by Tom Holland
And yet a sense of his own dignity never left him. Although excessive uppitiness might on occasion be punished by exile or threats of execution, the pre-eminence of Rome’s bishop as “the head of all Churches” was something that had been long and ringingly proclaimed by Byzantine law.34 Despite his best efforts, not even the Patriarch of Constantinople, leader of the Church in the empire’s very capital, had been able convincingly to rival it. Small wonder, then, that this authority should increasingly have tempted ambitious bishops in Rome to set themselves up as masters in their own city. They were, after all, at a gratifyingly distant remove from the emperor’s actual person – and the same crisis that in the seventh century had inspired Methodius’s prophecies of a last Roman emperor had served only to widen that remove. Greece had been infiltrated by savage barbarians from the North; the sea lanes preyed upon by corsairs; communications between Italy and Constantinople rendered perilous in the extreme. Byzantine officials in Rome, turning ever more native by the year, had fallen into the habit of obeying their bishop rather than the governor in Ravenna – and the bishop himself into the habit of issuing them with commands.
Perhaps a measure of imperiousness would have come naturally to any man who dwelt in a palace, the Lateran, that had originally been a grant from the Emperor Constantine, and who ruled as the effective master of the former mistress of the world. Early in the eighth century, indeed, plans were being drawn up – although never completed – to build him a second residence on the Palatine Hill: a site so associated with the age of the emperors that the very word “palace” echoed it. Yet the bishops of Rome did not derive their authority merely from the legacy of the imperial past. Their patrimony was something infinitely more awesome – indeed, so they proudly asserted, the most awesome of all time. Christ Himself, in naming Peter as His rock, had given to him the keys of heaven, with the power of binding and loosing souls everywhere on earth – and Peter, before his martyrdom, had ruled as the very first bishop of Rome.35 A trust more mystical and dreadful could hardly have been imagined. Peter’s successors, proclaiming themselves the apostle’s “vicarii,” or “deputies,” had long since laid claim to it as their own. In Constantinople, where it was the emperor who believed himself entrusted by God with the leadership of the Church, this cut predictably little ice: by the early eighth century, doctrines were being laid down by imperial fiat in the teeth of howls of protest from Rome.
In the kingdoms of the West, however, lacking as they did the dazzling pretensions of an ancient Christian empire, men were far more inclined to be impressed by the spectacle of a bishop on the throne of the chief apostle. Indeed, to see him as the very essence of a bishop. “Pappas” – that ancient Greek word for “father” – was still, in the eighth century, being claimed as a title by bishops everywhere in the East; but in the West, Latinised to “Papa,” by the Bishop of Rome alone. So far as the Latin Church was concerned, it had only the one Holy Father. It acknowledged just a single Pope.36
And the Bishops of Rome, bruised as they were by snubs from their imperial masters, were duly appreciative. “How regrettable it is,” a papal letter of 729 dared to sneer, “that we see savages and barbarians become civilised, while the Emperor, supposedly civilised, debases himself to the level of the barbarians.”37 Two decades later, and relations between Rome and Constantinople had turned frostier than ever. Divisions over subtle issues of theology continued to yawn. Trade links as well as diplomatic contacts had atrophied, leaving the papacy effectively broke. Most alarming of all, however, from the Pope’s point of view, was the failure of the emperor to fulfil his most sacred duty, and offer to God’s Church the protection of his sword and shield. Rome, long a frontier city, was starting to feel ever more abandoned. With the imperial armies locked into a series of desperate campaigns in the East, Byzantine efforts to maintain a presence in Italy had focused almost exclusively on Sicily and the south. The north, as a result, had been left fatally exposed. In 751, it was invaded by the Lombards, a warrior people of Germanic origin who for almost two centuries had sat ominously beyond the frontier of Byzantine Italy, waiting for their chance to expand at the empire’s expense. Ravenna, rich with palaces, splendid churches and the mosaics of saints and emperors, had fallen immediately. Rome herself, it seemed inevitable, would be next.
But hope still flickered, despite the negligence of Constantinople. The Pope was not utterly without protection. One year previously, a fateful embassy had arrived in Rome. It had borne an enquiry from a Frank by the name of Pepin, chief minister in the royal household and, to all intents and purposes, the leader of the Frankish people. Their legitimate king, Childeric III, although a descendant of Clovis, was but a feeble shadow of his glorious predecessor, and Pepin, eager to adorn his authority with the robes of monarchy, had resolved to thrust his master from the throne. Not wishing to offend against Almighty God, however, he had been anxious first to secure the Church’s blessing for his coup – and who better to turn to for that than the Vicar of St. Peter? Was it right, Pepin had duly written to the Pope, that a king without any power should continue to be a king? Back had come the answer: no, it was not right at all. A momentous judgement – and one, unsurprisingly, that had secured for Rome the pretender’s undying gratitude. The Pope’s ruling, it would soon be revealed, had set in train dramatic events. These would affect not only the papacy, not only the Franks, but all of Christendom.
God’s plans for the world had taken a startling and far-reaching turn.
Haircuts and Coronations
In 751, the same year that saw the fall of Ravenna to the Lombards, Pepin struck against the hapless Frankish king. Childeric’s spectral authority was terminated, not by death, but with a haircut. The Franks had long held a king to possess a mysterious communion with the supernatural, one that could provide victory in battle to their men, fertility to their women and fruitful harvests to their fields: a magical power dependent upon his having a luxuriant head of hair. It was hardly a belief calculated to delight scrupulous churchmen – but such considerations, back in the turbulent times of Clovis, had not weighed heavily. Two and a half centuries on, however, and the Franks had become a far more dutifully Christian people. The pagan affectations of their kings now struck many of them as an embarrassment. Few protests were raised when Pepin, having first snipped off Childeric’s resplendent locks, immured him and his son in a monastery. The usurper, however, wishing to affirm his legitimacy as well as his brute power, moved quickly to cover his back. A great assembly of his peers was summoned. The letter from the Pope was brandished in their faces. Pepin was elected king.
And yet election alone was insufficient to assure him of the authentic charisma of royalty. Although the Franks were Christian, they had never entirely abandoned their ancestral notion that kings were somehow more than mortal. Childeric’s dynasty, which claimed descent from a sea monster, had flaunted its bloodline as something literally holy: a blatant foolishness, bred of an age of barbarism, which only the gullible and ignorant had continued to swallow. Yet Pepin too, in laying claim to the kingship of the Frankish people, needed to demonstrate that his rule had been transfigured by the divine. The solution – naturally enough, for God had imprinted the pattern of the future as well as the past upon its pages – lay in the Bible. The ancient Israelites, oppressed by the depredations of their enemies, had called upon the Almighty for a king, and the Almighty, duly obliging, had given them a succession of mighty rulers: Saul, and David, and Solomon. As the mark of his elevation, each one had been anointed with holy oil; and Pepin, faithful son of the Church, now laid claim to a similar consecration. He would rule not by virtue of descent from some ridiculous merman, as Childeric had done, but “gratia Dei” – “by the grace of God.” The very same unction that served to impregnate a bishop with its awful and ineffable mystery would now imbue with its power the King of the Franks. Pepin, feeling the chrism sticky upon his skin, would know himself born again and become the mirror of Christ Himself on earth.
Nor was Stephen to be disappointed in his expectations. Six weeks after heading onwards from the Abbey of St. Maurice, he finally met with the Frankish king. Bursting into floods of ostentatious tears, the Pope begged Pepin to march to the protection of St. Peter, and then, just for good measure, reapplied the chrism. The Franks he ringingly endorsed as latter-day Israelites: “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.”39 Nor did Pepin, self-assured in a way that came naturally to a warlord anointed of God, stint in fulfilling his own side of the bargain. In 755, Lombardy was invaded, and its king briskly routed. Two years later, when the Lombards made the mistake of menacing Rome a second time, Pepin inflicted on them an even more crushing defeat. The territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium were donated in perpetuity to St. Peter. Arriving in Rome, Pepin personally and with a great show of sententiousness laid the keys of the cities he had conquered upon the apostle’s tomb. And as caretaker of this portfolio of states, he appointed – who else? – St. Peter’s vicar: the Bishop of Rome.
This was, for the papacy itself, a spectacular redemption from the jaws of catastrophe. That God in His infinite wisdom had ordained it appeared irrefutable. It was true, most regrettably, that there were a few too blinkered to recognise this, with officials from what remained of Byzantine territory in southern Italy voluble among them – but a succession of popes, confident in Pepin’s backing, blithely dismissed every demand for restoration of the emperor’s property. What were the arid pettifoggeries of diplomats when set against the evident will of the Almighty? The shocking manner in which the savage Lombards had presumed to menace the heir of St. Peter was an outrage committed not merely against the papacy itself, but against the whole of Christendom. No wonder that God had moved the heart of the Frankish king to such transcendent and gratifying effect. The surprise, it could be argued, was not that the papacy had been granted its own state to govern, but rather the very opposite – that no ruler had ever thought to grant it one before.
Or had the Pope’s archivists perhaps been overlooking something? Long centuries had passed since Constantine first established the Bishop of Rome in the Lateran – and who was to say what documents might not have been mislaid in all that time? Papal officials, keen to justify their master’s claim to his new possessions, appear to have spent the decade that followed Pepin’s victory over the Lombards ransacking the musty libraries of Rome. Certainly, it was at some point during the second half of the eighth century, even as the papacy was battling to keep hold of the grant of territories it had received from the Frankish king, that a remarkable and hitherto wholly unsuspected document was produced.* Its contents, from the papal point of view, could hardly have been more welcome. The foundations of the state donated to St. Peter, it appeared from the document, were far more venerable than anyone in the Lateran had dared to imagine. They had been laid, not by Pepin, but by the most glorious Christian ruler who had ever lived: Constantine himself. The content of the document added sensational details to the biography of the great emperor. A sufferer, it was revealed, from “the squalor of leprosy,”40 he had been miraculously cured by the then Bishop of Rome, a sage of towering holiness by the name of Sylvester. Constantine, submitting humbly to the will of Christ, had then headed off to install himself in Constantinople – but not before he had first adorned Sylvester in all the splendid regalia of empire, and surrendered to him and to the heirs of St. Peter for ever the rule of Rome, together with what were vaguely termed “the regions of the West.”41 The implication could hardly have been more pointed: the papacy, far from depriving the emperor of his property, had merely been reclaiming its due.
Its case was helped, admittedly, by the fact that even the most learned had only the haziest notion of who Constantine had actually been. Just as the great monuments of the emperors now stood as disfigured ruins, obscured beneath the spread of weeds and grass, so memories of the ancient past had long since faded into myth. In the West, unlike the East, there survived no contemporary account of the life of Constantine. Nothing to demonstrate that he had not, in fact, been a leper; that Pope Sylvester, far from presiding over the Church, had in truth been an ineffectual nonentity, much given to bleatings about his old age and poor health; that Constantine could certainly not have departed the Lateran for Constantinople, since he was yet to found the city at the time. Scholars in the West, far from uncovering these inconvenient details, never even imagined that they might exist to be exposed. Why should they have done? Great convulsions, the wise knew, only rarely ushered in novelty – for it was seen as the likeliest consequence of change that what had vanished would be repeated, repaired or restored. No dispensation of God stood revealed in the affairs of the world that had not, at some stage, been portended or foretold. It beggared belief, therefore, that a development as momentous as Pepin’s donation of a state to the Pope should not have been foreshadowed by a similar gesture back in ancient times. Had the “Donation of Constantine” not existed, papal officials might well have argued, it would have been necessary to invent it.
And in this they would have been very much in the spirit of their age. As the eighth century drew to a close, so men far beyond the purlieus of Rome felt themselves possessed of a new and stirring sense of mission. “Correctio,” they called it: the ordering of the disordered, the burnishing of the besmeared. Here was a programme to whet the ambitions of warlords as well as scholars, and to send men into battle beneath the fluttering of banners, the hiss of arrows and the shadow of carrion crows quite as much as into the mildewed quiet of libraries. Even as a succession of popes struggled to establish their supremacy in Italy, so from the North, beyond the Alps, momentous achievements were being bruited of the Franks.
In 768, King Pepin had died after a glorious reign, leaving behind him two sons, Charles and Carloman. These, as was the Frankish custom, had divided up their father’s lands, and ruled alongside each other for three uneasy years. Then, in 771, after an illness, Carloman had followed his father into the grave. Charles had immediately laid claim to his dead brother’s kingdom. He was not the man to squander the opportunity that God had so evidently granted him. Considerable though his dominions now were, he wanted more. A bare few months after Carloman’s death, and he was passing the Rhine, scouring the windswept heathlands of
Saxony, embarking upon a ferocious campaign of pacification against “the brutish peoples” who lurked there “without religion, without kings.”42 The following year he invaded Italy, and five years after that he crossed the Pyrenees into Catalonia. By the 790s, he ruled an empire that stretched from Barcelona to the Danube, and from Lombardy to the Baltic Sea. Of all the lands of western Christendom, only the British Isles and a few small kingdoms in Spain still remained beyond the writ of the Frankish king. No wonder that monkish chroniclers, astounded by Charles’s continent-shaking exploits, would commemorate him as “le magne,” bastard Latin for “the great”: as “Charlemagne.”
Warfare had long been the activity of choice among the Franks. Back in the days of Childeric, it had served to win them Gaul, after all. Leaders who failed to provide their followers with the spoils of pillage rarely endured for long. No sooner had winter thawed into spring than the Frankish people, dusting down their spears, would prepare to follow their king out on campaign. Charlemagne, whose hunger for booty was insatiable, had inherited to the full the appetites of a primordial line of warrior-chiefs. Yet though he ruled as a Frank, and gloried in the name, Charlemagne was heir as well to traditions more awesome and sanctified still. Like his father, he had been anointed with the dreadful power of the chrism, nor ever doubted that he was a new David, that mighty King of Israel, whose enemies the Almighty had broken “like a bursting flood.”43 It was in the perfect consciousness of this that Charlemagne made the wastes of Saxony to flow with pagan blood; that he spread even among the barbarous Slavs who swarmed on the outer reaches of the world awful rumours of the wrath and terror of his name; that he returned every autumn from his campaigns with lumbering wagon trains of booty, spoils with which to strengthen the Christian order throughout his vast domains. Just as he had taken it upon himself to push back the frontiers of Christendom, so also, within its boundaries, did he aim for its reform and purification – its “correctio.”