Page 27 - EuropeFlipBook1to14

Person Number Four – Charlemagne

The ruler who revived the Roman Empire in the west

Why Charlemagne?
On Christmas Day 800 Europe witnessed a revolutionary but ambiguous event. In the
city of Rome, in St Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. The
precise meaning of this event still puzzles historians.

Who was Charlemagne?

Charlemagne – Charles the Great - was the most successful king of the Franks, the
barbarian people who had overrun and settled the former Roman provinces of Gaul
and Germania - France and Germany. His coronation as emperor in 800 confirmed
him as Europe’s leading ruler. Did it also signify the revival of the western Roman
empire?

What had happened to the Roman empire?

In 476 the Roman empire fell, but only in the west. In 285 the emperor Diocletian had
divided the empire into two, with a western and an eastern half. The emperor
Constantine then built a new capital for the eastern half, at Byzantium, later renamed
Constantinople (later still, Istanbul). What fell in 476 was the western half of the
Roman empire. The eastern half survived and lasted until 1453, called by historians
“the Byzantine empire”.

We should pause here to note that the fall of Rome in the west had a very weird

outcome. Constantine had deliberately intertwined the Christian church with his
imperial government, so the infrastructure of the Church became mapped onto that
of the empire. When the western empire fell in 476 it broke up into various successor
barbarian kingdoms. In the ensuing chaos the Church was the only institution capable
of providing any degree of continuity, order and authority. It was therefore drawn
into the vacuum left by the fall of the empire, providing some degree of order and

stability. The Popes, the bishops of Rome, emerged as its head. Thomas Hobbes, the
th
17 century political philosopher, put it like this: “The papacy is no other than the
ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so
did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”

This is not what Augustine had predicted. He said that the fall of the Earthly City
didn’t matter to the Heavenly City because their goal was eternal life. He didn’t
envisage that in the chaos the Church would step in to hold everything together.
Perhaps because we are fairly familiar with this we don’t notice how weird it was, for

a fallen empire to be succeeded by a Church. This event had a unique consequence