Charlemagne and Christendom

The pope needs a protector

By the 700s the papacy was in a bind. Rome was still officially part of the Byzantine Empire, but Constantinople, fighting for its life against the Arabs, sent little help. The Byzantine emperors were also pushing iconoclasm, which the popes rejected. Meanwhile the Lombards, now Catholic, pressed ever closer to Rome. The popes needed a new protector.

They found one in the Franks, Catholic since Clovis I and the strongest power in the West. The old Frankish royal family, the Merovingians, had become figureheads. Real power lay with their chief ministers, the "mayors of the palace." The most famous was Charles Martel, who turned back a Muslim army near Poitiers in 732.

In 751 his son Pepin the Short the Short asked Pope Zachary whether it was right that the man with the power should not have the title of king. The pope answered that it was better for the one who had royal power to be called king. Pepin deposed the last Merovingian, who was shaved and sent to a monastery, and was anointed king, an Old Testament ritual that gave his rule sacred approval. In 754 Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps and anointed Pepin again.

In return, Pepin marched into Italy, defeated the Lombards, and gave the conquered territories around Rome and Ravenna to the pope (756). This "Donation of Pepin" created the Papal States, a band of territory across central Italy ruled by the pope as a temporal prince until 1870.

Charles the Great

Pepin's son Charlemagne (Charles the Great, king 768–814) was one of the most powerful rulers in European history. Tall, energetic and forceful, he spent most of his reign at war. He conquered the Lombard kingdom and fought in Spain. He waged over thirty years of brutal campaigns against the pagan Saxons in northern Germany, forcing them to accept baptism on pain of death. At Verden in 782, he reportedly had 4,500 Saxon prisoners executed. His adviser Alcuin of York protested that faith must be freely given, not forced: "Faith is a matter of the will, not of compulsion." By 800 Charlemagne ruled most of western Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central Italy.

Christmas Day, 800

In 799 Pope Leo III was attacked in the streets of Rome by enemies who tried to cut out his eyes and tongue. He escaped and fled to Charlemagne. The next year Charlemagne came to Rome to restore order. On Christmas Day 800, as Charlemagne knelt in prayer at St Peter's, Leo placed a crown on his head, and the crowd acclaimed him "Augustus, crowned by God, great and peace-giving emperor of the Romans."

The coronation was a revolution. For the first time since 476 there was a Roman emperor in the West. Constantinople was outraged, since it already had an emperor (in fact an empress, Irene of Athens). And the ceremony raised a question that would haunt the Middle Ages. Charlemagne's biographer Einhard claimed Charlemagne would not have entered the church had he known what the pope planned. Did the pope make the emperor, giving the church authority over the state? Or did the emperor, as protector of the church, stand above the pope? That argument would erupt in the Investiture Controversy.

Popes and rulers: the balance of power, 750–1500

Ruling a Christian empire

Charlemagne saw himself as a new King David, responsible for the souls of his people. He took a direct hand in church affairs:

• He issued laws (capitularies) requiring Sunday rest, tithes, and that everyone learn the Creed and the Lord's Prayer.
• He ordered every monastery to follow the Rule of Benedict and every cathedral to have a school.
• He standardized the liturgy along Roman lines and promoted Gregorian chant.
• He presided over church councils. His theologians even wrote a reply to the Byzantine Council of Nicaea II on icons and added the Filioque to the Creed in his chapel, an issue that would help divide East and West (see The Great Schism of 1054).

The Carolingian Renaissance

Charlemagne could read but, according to Einhard, never mastered writing, though he kept tablets under his pillow to practice. Yet he set off a remarkable revival of learning, the Carolingian Renaissance. He gathered scholars at his court in Aachen from across Europe. The most important was the English monk Alcuin of York of York, who ran the palace school and later the abbey of Tours.

Their achievements were lasting:

• Monks copied and corrected the Bible (Alcuin produced a revised Vulgate), church fathers and classical Latin authors. Most of the ancient Latin literature that survives today exists because Carolingian scribes copied it.
• They developed a clear new handwriting, Carolingian minuscule, with lower-case letters and spaces between words. Renaissance printers later revived it, and it is the ancestor of the letters you are reading now.
• Schools trained clergy in grammar, Latin and Scripture, laying foundations for medieval education.

Collapse and invasion

Charlemagne's empire did not survive his grandsons. In 843 the Treaty of Verdun split it into three kingdoms, roughly the ancestors of France, Germany and a middle kingdom between them. The 800s and 900s brought new invasions from every side: Vikings from Scandinavia, Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, and Muslim raiders in the Mediterranean.

The Vikings were especially devastating for the church. Monasteries were rich, undefended and near the coast. The raid on Lindisfarne in 793 shocked Europe. Alcuin wrote that never before had such terror appeared in Britain. Monasteries were plundered and burned, books destroyed, monks killed or enslaved. Yet within two centuries the Vikings themselves converted, and their descendants, the Normans, became great church builders.

In these chaotic times local lords seized control of church lands and appointments. Monasteries and bishoprics were bought and sold. The papacy itself sank to a low point in the 900s, controlled by Roman noble families. One pope was murdered, and another was elected as a teenager. Reform would come from two sources: the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 (see Monks and Friars), and the German emperors.

The Holy Roman Empire

In 962 the German king Otto I the Great the Great, having defeated the Magyars, was crowned emperor in Rome. This revived empire, mainly German but claiming universal authority, later became known as the Holy Roman Empire. It lasted, in one form or another, until Napoleon abolished it in 1806. The French writer Voltaire later joked that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Otto and his successors treated bishops as royal officials, appointed popes, and saw themselves as protectors of the church. This arrangement set up the great clash of the next century.

"Christendom"

By the year 1000, the idea of Christendom had taken hold in the West: a single Christian society (Christianitas), in which the church and the state were two aspects of one community. Everyone was baptized as a baby. Everyone belonged to a parish and paid tithes. Law, education, art, the calendar and the rhythm of daily life were shaped by the church. The only outsiders were Jews, increasingly marginalized, and, beyond the borders, pagans and Muslims. This vision would last, in one form or another, until the Reformation broke it and the Enlightenment questioned it.