron and clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of Constantinople.

      Coronation of Charles at Rome, A.D. 800.

      At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The Pope's cause was heard; his innocence, already vindicated by a miracle, was pronounced by the Patrician in full synod; his accusers condemned in his stead. Charles remained in the city for some weeks; and on Christmas-day, A.D. 80052, he heard mass in the basilica of St. Peter. On the spot where now the gigantic dome of Bramante

45

After the translatio ad Francos of A.D. 800, the two Empires corresponded exactly to the two Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova.

46'Plaudentem cerne senatumEt Byzantinos proceres, Graiosque Quirites.' In Eutrop. ii. 135.

47

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.

48

I should not have thought it necessary to explain that the sentence in the text is meant simply to state what were (so far as can be made out) the sentiments and notions of the ninth century, if a writer in the Tablet (reviewing a former edition) had not understood it as an expression of the author's own belief.

To a modern eye there is of course no necessary connection between the Roman Empire and a catholic and apostolic Church; in fact, the two things seem rather, such has been the impression made on us by the long struggle of church and state, in their nature mutually antagonistic. 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.

49

Monachus Sangallensis, De Gestis Karoli; in Pertz, Monumenta Germaniæ Historica.

50

Monachus Sangallensis; ut supra. So Pope Gregory the Great two centuries earlier: 'Quanto cæteros homines regia dignitas antecedit, tanto cæterarum gentium regna regni Francorum culmen excellit.' Ep. v. 6.

51

Alciatus, De Formula imperii Romani.

52

Or rather, according to the then prevailing practice of beginning the year from Christmas-day, A.D. 801.