The Historians' History of the World 07

The last years of Pope Adrian passed in peace, but his successor began amid storms. When Adrian died at the close of 795 he was succeeded by Leo III, who immediately sent Charles the keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter with the banner of Rome and requested him to send legates to Rome to receive the homage of the inhabitants of the city. The new pope made submission to the Frank for himself and Rome from the beginning. He conceived the rights of the patriciate as having the same extent as though Charles were already emperor; he sought a protector and only too soon needed the help of one. In the spring of 799 fierce party struggles broke out among the Roman nobility; the pope, attacked and maltreated by his enemies, fled from the city and hurried with an appeal for help to Paderborn before the throne of King Charles. Frankish nobles conducted him back to Rome in the autumn and procured him temporary security from his opponents; but without Charles he was even yet in danger. And already the king himself was hastening to Rome; the establishment of the Western Empire was decided.

When Charles, at the Christmas celebration of the year 800, entered the church of St. Peter in the robe of the Roman patricius, the pope placed a golden crown upon his head. The church resounded with the shout of the crowd, “God bless and save Carolus Augustus, crowned of God, the great and pacific emperor of the Romans!” The pope fell at the feet of the Germanic warrior and paid homage to him in the same manner as the bishops of Rome had formerly paid homage to the Roman emperor at Constantinople.

When Charles ascended the imperial throne of Rome an end was reached towards which ambitious German princes had for centuries aspired. The Germans had received from Rome the first impressions of a great political life, and it was under the influence of these impressions that all the Germanic kingdoms have been founded. The greatness of the Roman imperial state, the unity of its efficient armies, the pomp of the imperial court, the majesty of the law were, and remained, the ideal of the Germanic kings. Even when, in the West, the weakened empire of the cæsars had yielded under the impact of Germanic hordes, it nevertheless seemed to the noblest leaders of the latter to be the loftiest object of a mighty prince to restore the ruined structure by his own power and with his own means. But how was this to be accomplished so long as the German races themselves, without internal or external cohesion, weakened and exhausted one another in an almost uninterrupted series of wars, and so long as the leaders ruled over peoples who, with their defiant love of freedom, resisted any constraint of law and any energetic sovereignty? So the Visigoth Atawulf, the Ostrogoth Theodoric, and finally the first Merovingians had had to give up at the very first effort their bold plans of establishing the Western Empire; it was enough that they succeeded in bringing individual portions of the great whole under their sovereignty and forming them into separate kingdoms.

But the first Germanic prince who succeeded in breaking up forever the independence of the communities and in helping the royal authority to the final decisive victory over popular authority, and who proceeded at the same time to unite to his kingdom all the German races that had remained in their ancient seats, and join them again with the Germans who had emigrated and become romanised, also at once took up the idea of the Roman Empire and represented himself as the successor of the old emperors.

Thus for the first time there seemed to be a peaceful settlement of the long struggle between Rome and the Germans, in which the question involved was less the overthrow of the old-world power than the reception of the German races in the great federation of civilised peoples; less the destruction of the former civilisation than the further dissemination of all the intellectual treasures included in and cherished by the Roman power. It was not as slaves, indeed, conquered by the legions of Rome, that the Germans had been incorporated in the empire; with their arms in their hands they had gained the rights of citizens and of lords of the empire, and when they had filled and transformed everything with the elements of their nature, the free development of events placed the imperial sceptre of the West in the strong right hand of a German prince. So Charles entered upon the government of that great Germanic-Roman empire into which the ancient Roman power had been transformed.

Administration and Reforms of Charles

[800-814 A.D.]