Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At Paderborn he learnt of the Pope's approach. He sent to him archbishop Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to the cathedral.

Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.

The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the king a list of accusations against the Pope.

The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy, senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons, Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St. Peter's, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city, and took again possession of the Lateran.

In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in the Pope's possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St. Peter's, where the people waited for him in the usual order.

The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to clear the Pope from the accusations brought against him, and for this purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter's of archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one voice: ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors, and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”

After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were again assembled in the same church of St. Peter's. Charles, at the request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature, was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. celebrated High Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”

And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord. And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king his son.

Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St. Peter's primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes. During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and placed a nobler and more religious house on the throne of the Franks. Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son, during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory, and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St. Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its master, Christendom. The eastern emperor in his ardour to impose heresy, had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any civil subjection to the eastern.

Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from the Tagus to the Indus.

First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal, but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor's charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title, of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or Germans, nor dependent on the Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank, and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans. As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor; and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.

The annalists of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God's authority we have this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo, that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was that among the kings there should be one, already most powerful by the extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800. Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of things. So far already had Arius anticipated Mohammed. Against this confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power, and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above, by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ's religion, and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused. The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East; had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer with Christian name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian. Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.

Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out: Rome is our common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I. a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of qualities, excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the greatest of Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds of years after his death.

To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter's Basilica, was of itself to change the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory's time the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles; now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800 years, into the civil counsels of princes.

Pipin le Bref, great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was free. There was no written constitution, but it was one power exercised by sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense activity.

The royal commissioners, Missi Dominici, an institution perfected by Charles, carried everywhere throughout his vast empire a knowledge of the laws thus passed, and reported to the sovereign how they were kept. By them the king touched each member of his political body. It was a class of removable functionaries, entirely under the order of the central power. It was composed chiefly, but not always, of bishops and counts. They went four times a year, usually two and two, an ecclesiastic and a layman, to inspect the district entrusted to them. All authorities were subject to this inspection. They reported to the sovereign upon all, and conveyed to him the popular feeling, as well as informed him as to the popular needs. This institution, together with the Champs de Mai, contributed to the empire's unity by maintaining its peace. It checked excesses of power in the great proprietors.

An account is extant how these commissioners acted in one of the remotest provinces, that of Istria. They consisted of two counts and a simple priest. At their arrival they held a public enquiry upon the conduct of the religious and civil authorities. The patriarch of Grado was obliged to appear in person, together with all the bishops and counts of the province. After that they considered the conduct of the duke John. The patriarch and the duke were alike compelled to give pledges to amend what had been wrongly done. All felt that Charlemagne himself was behind his commissioners; and when they departed it was with the full assurance that their visit had not been in vain. It will be right to take this instance as representing the government of Charles everywhere, and at all times. For the first time since the origin of Frank society a power existed, each of whose acts indicated a resolution to maintain the general good and to impregnate the whole nation with the spirit of the sovereign.

In all this government the model of the Christian hierarchy was before the mind of Charles, and in the strength of union with it he worked. What is so singularly civilising in his power is the extinction in his personal character as ruler of anything local, bounded, and particular, together with the maintenance of every right in every place. The Pope was the head of the Church, and he looked upon himself as the head of the State; the Pope was surrounded in every province by bishops, his colleagues and coadjutors; they worked together in one mass. So Charles willed that his dukes and counts should work with him in one mass for one end, the pacific unity of his great empire. The act of the Pope in making him Roman emperor helped him greatly to conceive of himself as the secular head of a Christian brotherhood of peoples, as the Pope was its spiritual head. But the act which made him emperor did not give him secular dominion over any people not already subject to him. For instance, it did not subject to him the Saxon kingdoms in Britain. He was not territorial, but moral leader and president in the council of kings; their chief in the defence of the Church. He did not take from the Greek empress or her successors any temporal lordship; though the Greek pride long refused to acknowledge him as an equal. The Pope remained what he had been from the time of Stephen II., an independent sovereign in the Papal State: he had not given himself a master in erecting a new empire. In fact we see Leo III. retain the exercise of his secular sovereignty, and the emperor appear only as defender of St. Peter's landed inheritance. Leo III. maintained the right of his own officers against the interference of some imperial commissioners, and distinguished accurately the limits of the State of the Church, from the imperial realm. He took measures against Arab inroads, to secure his State in full independence. What he needed was the emperor's support against the violent party spirit of the time; against such deeds as the intrusion of a Pope upon the Apostolic See by armed force; against the assault upon a Pope by conspirators. This the authority of the emperor in Rome secured. For that he had a jurisdiction, as the Patricius had before. For this the Romans took an oath to the emperor as well as to the Pope; to the one as protector and advocate, to the other as temporal lord.

If in all this action Charlemagne had before him the model of the Christian hierarchy, not only his own vast kingdom, but all the nations of the West had spread out before them in the forty-six years of his reign, but especially in the last fourteen, when he had become, by the Pope's act, emperor of the Romans, the cordiality of union between the two great powers of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. The positive and intrinsic effect of the Holy See as the inflexible rule of doctrine and of justice on the Teuton features of the several northern tribes was seen when a man of immense natural capacity wielded so great a power in close conjunction and amity with it. What can be further than the action of Charles in the Champs de Mai, in the Missi Dominici, in a legislation which considered all the needs and desires of the subject, while it was supreme and final in its authority, from the condition of the northern tribes when they broke into the empire. The Vandals howled around the walls of Hippo when St. Augustine was repeating the penitential psalms on his death-bed; while Charles kept under his pillow St. Augustine's City of God, and strove to rule his empire for the maintenance of the Christian faith. He was accomplishing that union of many nations in one political bond as members of the same religion which Augustine himself, the most clear-sighted of saintly historians, was unable to contemplate. The mixture of earth with iron in the feet of the great heathen statue had wrought its dissolution; but the Teuton monarch, who mounted on his knees the steps of St. Peter's, kissing each separately, at the beginning of his career pledged his faith to the Pope over the tomb of the chief apostle, and before it ended he had given a final check to the intestine struggles of disunion. He had more than equalled the work of Constantine. The great Roman was indeed personally, though imperfectly, Christian. How much there was of policy, how much of faith in his conversion is a problem too hard to solve; but he was baptised on his death-bed, and the delay was probably of disastrous import to his inward life; and his empire was, in a great degree, still unconverted and heathen. His latter years were especially faulty in his practical execution of the relation between the Two Powers. From his time forward his own special foundation at Byzantium declined more and more, until the emperor who represented him became, in Leo, the Isaurian, and his son Kopronymus, the greatest enemy of the Church. But Charlemagne by his real union with St. Peter's successor, imparted Roman order, Christian civilisation, and civil constitution to that mass of seething peoples. If in the five hundred years succeeding Constantine his work deteriorated more and more, until the city which he wished to be the head of Christian empire yielded half of it to the Saracen, and then became the very seat of schism, the West, in the five hundred years which followed Charlemagne, saw a family of Christian and Catholic nations surround the throne of the chief apostle, nations which his Primacy had called into existence when he placed the imperial diadem on the head of “Charles Augustus, crowned of God”.

If from the West we extend our view to Charlemagne's effect on the East, we find the new order of things which his empire introduced, present him as the temporal head of the Christian faith in union with its spiritual head over against the powerless Byzantine emperor. The Pope had ceased to be a subject, and his word had set a Teuton sovereign on full equality with the power which had so grievously maltreated Italy during two hundred years. Never could he have taken such a step had he been still a vassal of the Greek court, which had not only tyrannised itself, but left the Apostolic See defenceless to the Lombard aggression for many generations. The emperor Zeno had made Odoacer Roman Patricius for the subjugation of Italy and of Rome itself. Stephen II. had made Pipin Patricius for its delivery and defence of the Holy See. Leo III. had exalted the Patricius to be emperor for fuller defence. No Roman noble or bandit could resist the power thus created. The Greek influence in Italy was all but extinguished; the Roman Church was protected from that violation of its rights, that plundering of its property, which Cæsar and Exarch had so often inflicted. For the patrimonies which the Isaurian had confiscated, the Roman See was thus in another form compensated. The Pope had received a domain in central Italy, and was in the possession of full independence. Over against that free life and mounting sap of the West, the East presented but an image of decay and stagnation.

Harun al Raschid was reigning as chalif at Bagdad when Charles was made emperor at Rome. His troops advanced to Ephesus and compelled the empress Irene to pay tribute during a four years' suspension of hostilities. Again and again had Moslem armies polluted the Christian cities from Antioch to the Bosphorus with every iniquity. In 726, they took possession of St. Basil's Cæsarea, in the year when the Isaurian was trying to force his Mohammedan hatred of images on Pope St. Gregory II., and seven years before he was stripping the Roman Church of its patrimony, and transferring ten provinces of the Papal patriarchate to the bishop of the eastern capital. From the death of Mohammed in 632 to the creation of Charles as emperor of the Romans in 800, was a time of scarcely interrupted disaster inflicted by the Saracen on the Christian through the East and the South. The outburst began as we have seen, by the betrayal of the faith on the part of Heraclius, the sole Roman emperor: Constans II., Leo III., and Kopronymus continued this betrayal. Mohammed waxed greater and greater through this whole period. The Christian successes consisted in not losing Constantinople, and in saving the south of France after the loss of Spain. In the reign of Harun al Raschid, that most terrible of destructions was at its greatest expansion and intensity. Then an emperor of the Romans was created by the Pope for the special defence of the Church. Exactly as Harun in his character of chalif was bound to lay waste and destroy the Christian Church and Faith, Charles was bound to watch over it. This was the tenure by which he held the empire, and his successors after him. It was given, not for the glory and distinction of the wearer, but its true and proper significance lay in the fulfilment of the duties which the emperor was to discharge as protector of the Church. All imperial grandeur was an attribute of this duty. Exactly because the Greek emperor had not fulfilled this duty, the Pope undertook the renovation of the western Roman empire. It would be an entirely erroneous view of Leo's act to suppose that he could have done nothing else, that he must have made Charlemagne emperor, and by this single crowning bound himself and his successors to accept every succeeding emperor. Things in the East had come to that pass, but in the West the whole empire, in conception and in fact, was the Pope's work. The office thus created was a spiritual office, to which the spiritual head of Christendom should consecrate, anoint, and crown its temporal head. When there was a new king of the Franks, he was to come to Rome for consecration as emperor of the Romans: the Pope did not elect the new king, neither of the Franks then, nor of the Germans afterwards, but he, and he alone, invested the man chosen king with the title and power of the Roman emperor.

The chalifate, set up in the false pretension of succeeding a man whose whole claim to rule was founded on a falsehood, had become the most terrible despotism which human history had witnessed. It had taken possession of a very large part of what was Christian territory when it appeared in the world. Heraclius and his line trembled before it. At the time when a soldier of fortune closed seven revolutions at Byzantium Christian Spain was overwhelmed by it. And presently the Isaurian line helped its onward march by arrogating to itself that intrusion into spiritual government, which was the very basis of the chalifate. Then the action of Leo III., on Christmas Day, 800, created in the West a power adequate to resist the further advance of Mohammedan rule. As long continued dissension in the faith, decline in Christian morals, and an ever advancing despotism had given entrance to Saracen conquest, so from the very tomb of St. Peter, and at the voice of his Successor, arose that Christian king and Roman prince whom Pope Felix and his successors sought in vain from the heirs of Constantine. The vileness of oriental despotism was to meet in conflict Christian monarchy: the union of nations in the faith to give one spirit to the West: the flood which had almost overflowed the earth to stop before the Rock of Peter.