Charlemagne crowned emperor

The story

A pope in danger

In the year 799 Pope Leo III was attacked in the streets of Rome by a group of Roman nobles who were his enemies; they tried to blind him and tear out his tongue, and accused him of various crimes. The pope managed to escape and went to ask for help from Charles, king of the Franks, who was in the north, at Paderborn in Germany. Charles, who considered himself the protector of the Church, welcomed him and had him taken back to Rome with an escort.

Charles was a very powerful ruler. He had reigned since 768 and, with his wars, had united under his rule a large part of Western Europe: France, western Germany, northern Italy and parts of Spain. Since 476 there had been no ruler in the West with such a large kingdom. At his court, meanwhile, scholars such as Alcuin of York spoke of his kingdom as a new Christian empire.

Christmas of the year 800

Charles arrived in Rome in November 800. On 23 December the pope, before an assembly, swore that he was not guilty of the accusations made against him. Two days later, on the morning of 25 December, Christmas Day, Charles went to Mass in St Peter's Basilica. The annals of the Franks tell us that the king had knelt down to pray before the tomb of the apostle when Leo III placed a crown on his head and the Roman people shouted three times: “To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The pope bowed down before Charles, following the custom of the old emperors of Constantinople. From that day Charles had the title of emperor. Einhard also writes that Charles later said he would not have entered the church if he had known what the pope was about to do. Historians argue about whether this is true: perhaps Charles did not like the coronation to seem like a gift from the pope, rather than a recognition of his worth.

Einhard describes him as an imposing man: tall, with a thick neck and a bit of a belly, but with a voice thinner than his build would suggest. He loved riding, hunting and swimming, and he had learned to speak Latin and to understand Greek. He also tried to learn to write, but managed little, because he started too late.

An empire that already existed?

In Constantinople there was already a Roman emperor, or rather an empress: Irene, who had taken power in 797 after having her son, the lawful emperor, blinded. In the West people thought the throne was vacant, because there had never been a woman emperor. The Byzantines, however, did not accept Charles's coronation; to them he was a usurper. The conflict was settled only after some years: in 812 the emperor Michael I recognised Charles's title of emperor, but not as “emperor of the Romans”.

Charles ruled the empire for about thirteen years. He died on 28 January 814 and was buried in the chapel at Aachen. After him his son Louis the Pious reigned, and in 843, with the Treaty of Verdun, his three grandsons divided the empire into three parts: from these, over time, came France, Germany and a middle kingdom that included Italy.

A title that lasted a thousand years

The imperial title, after a long break, was taken up again in 962 by the German king Otto I, and from then on people spoke of the Holy Roman Empire, which survived, with enormous changes, until 1806, when it was dissolved, under pressure from Napoleon, by the emperor Francis II. For centuries popes and emperors argued over who had the right to supreme power: could the emperor crown himself, or was it the pope who decided?