Peter H. Wilson, Rome to Empire, peace & power
The pope needed a protector, the empire needed a legitimator, not freedom
Peter H. Wilson wrote:
Chapter 1 Two Swords
The problems of defining the Empire are already apparent in the confusion over its title. For most of its existence it was simply ‘the Empire’. The words Holy, Roman and Empire were only combined as Sacrum Romanum Imperium in June 1180, and though used more frequently from 1254, they never appeared consistently in official documents. Nonetheless, all three terms formed core elements of the imperial ideal present from the Empire’s foundation. …
… The holy element was integral to the Empire’s primary purpose in providing a stable political order for all Christians and defending them against heretics and infidels. To this end, the emperor should act as chief advocate, or guardian, of the pope, who was the head of a single, universal Christian church. Since this was considered a divine mission, entrusted by God, it opened the possibility that the emperor and Empire were themselves sacred. Like the Roman and imperial elements, the holy character of the Empire was rooted in the later, Christian phase of the ancient Roman empire, rather than the pagan past of the first Caesars or the earlier Roman republic.
After more than three centuries of persecuting Christians, Rome adopted Christianity as its sole, official religion in AD 391. This step partially desacralized the imperial office, since the singular Christian God would not tolerate a rival. The emperor no longer considered himself divine and had to accept the church’s development as a separate institution throughout his empire. These changes were eased by the church’s adoption of a clerical hierarchy modelled on Roman imperial infrastructure. …
… It was important for the later Holy Roman Empire that the Roman papacy developed differently to the eastern patriarchate in Constantinople. Byzantium retained the centralized imperial structure, with its culture of hierarchical subordination and written administration deriving directly from ancient Rome. This imparted two characteristics largely absent in the early western church. The patriarch remained subordinate to the emperor, while the desire to fix theology in written statements made doctrinal differences much more pronounced than those in the western church, which was both more decentralized and less concerned with communication in writing. The eastern church distanced itself from the version of Christianity known as Arianism, which retained a strong following amongst the Lombards, while a dispute over the human and divine aspects of Christ’s nature had forced the emergence of a separate Coptic church in Syria and Egypt when these were still Byzantine provinces.
The absence of durable imperial structures in the west deprived the Roman popes of the strong political backing afforded the eastern patriarch. Papal authority relied on asserting moral rather than direct administrative leadership of the western church, which remained a loose agglomeration of dioceses and churches. …
… The early medieval popes would have preferred a strong emperor who could protect them and allow them to pursue their spiritual mission. …
… the popes did not follow seventh-century Islamic leaders in establishing their own imperial state. Latin Christianity alone proved insufficient to reunite the kingdoms and principalities emerging from the former western Roman empire. The papacy still needed a protector …
… The pope looked north-west to the Franks as … protectors. …
… Pippin the Short [was crowned] as Frankish king in 751 … Pippin signalled his subordination to the pope at two meetings in 753 and 754 by prostrating himself, kissing the papal stirrup and helping the pontiff dismount. … [The] papal-Frankish alliance was renewed in 773 by Charlemagne, Pippin’s eldest son, who answered renewed calls for assistance as the Lombards again tried to assert secular jurisdiction over Rome. The future emperor looked the part at 1.8 metres, towering over his contemporaries … Charlemagne clearly enjoyed being the centre of attention. Recent attempts to debunk him as a military leader are unconvincing. The Franks were simply the best organized for war of all the major post-Roman kingdoms, as Charlemagne amply demonstrated in his campaign to rescue the pope in 773–4. Charlemagne besieged Pavia for a year, and its capture in June 774 ended two hundred years of Lombard royal rule. In keeping with Frankish custom, Lombardy was not annexed directly, but preserved as a distinct kingdom under Charlemagne. Following the suppression of a rebellion in 776, Charlemagne replaced most of the Lombard elite with loyal Franks and spent the next three decades ruthlessly consolidating his authority throughout Francia and extending his influence with new conquests in Bavaria and Saxony.
Foundation of the Empire
The Holy Roman Empire owed its foundation to the pope’s decision to dignify this expansion by conferring an imperial title on Charlemagne. … [Thus] the Empire was a joint creation of Charlemagne and Leo III, ‘one of the shiftiest occupants of the throne of St Peter’. … [It is] likely Charlemagne saw his accession as a way to consolidate his hold over all Italy, since the former Lombard kingdom only covered the north, whereas the idea of the Roman empire had great resonance throughout the entire peninsula. Additionally, in accepting the various religious symbols, Charlemagne signalled his partnership with the pope as joint leaders of Christendom. Alongside the joint effort and careful choreography, the third factor is that it is highly likely Charlemagne believed he was being made Roman emperor. …
… Christians owed obedience to all authority, but their duty to God trumped that to secular power. It proved impossible to agree whether they should suffer tyrants as a test of faith or were entitled to oppose them as ‘ungodly’ rulers. … In short, Christian thought tried to distinguish separate spheres of regnum, denoting the political realm, and sacerdotium for the spiritual world of the church. Delineation of separate spheres merely raised the new problem of their mutual relationship. St Augustine was in no doubt of the superiority of sacerdotium over regnum. Responding to Roman intellectuals’ attribution of the Gothic sack of their city in 410 as the wrath of their former pagan gods, Augustine argued this merely demonstrated the transience of temporal existence compared to the enduring Christian ‘city of God’ in heaven.
This distinction was later elaborated by Latin theologians to reject Byzantium’s continuation of a semi-divine imperial office. Pope Gelesius I used the influential metaphor of two swords, both provided by God. The church received the sword of spiritual authority (auctoritas), symbolizing responsibility for guiding humanity through divine grace to salvation. The state received the secular sword of power (potestas) to maintain order and provide the physical conditions to enable the church to perform its role.
Christendom had two leaders. Both pope and emperor were considered essential to proper order. Neither could ignore the other without negating his own position. Both remained locked in a dance that each struggled to lead, yet neither was prepared to release his partner and go solo. …
… Clergy and laity generally worked together, while spiritual and secular authority generally proved mutually reinforcing rather than conflictual. Nonetheless, the issues remained clear enough. Secular power was inconceivable without reference to divine authority. Likewise, the clergy could not dispense with the material world …
… The difficulties with ultimate authority were obvious at the Empire’s birth. Pope Leo’s public obsequiousness extended – if we believe the Frankish accounts – to prostrating himself before the newly crowned emperor. Yet, moments before, he had placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head in a ceremony invented for the occasion; Byzantine emperors did not use crowns before the tenth century. The coronation thus enabled both parties to claim superiority. It was not in Charlemagne’s interest to contest papal claims directly, since the process of translating his imperial title from east to west required a pope with wide-ranging authority. Thus, the Franks did not seriously question the inventions of previous popes; notably Symmachus, who claimed in 502 on dubious precedents that no secular power could judge a pontiff. Nor did they challenge the Donation of Constantine, purportedly dating from 317, but probably written around 760, which presented the pope as temporal lord of the western empire as well as head of the church.
From Sacral Kingship to Holy Empire
Other arguments favoured imperial supremacy. The idea of the secular sword elevated the emperor above other kings as ‘defender of the church’ (defensor ecclesiae), extending the Franks’ existing Christianizing mission to include repelling external threats from the Arabs, Magyars and Vikings. Defence could also entail combating internal enemies, including corrupt or heretical clergy, thus suggesting a spiritual as well as a military and political mission. …
… Ancient Roman emperors had been regarded as demigods, with Caesar posthumously pronounced divine by the senate. The idea continued under his successors, but the need to respect Rome’s still powerful republican traditions prevented this developing into full, theocratic kingship – something that was further curbed by the conversion to Christianity early in the fourth century. While ancient practice continued in Byzantium, the western Empire emerged amidst post-Roman ideas of piety as a guide to public behaviour.
… The notion that emperors were sacred rather than merely pious took hold during the tenth century. … Early medieval emperors remained warriors, including Henry II, who was subsequently canonized in 1146 and who consciously presented the Empire as God’s House. Nonetheless, the period 960–1050 clearly saw a more sacral style of kingship (regale sacerdotium) intended to manifest the divine imperial mission through public acts. …
… Like their Roman predecessors, the Empire’s rulers stopped short of claiming to be priests, but their coronation ritual resembled a bishop’s ordination by the mid-tenth century, including anointing, assuming vestments and receiving objects that symbolized spiritual as well as secular authority. …
… A renewed bout of papal-imperial tension in the mid-twelfth century confirmed the impracticality of sacral kingship to legitimate power in the Empire. The Staufer family, ruling from 1138, changed the emphasis from the monarch to a transpersonal holy Empire, first using the title Sacrum Imperium in March 1157. Already sanctified by its divine mission, the Empire did not need the pope’s approbation. This powerful idea survived the Staufers’ political demise in 1250, persisting thereafter even in the long periods when no German king was crowned emperor. …
ROMAN
The Legacy of Rome
The Roman legacy was powerfully attractive, but hard to assimilate within the new Empire. Knowledge of ancient Rome was imperfect, though it improved during the ninth century with the intellectual and literary movement known as the Carolingian Renaissance. …
… There were also domestic pressures against embracing Rome. Charlemagne already ruled his own realm, which itself stimulated imitation: the Polish król, Czech král and Russian korol, all meaning ‘king’, derive from ‘Charles’. The Franks were not prepared to renounce their own identity and merge themselves with the peoples they had recently conquered to become a common body of Roman citizens. While the Franks were Romanized, the centre of their power lay on or beyond the Limes – the frontiers of the ancient Roman empire. Memories lingered, such as the widespread stories that Caesar himself had laid the foundations of various important buildings, but most Roman settlements had contracted or been abandoned completely. Likewise, Roman institutions influenced Merovingian governance, but had also been heavily modified or replaced by entirely new methods.
A Rome-Free Empire?
There were only about 50,000 people in Rome in 800, and despite some Carolingian rebuilding, the numerous ancient ruins indicated just how much time had passed since it had been capital of the known world. Although still large by contemporary standards, it was not big enough to accommodate pope and emperor simultaneously. Following the Carolingian partition of the Empire in 843 into three kingdoms (West Francia, East Francia and Lotharingia), the imperial title was generally held by the Frankish kings of Italy until 924, but they were relatively weak, especially after 870, and they usually resided in the old Lombard capital at Pavia, or in the former Byzantine base at Ravenna. …
… The possibility of dispensing with Rome altogether was strongest during the early Carolingian era. Charlemagne never returned to Italy after the spring of 801, and it was 22 years before another emperor visited Rome; whereas popes crossed the Alps three times, including for the coronation of Charlemagne’s son and successor, Louis I, in Reims (816). … [The] turbulence of Carolingian politics from the 820s … made it imperative to involve the pope in legitimizing possession of the imperial title and decreased the incentive for the pope to travel over the Alps to please the Franks. Lothar’s decision to have his son Louis II crowned co-emperor in 850 is usually accepted as definitively fixing imperial coronations in Rome. Thereafter, it proved hard to break what appeared to be tradition.
While it became impossible to become emperor without being crowned by the pope, papal involvement was not necessary to rule the Empire. The so-called ‘interregna’ are misleading. The Empire had an almost unbroken succession of kings; it was just that not all of them were crowned emperors by the pope. Otto I established the convention that the German king was automatically imperator futurus, or, as Conrad II asserted in 1026 before his coronation, ‘designated for the imperial crown of the Romans’. However, it proved fundamental to the Empire’s subsequent history that Otto did not merge the imperial with the German royal title. Despite being proclaimed emperor by his victorious army at Lechfeld, he waited until his coronation in 962 before presenting himself as such. Unlike later nationalist historians, Otto and his successors never regarded the Empire as a German nation state. In their eyes, what made them worthy to be emperor was that they already ruled such extensive lands. By the early eleventh century it had become accepted that whoever was German king was also king of Italy and Burgundy, even without separate coronations. The title King of the Romans (Romanorum rex) was added from 1110 in a bid to assert authority over Rome and reinforce claims that only the German king could be emperor.
German claims evolved in response to the difficulties in dealing with the papacy, rather than rejection of the Roman imperial tradition. Indeed, the idea of unbroken continuity grew stronger with the spread of new ideas about the ‘imperial translation’ enacted in 800 by Leo III and Charlemagne. Like all powerful medieval ideas, this was rooted in the Bible. The Book of Daniel (2:31ff.) recounts how the Old Testament prophet responded to a request to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about the future of his empire. Thanks to an influential reading by St Jerome in the fourth century, this was understood as a succession of four ‘world monarchies’: Babylon, Persia, Macedonia and Rome. The notion of ‘empire’ was singular and exclusive. Empires could not co-exist, but followed each other in a strict sequence that was epochal, involving the transfer of divinely ordained power and responsibility for humanity, rather than merely changes of ruler or dynasty. The Roman empire had to continue, since the appearance of a fifth monarchy would invalidate Daniel’s prophecy and contradict God’s plan. …
EMPIRE
Singular and Universal
… Imperial apologists fully recognized that the Empire’s territory was much smaller than the extent of the known world. Like the ancient Romans, they distinguished between the Empire’s actual territory and its divine imperial mission, which they considered limitless. French, Spanish and other western monarchs increasingly emphasized their own sovereign royal authority, but this did little to diminish arguments that the emperor was still superior. Even if they acknowledged practical limits to imperial authority, most writers still believed in the desirability of a single, secular Christian leader.
The Empire was considered indivisible, since the theory of imperial translation ruled that there could only be one empire at a time. The clergy pressured the Franks to abandon their practice of partible inheritance. It is not clear how far Charlemagne accepted this, since two of his sons predeceased him, leaving only Louis I as heir in 814.61 Louis declared the Empire indivisible in 817 on the grounds that it was a gift from God. However, it was the Franks’ own conception of Empire that proved more significant since this envisaged imperial leadership of subordinate kingdoms, rather than a centralized, unitary state. … Family jealousies wrecked these arrangements, leading to civil wars from 829 and a series of partitions after the Treaty of Verdun in 843, but the Carolingians continued to regard their lands as part of a wider unit and held at least 70 summit meetings between 843 and 877 alone. It is only subsequent historical convention that sees these partitions as creating distinct nation states. …
… Practical politics reinforced this. For most of the Middle Ages, the Empire remained its own political world. …
The Frankish ideas imparted important characteristics to the Empire, giving it a strong ideological continuity, but ultimately contributing to its inability to match new political ideas emerging in Europe by the eighteenth century. Although different in many ways, one aspect of ancient Rome is strikingly modern. Romans believed their empire was a unitary state inhabited by a common people who had submerged any previous identities through the acceptance of common citizenship.
By contrast, the Franks and their imperial successors were more like other pre-modern emperors in Persia, India, China and Ethiopia who saw themselves as ‘kings of kings’, ruling empires composed of discrete kingdoms inhabited by different peoples.
This was a source of great strength to the Franks and their successors. It meant that the imperial title retained prestige, remaining a much more realistic goal than trying to establish direct hegemony over the subjects of other rulers. Peoples and lands were mostly only indirectly subject to the emperor, whose authority was mediated by a variety of other, lesser lords. This hierarchy would lengthen … eventually becoming more elaborate and rigid as it began to be fixed in copious written and printed documents from the fifteenth century. Although ultimately hindering adaptation to change, this aspect provided coherence since status and rights depended on each lord or community’s continued membership of the Empire. It also rendered the creation of a national monarchy undesirable, because the Empire was defined as many kingdoms, rather than just one kingdom.
Peace
As in other empires, the emperor was expected to preserve peace. Charlemagne blended Merovingian and late Roman ideals by presenting peace as the fruit of justice. The Salians and Staufers asserted a more active style of kingship, reversing the church’s argument that good governance was a precondition of faith and justice. This shift should not be misunderstood as deliberate state-building. It was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans embraced the modern idea of progress, which envisaged the future as an improved version of the present, encouraging both the elaboration of new utopias and the expectation that politics should deliver these. Previously, people generally viewed the future in terms of salvation and secular ideals of fame and posthumous reputation. They might bemoan current problems like disorder, disease and misrule, but saw these as deviations from an essentially static, idealized order. The discrepancy between ideal and reality was not too troubling, since it was considered an expression of the imperfection of human, earthly existence. The ruler was expected to embody idealized harmony (Concordia) and to manifest it through symbolic-laden actions.
The emphasis on consensus remained fundamental to imperial politics until 1806, but it would be wrong to replace the earlier narrative of emperors as failed state-builders with a new one of them as honest peace-brokers. Virtually all the men ruling the Empire before the sixteenth century were successful warriors, with many of them owing their position to victory over domestic rivals.
Freedom
Likewise, we should not confuse the Empire’s much cherished freedoms with the modern, democratic ideal of Liberty. The latter derives inspiration from republican Rome and the ancient Greek city states, neither of which feature significantly in the classical legacy embraced by the Empire. Instead, Frankish warrior culture imparted a distinctly pre-modern idea of local and particular liberties, which started to shape the Empire as a status hierarchy, distributing political and social capital unevenly across society. The emperor’s coronation and mission elevated him above other lords, but these lords still played a role in his accession as king. The Franks’ success as conquerors bred a culture of entitlement amongst the aristocracy that Carolingian rulers never escaped. No king could afford to ignore his leading lords for long. However, these rarely sought to displace the king, or to establish fully independent kingdoms of their own. … [The] Carolingian and Ottonian aristocracy repeatedly declined opportunities to break up the Empire during periods of weak royal rule. Rebellions were about individual influence, not alternative forms of governance.
The most important liberty was the right of lords to participate in the greater affairs of the Empire by having a voice in forming the political consensus. Rather than a constant battle between centralism and princely independence, the Empire’s political history is better understood as a long process of delineating these rights and fixing them with greater precision. … [The] graduations became sharper with the fundamental distinction from the later twelfth century between those with ‘imperial immediacy’ and those whose relationship to the emperor was mediated by one or more intervening levels of lordship. Over the next five centuries, immediacy became more firmly associated with the rule of increasingly distinct territories and their mediate subjects. Meanwhile, those possessing immediacy shared common political rights that came to be exercised through more formal institutions from the later fifteenth century.
Freedoms and status were corporate in the sense of being shared communally by members of a legally recognized social group, such as the clergy. They were also local and specific, varying across different parts of the Empire, and even between those of nominally the same social rank.
Fundamentally, however, their freedoms and status related all inhabitants in some way to the Empire as the ultimate source of individual or communal liberties. The Empire’s hierarchy was not a chain of command, but a multilayered structure allowing individuals and groups to disobey one authority whilst still professing loyalty to another. This was exemplified by the refusal of Counts Frederick and Anselm to join their immediate lord, Duke Ernst II of Swabia, in rebelling against Conrad II in 1026:
‘If we were slaves of our king and emperor, subjected by him to your jurisdiction, it would not be permissible for us to separate ourselves from you. But now, since we are free, and hold our king and emperor the supreme defender of our liberty on earth, as soon as we desert him, we lose our liberty, which no good man, as someone says, loses save with his life.’
Power
Imperial rule was not hegemonic, despite periodic moves towards a more command-style monarchy … but was characterized more by brokerage and negotiation. It worked because the main participants usually had more to gain from preserving the imperial order than by overturning or fragmenting it. The Carolingians extended a broadly standard system of general governance across their entire realm, entrenching it by adapting the specifics of rule to local circumstances. The Empire was divided into duchies as military districts, subdivided into counties for the maintenance of public order. The duchies largely mapped onto the diocesan structure west of the Rhine, and onto the fewer, but larger tribal areas east of that river. Land was endowed as fiefs or benefices to enable the dukes and counts to sustain themselves and carry out their functions, as well as to support bishops and abbots in developing a more extensive and dense church infrastructure.
… [It] is important to note that the Carolingians already distinguished between the kingdom (regnum) and the king (rex), with the former persisting even if it was ruled by several kings. The transition from the Carolingians to the Ottonians as German kings in 919 was regarded by contemporaries as a significant event. Like Otto I’s assumption of the imperial title in 962, they disagreed how far this represented a break with the past, but by the twelfth century most emphasized continuity even if they did not all fully accept the wider claims of imperial translation.
Continuity persisted despite subsequent changes of ruling family and the long periods without a crowned emperor. History records the Empire’s kings as members of different dynasties, and this is certainly a useful shorthand. However, true dynasticism only emerged in the fourteenth century, and in fact simply reinforced existing ideas that each ruler could claim descent from his illustrious predecessors.
Continuity suggested that power was transpersonal [dictionary: denoting or relating to states or areas of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity], transcending the lives of individual monarchs. This idea developed in France, England and Bohemia around 1150 where it was expressed through the idea of the crown symbolizing the kingdom as a combination of inalienable royal rights and property. The loyalty that all subjects owed to the crown transferred automatically from one king to the next.
This idea did not take firm hold in the Empire, despite its having Europe’s oldest crown in continuous use. While royal rule remained continuous in the Empire, imperial coronations depended on papal cooperation before 1530. Consequently, it was the Empire itself that was abstracted as transpersonal. This was most famously demonstrated in 1024 by Conrad II’s furious response to a delegation from Pavia that defended their demolition of the imperial palace there on the grounds that his predecessor Henry II had died:
‘Even if the king had died, the kingdom remained, just as the ship whose steersman falls remains. They were state, not private buildings; they were under another law, not yours’.
Abstracting the Empire helped divorce political continuity from specific territory, unlike western European monarchies, where power was increasingly associated with ruling a distinct people and place. The sacrality of the imperial mission reinforced this. Continuity was only seriously challenged with changes in historical perception emerging from Renaissance Humanism, which was more likely to contest claims that lacked foundation in verifiable written sources. The Protestant Reformation proved a second challenge, since continuity with ancient Rome was automatically suspect to those busy renouncing papal supremacy over their church. Finally, political changes became more obvious as imperial governance shifted under the Habsburgs to possession of lands controlled directly by the emperor, including parts of the New World during the reign of Charles V in the sixteenth century. However, it was not until 1641 that anyone published a serious critique of the ideology of imperial translation, while imperial political culture continued to celebrate aspects of the Holy Roman imperial past right up to 1806, such as the belief in unbroken imperial rule since Charlemagne.
The Source:
Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of The Holy Roman Empire, Penguin Random House 2016
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