16: The Reign of Charlemagne

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1 16: The Reign of Charlemagne Charlemagne ruled over the Carolingian Empire from 768 until his death in 814. During the forty-six years of his reign, Charlemagne expanded the Frankish realm to its greatest extent with a succession of conquests over the traditional enemies of the Franks. An enlightened king as well as a conqueror, Charlemagne also patronised the Carolingian Renaissance in which classical ideals, education and the production of visual culture were revived amongst the Franks. Driven by his Christian faith, Charlemagne conceived of himself as a new Constantine and was conformed as such when he was crowned imperator Romanorum by Pope Leo III in : The Conquests of Charlemagne After the death of Pepin the Short in 768, the Frankish realm was divided between his sons, Charlemagne and Carloman. The brothers ruled the Frankish Empire together for three years until the death of Carloman in 771 at which point Charlemagne became sole ruler. The first three decades of Charlemagne s rule were dominated by military campaigns against external enemies and internal separatists. The first and the most demanding of these military undertakings was the invasion of Saxony on the North German Plain. The Saxons had long been the traditional enemies of the Franks, had never formed part of the Frankish realm and remained for the most part pagan despite the efforts of Anglo-Saxon Christian missionaries in the area during the eighth century. The historical enmity and religious differences between the Franks and the Saxons provoked fierce resistance from the Saxons toward Frankish aggression while a lack of centralized political authority within Saxony meant that Charlemagne s campaigns against the Saxons were protracted and attritional in nature. The Saxons together with their neighbours, the Frisians, were not fully brought under Frankish control until 804 at which point the Saxons were forced to accept Christianity. While campaigns against the Saxons were ongoing, Charlemagne also directed further Frankish intervention in Italy. In 773, after the Lombard king Desiderius had invaded the papal Duchy of Pentapolis, Charlemagne responded to appeals for help from Pope Adrian I and besieged the Lombard capital at Pavia. The following year, Desiderius surrendered his crown to Charlemagne who then assumed kingship over the Lombards while reaffirming and expanding the Donation of Pepin made in 756. In 781, Charlemagne appointed his son, Pepin (formerly named Carloman) as King of the Lombards, a title which Pepin held under his father s authority until his death in

2 Charlemagne sought to secure the southern borders of the Frankish realm by invading Muslim Spain in 778. While this campaign ended in failure for the Franks, Charlemagne persisted in his efforts to secure the Frankish frontier with Spain and in 781 he made Aquitaine a Frankish sub-kingdom then installed his youngest son, Louis, as king of the territory. Louis gradually nurtured an acceptance of Frankish rule within Aquitaine and used the kingdom as a base of operations from which he eventually established the Marca Hispanica (Spanish March) between the Pyrenees and the River Ebro as a buffer zone against Muslim invasion. With Louis installed as King of Aquitaine and Pepin ruling Frankish lands in Italy in his father s name, Charlemagne was able to entrust the running of the south of the Carolingian Empire to his sons and focus his attention on the affairs of the north. In these circumstances, Charlemagne brought a temporary end to the itineracy of the Frankish court and established a permanent capital at Aachen, a city situated in the heart of Austrasia -the traditional power base of the Carolingians -and close enough to Saxony to allow Charlemagne to direct the ongoing military campaigns in that territory. In the 790s, Charlemagne commissioned the construction of an elaborate royal palace at Aachen and after the conquest of Saxony and Frisia was completed, Charlemagne rarely left his capital. Between 787 and 788, Charlemagne decisively ended long-standing Bavarian resistance to Frankish rule by deposing Tassilo III and incorporating Bavaria into the Frankish realm under the governance of a prefect. The subjugation of Bavaria brought Carolingian armies into direct contact with the Avars and the end of the already declining Avar Khaganate was hastened by a series of Frankish attacks which began in 791. Over the following five years, Charlemagne subjugated the Avars and ensured the long-term security of the Carolingian Empire s eastern frontier by establishing the Avar March to the immediate east of Bavaria. After thirty years of military campaigning, Charlemagne ruled over a vast territory comprised of the lands that would become France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy. As a geo-political entity, the Carolingian Empire equalled the scale of the Western Roman Empire and emerged as a potent rival to the Byzantine Empire in the East. 16.2: The Holy Roman Emperor After Justinian, the Byzantine emperors were increasingly unable to defend Western Christianity from the expansion of Islam or the papacy from the aggression of the Lombards. Faced with the military impotency of the Byzantine throne, the papacy had increasingly looked to the Franks to become the new defenders of Christianity in Western Europe and had subsequently 2

3 offered consistent support to the Frankish rulers, even to the extent of turning a blind eye to the frequent brutality of the Merovingians, tolerating Carolingian domination of ecclesiastical affairs within the Frankish realm and providing papal endorsement of the Carolingian seizure of the Frankish throne. In return, the Franks had vanquished Arianism from Gaul, supported the missionary work of the papacy against Germanic paganism, halted Muslim expansion into Western Christendom and protected the papacy against the Lombards. Yet until Charlemagne, it was reciprocity rather than a genuine devotion to Christianity which motivated the Frankish rulers to maintain a favourable adjustment toward the Church. Charlemagne, however, was markedly different from his predecessors. His deep personal commitment to Christianity was as much a motivation for his campaigns against Muslim Spain and pagan Saxony as his desire to further expand the frontiers of the Carolingian Empire at the expense of the traditional enemies of the Franks. Moreover, Charlemagne s religious conviction shaped a new ideology for the Carolingian Empire. In the view of Charlemagne and several of the intellectuals which he brought to his court, the Carolingian Empire was not a Frankish empire per se nor did it represent a revival of the Western Roman Empire, but instead it was an imperium Christianum (Christian Empire), the identity of which was derived from Christian faith rather than from the Frankish ethnicity of its overlords or the secular ideals of the Roman State. Attendant to the ideology of the imperium Christianum was Charlemagne s conception of himself as a new Constantine, the ruler of the populus christianus (Christian people) as well as the defender of the Catholic Church. Much of Charlemagne s ideology coincided with the aspirations which the papacy had long-held for the Frankish potentates. However, the strident caesaropapism inherent to Charlemagne s vision of the Carolingian Empire was likely a key reason as to why Pope Adrian I, whose pontificate lasted from 772 to 795, was reluctant to recognise Charlemagne rather than the emperor in Constantinople as the ultimate secular authority in Christendom. Yet when Adrian I died in December 795, he was succeeded by Leo III whose pontificate was opposed by prominent papal bureaucrats who subsequently brought allegations of misconduct against the new pope. The challenges presented to Leo by the magnates of Rome had not abated in 797 when Irene of Athens made herself empress regnant in Constantinople under circumstances which cast doubt over the legitimacy of her authority. Confronted with both internal threats to his own pontificate and the turmoil surrounding the Byzantine throne, Leo increasingly looked to Charlemagne as the principal protector and secular ally of the papacy. In April 799 Leo was attacked on the streets of Rome by his rivals who 3

4 attempted to blind him and remove his tongue, thus disqualifying him from the papacy. Leo eventually recovered from the attack but with his enemies still at large in Rome, he travelled across the Alps to seek the assistance of the Franks. In the autumn of 800, Leo III returned to Italy with a Frankish military retinue provided by Charlemagne which, on arrival in Rome, both restored Leo to the papacy and arrested his attackers. In late 800, Charlemagne himself travelled to Rome to mediate a settlement between Leo and his enemies. In December, at Charlemagne s behest, Leo took an oath of innocence as a means of clearing himself of the allegations of misconduct made against him. Two days later, Leo III crowned Charlemagne imperator Romanorum (Holy Roman Emperor) in St Peter s Basilica. According to Einhard, Charlemagne s court biographer, Charlemagne himself was unaware of Leo s intentions to bestow the title of emperor upon him. However, the development was advantageous to both parties in that by elevating Charlemagne to the status of emperor, Leo III gave his protector a secular authority sufficient to enable Leo to remove the papacy from the jurisdiction of the Empress Irene. At the same time, Charlemagne s conception of himself as the ruler of an imperium Christianum at last received gained papal acknowledgement. Given the immediate benefits which both Leo and Charlemagne reaped from the coronation of Christmas Day 800, it is highly likely that despite the retrospective claims made by Einhard, the event was in fact the result of a prior agreement made between the two men. Whatever the circumstances behind Leo III s crowning Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, the event had long-term consequences for relationships between the Carolingian and Byzantine empires. On receiving the news of Charlemagne s coronation, the Empress Irene refused to acknowledge Charlemagne s imperial status and although Charlemagne himself made no claim to hold secular or ecclesiastical authority in the East, his elevation to the position of emperor was widely viewed in Constantinople as tantamount to an act of usurpation through which Charlemagne and Leo III had seized the prerogatives of the Byzantine throne. Irene was deposed in 802 and Nikephorus I was installed as her successor. Like Irene, Nikephorus refused to recognise Charlemagne as emperor in the West and in 803, amidst deteriorating relations, the Franks and the Byzantines went to war over the control of Venetia in northern Italy and Dalmatia. Over the next six years, Charlemagne s land and naval forces prevailed against their Byzantine enemies and in 809, Nikephorus was forced to recognise Charlemagne s imperial authority in the West in exchange for peace with the Franks. However, the peace agreed between Charlemagne and Nikephorus did not bring an end to the resentments which the Byzantine Empire harboured over Charlemagne s coronation and the episode ultimately led to a deepening 4

5 of the divisions between Western and Eastern Christendom. 16.3: The Carolingian Renaissance By the eighth century, spoken Latin within Europe was in the midst of an evolution which eventually yielded the Romance languages. Within the Frankish realm, the development of vernacular languages combined with poor standards of education led to an increasing lack of understanding of written Latin. This state-of-affairs in turn led to corrupted transcriptions of the Biblia Vulgata (Common Bible) and other important religious documents and caused priests to deliver corrupted versions of mass and prayers to their congregations. Charlemagne was acutely aware of the degradation of Latin within the Frankish realm and the extent to which it compromised the integrity of Christian tradition and so he sponsored a programme of learning, later called the Carolingian Renaissance, which was intended to extend and improve Latin literacy across his empire. To accomplish his objectives, Charlemagne summonsed to his court several of the most influential intellects of his day not only from within the Frankish realm but also from Spain, Portugal, England and Ireland. Principle of Charlemagne s recruits was Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon scholar who had already been involved in the reorganization of the English Church. Alcuin was preeminent at Charlemagne s court throughout the 780s and 790s and oversaw the laborious task of preparing in Latin new and uncorrupted editions of not only the Bible but also of other texts central to Christian institutions and Christian worship. Once copied, the new texts produced by Alcuin and other scholars were distributed to churches, cathedrals, schools and monasteries across the Carolingian Empire. A further problem in disseminating Latin texts across a large geographical area was a marked variance of writing styles or scripts which were often very localized and difficult to read by scholars from outside the region in which the document had been produced. To overcome this problem, under the direction of Alcuin, the royal scriptorium at Aachen utilised a script, later known as Carolingian miniscule, which was ideally suited to the production of clear and legible versions of religious texts. During the reign of Charlemagne, Carolingian miniscule became the standard script for religious documents produced within the Carolingian Empire and was eventually adopted throughout Europe for the production of both secular and ecclesiastical documents. The Carolingian Renaissance also stimulated a revival in visual art and architecture within the Carolingian Empire as Charlemagne sought to establish an original Frankish art form to rival that of the Roman and Byzantine traditions. The best surviving examples of the art of the 5

6 Carolingian Renaissance are found in illuminations, religious artefacts, sculpture and ecclesiastical architecture with the best-known example of the latter being the Palatine Chapel, the only surviving component of Charlemagne s Palace of Aachen. While much of the Carolingian art produced during the reign of Charlemagne was influenced by Classical and Byzantine styles, it also incorporated trends from the material culture of the Franks themselves as well as the Anglo-Saxons. 16.4: The Government of Charlemagne Charlemagne s Merovingian and Carolingian predecessors had adhered to a notion of royal authority as being derived from ancestry and the ability to lead their people in successful conquest. Yet innate to Charlemagne s conception of himself as the ruler of a Christian empire was the belief that his own royal authority was given to him by the grace of God and as such he felt that kingship came with an obligation to assume responsibility for the material and the spiritual well-being of the populus christianus over which he ruled. In order to fulfil this responsibility, Charlemagne sought to revise the Merovingian system of government in which responsibility for administration was largely devolved to provincial counts and bishops and produce a more centralized government through which he could direct moral order and stability within the Carolingian Empire. To this purpose, Charlemagne sought to establish closer personal connections as well as heightened control over his provincial administrators. This process began with an expanded role for the placitum generale (general assembly). During the reign of Charlemagne, these assemblies took place two to three times a year, were attended by magnates from all over the Carolingian Empire and became a forum in which the king would express his own intentions over the running of the realm but would also consult with his bishops and nobility and seek their assent for his policies. Related to Charlemagne s use of the placitum generale was the much-increased use of royal capitularia, written documents relating the directives and policies of Charlemagne on civil as well as ecclesiastical issues and many of these documents were compiled in the course of the placitum generale. While Charlemagne sought to consult rather than to simply instruct the men who governed the pagi of the Carolingian Empire on his behalf, he also introduced the missi dominici (envoys of the lord) as an attempt to maintain the integrity of his local administrators. The missi were royal officials who worked in teams of two -typically a noble layman accompanied by an archbishop or abbot - and toured the Carolingian Empire on missatica (inspection circuits) during which they delivered capitularia, investigated the administration of the pagi and reported any abuses of power to Charlemagne himself. 6

7 While the introduction of capitularia and the missi dominici did enable Charlemagne to exercise some degree of direct control over his local administrators, Charlemagne lacked the bureaucratic apparatus and cultural traditions necessary to significantly reduce the power of the counts and the bishops and establish a genuine central government which emulated the sophisticated administrations of the Roman predecessors and Eastern contemporaries of the Carolingians. The foundation of Charlemagne s own administration therefore remained the lord and vassal relationship created by the Merovingians in which the exercise of royal authority at a local level largely was largely dependent on nobles who were willing to give their loyalty to the Frankish rulers in exchange for power, prestige and land. Indicative Reading Matthias Becher, Charlemagne, Chapters 2-6 Rosamund McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity, Chapters 2-5 Pierre Riché, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, Pt. II, Chapters 2-5 7