Charlemagne

On Christmas Day 800, in Saint Peter's in Rome, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the king of the Franks and the assembled Romans acclaimed him emperor. Einhard, who knew him and wrote his life a decade or so after his death, reports that Charlemagne said afterwards he would not have entered the church that day had he known what the pope intended. Historians have argued about that remark ever since, because a ceremony of that scale is not improvised and because the claim of reluctance is exactly what a Frankish court would want on the record.

The difficulty was diplomatic before it was theological. There already was a Roman emperor, in Constantinople, and at that moment the throne was held by Irene, a woman, which western apologists used to argue the office was vacant. The eastern court did not accept the argument, and the matter was only settled in 812 when Byzantine envoys agreed to address Charlemagne as emperor without conceding that he was emperor of the Romans.

What the ceremony established in the West was more durable than the title. A pope had crowned an emperor, and the act could be read as a gift in the pope's hands. Later popes read it exactly that way, and later emperors read it as a formality confirming an authority they already held. The investiture disputes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the political theology of the two swords, are arguments about what happened in that building on that morning.

The Carolingian religious programme was administrative. The Admonitio Generalis of 789 is a long list of orders to bishops, abbots and counts: correct your books, teach the creed and the Lord's Prayer in a language the people understand, keep Sunday, stop the local abuses named here, and set up schools where boys can learn to read. It reads less like a sermon than an inspection report with instructions attached.

Behind it was a genuine textual problem. Liturgical books, bibles and canon law collections had drifted apart across centuries of local copying, and no two churches did the same thing in the same words. Charlemagne asked Rome for an authoritative sacramentary and received one, which his scholars then had to supplement because it was a papal book unsuited to ordinary parish use. Alcuin of York and others revised the biblical text, and the scriptoria developed a clear, spaced, minuscule hand that is the ancestor of the lower case letters on this page.

The same programme had a coercive edge that the reforms are often described without. The capitulary issued for the conquered Saxons made refusing baptism, eating meat in Lent and cremating the dead capital offences, and the campaign that enforced it lasted three decades. A later capitulary softened the terms after criticism from within his own court, Alcuin among the critics, who argued that faith is a matter of persuasion and that tithes were being demanded of people who had not been taught anything first.