were already set on Empire, hoped to depose and succeed
Irene, and thus to become sole representative of the conception
of Empire, both for the East and for the West. Suddenly
there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor,
Relations
of the Carolingian to the Eastern empire.
an act apparently unpremeditated at the
moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from
Einhard’s Vita Karoli, and interrupting his plans. It
left him representative of the Empire for the West
only, confronting another representative in the East. Such a
position he did not desire: there had been a single Empire
vested in a single person since 476, and he desired that there
should still continue to be a single Empire, vested only in his
own person. He now sought to achieve this unity by a proposal
of marriage to Irene. The proposal failed, and he had to content
himself with a recognition of his imperial title by the two successors
of the empress. This did not, however, mean (at any
rate in the issue) that henceforth there were to be two conjoint
rulers, amicably ruling as colleagues a single Empire, in the
manner of Arcadius and Honorius. The dual government of
a single Empire established by Diocletian had finally vanished
in 476; and the unity of the Empire was now conceived, as
it had been conceived before the days of Diocletian, to demand
a single representative. Henceforth there were two rulers, one
at Aix-la-Chapelle and one at Constantinople, each claiming,
whatever temporary concessions he might make, to be the sole
ruler and representative of the Roman empire. On the one hand,
the Western emperors held that, upon the deposition of Constantine
VI., Charlemagne had succeeded him, after a slight
interval, in the government of the whole Empire, both in the
East and in the West; on the other hand, the Eastern emperors,
in spite of their grudging recognition of Charlemagne at the
moment, regarded themselves as the only lawful successors of
Constantine VI., and viewed the Carolings and their later
successors as upstarts and usurpers, with no right to their imperial
pretensions. Henceforth two halves confronted one another,
each claiming to be the whole; two finite bodies touched, and
each yet claimed to be infinite.
If, as has been suggested, Charlemagne did not enter into
any fundamentally new relations with his subjects after his
coronation, it follows that the results of his coronation,
in the sphere of policy and administration, cannot
have been considerable. The Empire added a new
Character
of the Carolingian empire.
sanction to a policy and administration already
developed. Charlemagne had already showed himself
episcopus episcoporum, anxious not only to suppress heresy and
supervise the clergy within his borders, but also to extend true
Christianity without them even before the year when his imperial
coronation gave him a new title to supreme governorship in all
cases ecclesiastical. He had already organized his empire on a
new uniform system of counties, and the missi dominici were
already at work to superintend the action of the counts, even
before the renovatio imperii Romani came to suggest such
uniformity and centralization. Charlemagne had a new title;
but his subjects still obeyed the king of the Franks, and lived by
Frankish law, in the old fashion. In their eyes, and in the eyes
of Charlemagne’s own descendants, the Empire was something
appendant to the kingship of the Franks, which made that
kingship unique among others, but did not radically alter its
character. True, the kingship might be divided among brothers
by the old Germanic custom of partition, while the Empire
must inhere in one person; but that was the one difference, and
the one difficulty, which might easily be solved by attaching the
name of emperor to the eldest brother. Such was the conception
of the Carolings: such was not, however, the conception of the
Church. To the popes the Empire was a solemn office, to which
the kings of the Franks might most naturally be called, in view
of their power and the traditions of their house, but which by no
means remained in their hands as a personal property. By
thus seeking to dissociate the Empire from any indissoluble
connexion with the Carolingian house, the popes were able to
save it. Civil wars raged among the descendants of Charlemagne:
partitions recurred: the Empire was finally dissolved, in the
Break-up
of the Carolingian empire.
Attitude of the papacy.sense that the old realm of Charlemagne fell asunder, in 888.
But the Empire, as an office, did not perish. During the 9th
century the popes had insisted, as each emperor died,
that the new emperor needed coronation at their hands;
and they had thus kept alive the conception of the
Empire as an office to which they invited, if they did
not appoint, each successive emperor. The quarrels
of the Carolingian house helped them to make good their claim.
John VIII. was able to select Charles the Bald in preference
to other claimants in 875; and before the end of his
pontificate he could write that “he who is to be
ordained by us to the Empire must be by us first and
foremost invited and elected.” Thus was the unity
of the Empire preserved, and the conception of a united Empire
continued, in spite of the eventual dissolution of the realm of
Charlemagne. When the Carolingian emperors disappeared,
Benedict IV. could crown Louis of Provence (901) and John X.
could invite to the vacant throne an Italian potentate like
Berengar of Friuli (915); and even when Berengar died in 924,
and the Empire was vacant of an emperor, they could hold, and
hold with truth, that the Empire was not dead, but only suspended,
until such time as they should invite a new ruler to
assume the office.
Various causes had contributed to the dissolution of the
realm of Charlemagne. Partitions had split it; feudalism
had begun to honeycomb it; incessant wars had destroyed its
core, the fighting Franks of Austrasia. But, above all, the rise
of divisions within the realm, which, whether animated by the
spirit of nationality or no, were ultimately destined to develop
into nations, had silently undermined the structure of Pippin
and Charlemagne. Already in 842 the oath of Strassburg shows
us one Caroling king swearing in French and another in German:
already in 870 the partition of Mersen shows us the kings of
France and Germany dividing the middle kingdom which lay
between the two countries by the linguistic frontier of the Meuse
and Moselle. The year 888 is the birth-year of modern Europe.
France, Germany, Italy, stood distinct as three separate units,
with Burgundy and Lorraine as debatable lands, as they were
destined to remain for centuries to come. If the conception of
Empire was still to survive, the pope must ultimately invite the
The
German kingdom and the empire.
ruler of the strongest of these three units to assume
the imperial crown; and this was what happened
when in 962 Pope John XII. invited Otto I. of Germany
to renew once more the Roman Empire. As the
imperial strength of the whole Frankish tribe had
given them the Empire in 800, so did the national strength of
the East Frankish kingdom, now resting indeed on a Saxon
rather than a Frankish basis, bring the Empire to its ruler in
962. The centre of political gravity had already been shifting
to the east of the Rhine in the course of the 9th century. While
the Northmen had carried their arms along the rivers and into
the heart of France, Louis the German had consolidated his
kingdom in a long reign of sixty years (817–876); and at the end
of the 9th century two kings of Germany had already worn the
imperial crown. Early in the 10th century the kingship of
Germany had come to the vigorous Saxon dukes (919); and
strong in their Saxon basis Henry I. and his son Otto had built
a realm which, disunited as it was, was far more compact than
that which the Carolings of the West ruled from Laon. Henry I.
had thought in his later years of going to Rome for the imperial
crown: under Otto I. the imperial idea becomes manifest.
On the one hand, he established a semi-imperial position in the
West: by 946 Louis IV. d’Outremer is his protégé, and it is his
arms which maintain the young Conrad of Burgundy on his
throne. On the other hand, he showed, by his policy towards
the German Church, that he was the true heir of the Carolingian
traditions. He made churchmen his ministers; he established
missionary bishoprics on the Elbe which should spread Christianity
among the Wends; and his dearest project was a new
archbishopric of Magdeburg. The one thing needful was that he
should, like Charlemagne, acquire the throne of Italy; and the
dissolute condition of that country during the first half of the
