Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (59 page)

By contrast to the high-handed Easterners, with their fitful regard for Roman sensibilities, popes were well aware of the fund of goodwill towards the see of Peter in northern Europe, exemplified by no fewer than four Anglo-Saxon reigning monarchs who, between the seventh and ninth centuries, successively undertook the long journey to Rome. The pioneer less than a century after Augustine's arrival in England was Caedwalla, king of the predecessor kingdom of Wessex called Gewisse (
c
. 659-89), and he was followed later by Ine, King of Wessex (d. 726), and Coenred (d.
c
. 709) and Burgred (d.
c
. 874), both kings of Mercia in the English Midlands. All died there, and three of them, Caedwalla, Coenred and Ine, are known to have decided to abdicate and retire to the city permanently; the long love affair between English wealth and Italian sunshine had begun. But the English were too distant to be of much political use to the popes against Lombardy or Constantinople. They looked instead directly across the Alps to the powerful Franks. Frankish rulers in the second half of the seventh century had their own reasons for finding this a very convenient alliance.

CHARLEMAGNE, CAROLINGIANS AND A NEW ROMAN EMPIRE (800-1000)

In Francia, two and a half centuries of Merovingian Christian monarchy sputtered to an ignominious close in 751, when the titular and already powerless Merovingian King Childeric III was informed that he and his son had discovered a religious vocation, after which his hair was given a monastic tonsure and he spent the rest of his days confined in a monastery. A pioneering example of what proved to be a frequent Christian technique for disposing of inconvenient monarchs or politicians, both male and female (often inconvenient spouses too), this was the brainchild of a ruthless nobleman called Pippin and maybe also his elder brother, Carloman. Between them they had been the real rulers of Francia for some time, as the Court officials known as the 'Mayors of the Palace'; they were the sons of the great former mayor Charles Martel who had won the crucial victory against the Arabs at Poitiers in 732-3, turning back the Islamic advance into Europe (see p. 261).
⁵²
Carloman and his family in turn were rapidly eliminated in a series of events which remain much more squalid and murky than chroniclers of the time were prepared to admit. The kingship of Pippin was a wholly illegitimate break with historic succession and, like David's coup d'etat against Saul long before in Israel, it needed all the boosting it could get from divine power and sacred place.

Accordingly, the Frankish bishops invested the installation of the new King Pippin III with an unprecedented degree of ceremonial. Pippin paid especial devotion to the Merovingian royal saints, Martin of Tours and Denis, thus annexing that intimate relationship between dynasty and sanctity, while in subsequent decades his family unabashedly claimed continuity with the Merovingian glory days by christening their children with Merovingian names such as Louis (Clovis) or Lothar. Pippin further bolstered his saintly support by enlisting another celebrated former Bishop of Paris, Germanus (Germain), who appeared in a well-timed vision to a pious woman and ordered her to solicit the reburial of his remains in Paris and in greater splendour - Pippin devoutly obeyed with ostentatious ritual in the presence of many Frankish notables, and he also lavishly endowed the saint's monastery (St-Germain-des-Pres, then in countryside beyond Paris) with former Merovingian lands.
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Pippin and Carloman thus linked the fortunes of their new political venture to major changes and reforms in the Church, particularly in backing great monastic communities who housed their powerful long-dead saintly allies.

In doing this, the new dynasts were only the most prominent and successful of a number of Frankish noblemen who saw their chance to increase their power as the Merovingian monarchy disintegrated, and who were happy to ally this project with the renewal of the Church, linking their own interests to the glory of God. Outstanding among them was Chrodegang, a great aristocrat and Merovingian palace official who, in the 740s, also became Bishop of Metz in what is now north-east France; he may have been the leading bishop in the anointing of Pippin in 751.
⁵⁴
He energetically summoned councils of his clergy and imposed reforms on his diocese, including a strict code of rules for the clergy of his cathedral church. He set out a system which made their community life much more disciplined, like that of a monastery, but still left them free to exercise pastoral care in cathedral and diocese - a model much imitated later. Since the Greek word for a rule or measure is
kanon
, the word 'canon' became increasingly commonly applied to members of such regulated bodies of clergy in cathedrals or other major churches.

Bishop Chrodegang also started an ambitious programme of church building and reconstruction in his city of Metz, aiming at making it a centre of sacred power, just as the dynasty of Pippin was enriching the sacred places of Paris. Significantly, when he introduced innovations to the liturgy (and liturgical music) used in his diocese, he justified them on the grounds that they were those used in Rome. Notably, for the first time in northern Europe, he organized 'stational' services around a rotation of the churches of Metz, just as Bishops of Rome had used stational liturgy to unite the Church in their city since the third century (see pp. 136-7). Chrodegang intended Metz to be a local symbol of the unity of the Church, a lesser reflection of Rome, just as the monk Augustine had done in Anglo-Saxon Kent in his mission from 597. Chrodegang even obtained bodies of certain saints from Rome to be rehoused in key monasteries of his diocese: another initiative then almost unprecedented north of the Alps, and a charitable act likely to secure him a great deal of goodwill from entrenched corporations which might otherwise have challenged his authority.
⁵⁵
In his celebration of Rome in Metz, Chrodegang was closely reflecting the aims of his patron in the new dynasty - for a key component in Pippin's success, and of great significance for the future, was the fact that he too looked for support beyond the clergy of the Frankish Church, over the Alps to Rome.

As early as the 760s clerical chroniclers in Francia were assiduously cultivating the idea that the Pope had explicitly ordered and authorized Pippin's eviction of the Merovingian king (they also did their best to portray the last Merovingians as the sort of accident-prone unfortunates whom no divine insurer would underwrite).
⁵⁶
There is no question that Pippin quickly won approval for his abrupt change of regime from Pope Zacharias, and Zacharias's immediate successor, Stephen II (752-7), reaped the reward of this affirmation. In 751, the year that Pippin presented King Childeric with his monastic vocation, the Lombards had finally ejected the Byzantine emperor's representative from Ravenna, and they overran the remaining Byzantine territories in Italy as far south as Rome. King Pippin recaptured these lands, but he did not return them to imperial government: instead (to the fury of the Byzantines) he gave them to Pope Stephen. His decision had consequences for the next thousand years; he had founded one of Europe's most enduring political units, the Papal States of central Italy, whose final dissolution in the nineteenth century still shapes the mindset of the modern papacy (see pp. 821-7).

The alliance between the Franks and the popes ripened. Chrodegang was a key negotiator for Pippin in Rome, eventually receiving the pallium and title of archbishop for his pains, while successive popes now kept a permanent representative at the Frankish Court, just as they had long done at the imperial Court in Constantinople.
⁵⁷
The new relationship was precisely symbolized in a move no less revolutionary for being logical: Pope Hadrian I (772-95) changed the dating custom used by the popes. He began dating his administrative documents and correspondence not by the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople, but by the year of his own period in office and by the regnal year of the King of the Franks. By now this was the son of Pippin, Charles, the first Frankish king to visit Rome, during the military campaign of 774 which crippled Lombard power. Charles's reign was long, 768 to 814, and history soon christened him Charles the Great,
Carolus Magnus
- Charlemagne.
⁵⁸
Such was the historic power of his name that it passed beyond his frontier into the Magyar language of his family's enemies in Hungary as the word for king,
kiraly
- and beyond that into Russian and other Slav languages as
korol'
and similar forms. It is significant nevertheless that these mostly Orthodox lands remembered him only as king and not as emperor - that was something of a linguistic put-down for the man who had imperial ambitions, which as far as Westerners and Western history were concerned were realized in 800.

Charles had come a long way from those Arian chieftains who had burst on western Europe to smash the central structures of the Roman Empire, as was apparent in his regular happy wallowings in the hot springs at his newly established capital of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle): he enjoyed the opportunity to play at being an ancient Roman provided by public bathing. In fact, he was obsessed with ancient Rome - but also a Rome which was Christian: had he not himself sworn mutual oaths with the Pope in the very presence of Peter in the crypt of the Apostle's basilica? Charlemagne's Christianity did not prevent him taking up arms against other Christians; Carolingian control over the new empire's nobility was based on the rewards of plunder which successful campaigns could produce, which meant fighting Saxons or Avars in the north and east, among whom Christianity had long had a presence. The best that could be done was persuade posterity that the conquered were either all pagans or Christian deviants needing renewal by the Frankish Church, and Carolingian chroniclers set their energies to doing just that: a necessary whitewashing of a new Christian empire.
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For the result was a political unit which stretched beyond the Pyrenees to the south-west and into the heart of modern Germany. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charles as a Roman emperor, in Rome itself. The ceremony was not without its problems. The Pope who performed the coronation had supposedly miraculously recovered from a murderous assault in an attempted coup in Rome the previous year, in which he had been blinded and his tongue cut out. Both mutilation and recovery are questionable (though much celebrated by Charlemagne's clerical publicists), and they were by no means the most dubious part of Leo's reputation. What undoubtedly they did prove was the Pope's urgent need for political support from the most powerful man in western Europe. Leo was the only pope ever to kneel in homage to a Western emperor: his successors did not make the same mistake.
⁶⁰

More seriously, there was the problem of what the existing Roman Empire in Constantinople might think of this unwelcome
doppelganger
. It might be possible to outflank the Byzantines; so Charlemagne put out diplomatic feelers to the great Islamic Abbasid caliph, Harun ar-Rashid, far away in Baghdad. This led to the arrival from the East of a present for the new emperor, an elephant, which remained a delightfully exotic adornment at his Court for nine years.
⁶¹
In the same spirit of defiance, Charlemagne's advisers tried to brazen out the situation by claiming that the Byzantine throne was vacant since it was currently held by a woman, the Empress Irene (see pp. 448-51). The Empress was in fact a formidable ruler not to be trifled with - she had after all recently blinded her own son in the room where he had been born, in order to seize his power - and Charlemagne changed tack; he opened negotiations to marry her. The proposal had the unfortunate effect of precipitating her downfall at the hands of courtiers appalled at the prospective marriage, and Charlemagne now had no choice but to stress the role of his coronation by the Pope as the basis for his new imperial power. Equally, the Byzantines had little eventual choice but to recognize the new dispensation and the new empire in the West, though it took them twelve years to do so.
⁶²

It was probably in this final stage, right at the end of his reign, that Charlemagne issued a series of coins which must have caused awe and amazement at the time, and still have the power to astonish. As best they could, the imperial moneyers carved coin dies which imitated the coins of ancient Rome from half a millennium before.
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This was an audacious annexation of the past: a Frankish monarch portrayed laureate and clean-shaven, as once Augustus had been, and bearing little resemblance to Charlemagne's real everyday dress and coiffeur. Charlemagne was creating a new empire of the West, but, unlike Augustus, he posed as the defender of Christianity like the Byzantine emperor. He had no hesitation in confronting the Byzantines on theological matters. During his reign a major cause of misunderstanding and ill-will was the matter of iconoclasm (destruction of images), resulting in some aggressive statements against the Eastern Church by Frankish bishops and theologians, at a council presided over by Charlemagne himself, in conscious imitation of Constantine (see pp. 449-50). Another issue was the promotion of that troublesome addition to the Nicene Creed, the
Filioque
or double procession in the Trinity of the Spirit from Father and Son, which had taken its cue from Augustine's writing on the Trinity (see pp. 310-11). Once more it was Charlemagne's Court which encouraged this development. Although the phrase seems first to have been added to the liturgical recitation of the creed in seventh-century Spain, it was given universal respectability in the Western Church because Charlemagne's chaplains introduced it to the worship of his Court at Aachen, and then his bishops defiantly defended it as orthodoxy in the public statements of a synod held there.
⁶⁴
Much trouble was to follow from this apparently small liturgical innovation.