Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

In that battle Charles merited his title of “the Hammer”. Had he or his Franks blenched upon that day, Europe would have become Mohammedan, as three hundred years before in the battle of the nations by Macon it would have been the prey of the Mongol, had Attila prevailed. Carcassonne and Nimes and all southern France had yielded. But the hammer of Charles descended on the Saracen anvil. His son, king Pipin, carried on his work in southern France, and his grandson Charles, before his death, had become lord of an united realm from the Ebro to the Eyder. Islam never advanced further in the West. As France in the fifteenth century owed its deliverance to the maiden of Arc, so in the eighth, not Gaul only, but all the West would seem to have owed its inheritance of the Christian name to the four great men whom Providence raised up in the family of Arnulf of Metz, and Pipin of Landen. Pipin, the mayor of the palace, Charles the Hammer, Pipin the king, and Charlemagne, are four continuous generations from grandfather to greatgrandson the like of which I know not that any other family can produce.

An old man so feeble that he had hardly strength to cross the Alps, and was almost killed by the exertion, laid his hand on the head of Pipin, and the mayor of the palace became king of the Franks. The hand was the hand of St. Peter. Forty-six years later the same hand will be laid upon the head of his son; and the king of the Franks will become emperor of the Romans; and the Saracens who felt the arm of one Charles in the battle by Tours, will feel another Charles rise up before them to meet the Moslem lord of the southern and eastern world on equal terms.

After Charles left Rome, at Easter, 774, as above narrated, attempts were made against him by the Lombard dukes, and Adelchis, the son of Desiderius. In spite of the Saxon wars he was in upper Italy at the end of the winter of 776: he prevailed over his opponents, sent his counts to the various cities, and protected the State of the Church. At the end of 780 he was again at Pavia, and he celebrated the feast of Easter on April 15, 781, at Rome. Here Pope Adrian crowned his son Pipin king of Lombardy, and the youngest, Louis, king of Aquitania. All seemed to go well. Greek messengers from the regent Irene, widow of Leo IV., brought proposals of agreement and treaty. During this longer sojourn the new arrangement of the Lombard kingdom would be completed. Frankish counts took the place of the old dukes, whose relation to the central power had been far looser than that of their successors was made.

The introduction of the royal missi and their action upon the administration of law likened subject Italy much more to the other states of Charles. The position of the native population was not essentially altered, but the improvement of the laws helped them. Charles all the while was carrying on war after war with the resisting Saxons, enlarging the Christian domain by founding bishoprics as far as the Weser and the Elbe, taking the Spanish marches from the Arab, and the eastern marches from the Avars, uniting the dukedom of Bavaria with his kingdom, and carrying out that mighty work of civilisation which has made his name immortal for its religious institutions, its legislation, and the encouragement which he gave to literature.

Early in the year 787 Charles was again with Pope Adrian at Rome. In a rapid campaign he reduced to his obedience Arichis, duke of Benevento, who was married to a daughter of Desiderius; and returning once more spent Easter with Adrian. It was the last meeting between those two fast friends. On Christmas day, 795, Adrian closed a pontificate of nearly twenty-four years. Three years before Rome had been desolated by one of its most fearful inundations, and the Pope had gone about in a boat succouring the needy. This pontificate was both in its spiritual and temporal consequences most brilliant. Adrian possessed every quality which should adorn a great Pope, a tender and active piety, a zeal the ardour of which was tempered by wisdom: a union of goodness and resolution, so that in the exercise of his charge he combined the affection of a father with the authority of a teacher, and the vigilance of a Pope. Charles mourned for him both as a friend and father. He had an inscription of thirty-eight verses engraved in golden letters on the black marble stone which covered his tomb. He had Masses said for his soul in all churches; and dispensed great alms in distant lands, especially to England. In his letter to Offa, king of Mercia, he wrote: – “We have sent you these alms begging intercession for the Apostolic Lord Adrian, not that we doubt, that that blessed soul is at peace, but to show our faith and affection for a most dear friend”. It cannot be doubted that Adrian's influence upon the great king, since he first came to Rome in 774, had prepared him for the future exaltation which he was to receive in that same church of St. Peter, the steps of which he had ascended on his knees twenty-six years before. The day after Adrian's death, Leo III. was chosen his successor. He was by birth a Roman, and brought up in the patriarchal palace, and is described by contemporaries as learned, eloquent, and beneficent.

From the gift of king Pipin to Pope Stephen II., when the keys of the cities surrendered to him were laid upon the altar over the body of St. Peter, to the repetition of that gift by Charles in 774, and again from that most solemn action of Charles to the year 800, no difference in the relation of the Pope to the king of the Franks took place. In the first instance, in the year 754, Charles had been made Patricius of the Roman Church together with his father, and had as such taken on himself its protection and defence. Therefore the Popes took pains, in particular Leo III., that the Romans acknowledged under oath this relation, binding themselves to observe the rules which their Patricius should make for the security of the Church. No conclusion can be drawn from this, as to an overlordship of the king of the Franks in the territories assigned to the Pope. Pope Adrian and Leo III. sent to Charles a standard together with the keys of St. Peter's tomb. The jurisdiction which the king of the Franks exercised in Rome as Patricius was not an overlordship; it was necessary for his office as Protector. But now an extraordinary event took place. In the year 799, three years after the accession of Leo III., a tumult broke out which in its savage violence surpassed that under Stephen III. On April 25, St. Mark's day, the Pope was conducting the solemn procession ordered by St. Gregory the Great, from the Lateran to St. Lorenzo in Lucina. A band of conspirators broke out of the Flaminian way, not far from the Church of St. Silvester. At their head were two nephews of the late Pope Adrian: Paschalis, the Primicerius, that is, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and Campulus, the treasurer, another of them, both in immediate attendance on the Pope. Leo III. was thrown to the ground, and an attempt made to tear out his eyes and his tongue. He was dragged into the Church of St. Silvester, and thence taken to the monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cælian.

The conspirators had not succeeded, as they hoped, in blinding the Pope. His wounds were wonderfully healed. His friends rescued him on a dark night from his confinement in the monastery, and brought him safely to St Peter's. A large number of the people and clergy surrounded him. The Frank duke came from Spoleto with a hurriedly collected troop, took him from St. Peter's, and carried him to Spoleto, where again bishops, priests, and laity surrounded him with congratulations.

When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At Paderborn he learnt of the Pope's approach. He sent to him archbishop Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to the cathedral.

Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.

The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the king a list of accusations against the Pope.

The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy, senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons, Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St. Peter's, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city, and took again possession of the Lateran.

In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital, Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in the Pope's possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St. Peter's, where the people waited for him in the usual order.

The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to clear the Pope from the accusations brought against him, and for this purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter's of archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one voice: ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors, and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”

After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were again assembled in the same church of St. Peter's. Charles, at the request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature, was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. celebrated High Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”

And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord. And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king his son.

Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St. Peter's primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes. During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and placed a nobler and more religious house on the throne of the Franks. Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son, during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory, and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St. Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its master, Christendom. The eastern emperor in his ardour to impose heresy, had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any civil subjection to the eastern.

Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from the Tagus to the Indus.

First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal, but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor's charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title, of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or Germans, nor dependent on the Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank, and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans. As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor; and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.

The annalists of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God's authority we have this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo, that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was that among the kings there should be one, already most powerful by the extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800. Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of things. So far already had Arius anticipated Mohammed. Against this confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power, and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above, by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ's religion, and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused. The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East; had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer with Christian name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian. Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.

Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out: Rome is our common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I. a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of qualities, excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the greatest of Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds of years after his death.

To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter's Basilica, was of itself to change the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory's time the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles; now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800 years, into the civil counsels of princes.

Pipin le Bref, great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was free. There was no written constitution, but it was one power exercised by sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense activity.