He now sent frequent embassies and
letters to Constantinople, seeking to heal the breach; and
for a long time he made no use of his new title. In 802 he
offered marriage to Irene as a means of mutually
legitimizing their dubious titles; but Irene’s fall from
power shattered this elegant plan. To discourage any martial
attack by Byzantium he arranged an entente with Harun
al-Rashid, who sealed their understanding by sending him
some elephants and the keys to the Christian holy places in
Jerusalem. The Eastern emperor, in retaliation, encouraged
the emirof Cordova to renounce allegiance to Baghdad.
Finally, in 812, the Greek basileus recognized Charlemagne
as coemperor, in return for Charlemagne’s acknowledgment of
Venice and southern Italy as belonging to Byzantium. The
coronation had results for a thousand years. It strengthened
the papacy and the bishops by making civil authority derive
from ecclesiastical conferment; Gregory VII and Innocent III
would build a mightier Church on the events of 800 in Rome.
It strengthened Charlemagne against baronial and other
disaffection by making him a very vicar of God; it vastly
advanced the theory of the divine right of kings. It
contributed to the schism of Greek from Latin Christianity;
the Greek Church did not relish subordination to a Roman
Church allied with an empire rival to Byzantium. The fact
that Charlemagne (as the Pope desired) continued to make
Aachen, not Rome, his capital, underlined the passage of
political power from the Mediterranean to northern Europe,
from the Latin peoples to the Teutons. Above all, the
coronation established the Holy Roman Empire in fact, though
not in theory.
Charlemagne and his advisers conceived of his new authority as a revival of
the old imperial power; only with Otto I was the distinctively new character
of the regime recognized; and it became “holy”only when Frederick Barbarossa
introduced the word sacrum into his title in 1155. All in all, despite its
threat to the liberty of the mind and the citizen, the Holy Roman Empire was
a noble conception, a dream of security and peace, order and civilization
restored in a world heroically won from barbarism, violence, and ignorance.
Imperial formalities now hedged in the Emperor on occasions of state.
Then he had to wear embroidered robes, a golden buckle, jeweled shoes, and a
crown of gold and gems, and visitors prostrated themselves to kiss his foot
or knee; so much had Charlemagne learned from Byzantium, and Byzantium from
Ctesiphon. But in other days, Eginhard assures us, his dress varied little
from the common garb of the Franks- linen shirt and breeches next to the
skin, and over these a woolen tunic perhaps fringed with silk; hose fastened
by bands covered his legs, leather shoes his feet; in winter he added a
close-fitting coat of otter or marten skins; and always a sword at his side.
He was six feet four inches tall, and built to scale. He had blond hair,
animated eyes, a powerful nose, a mustache but no beard, a presence “always
stately and dignified.” He was temperate in eating and drinking, abominated
drunkenness, and kept in good health despite every exposure and hardship. He
often hunted, or took vigorous exercise on horseback. He was a good swimmer,
and liked to bathe in the warm springs of Aachen. He rarely entertained,
preferring to hear music or the reading of a book while he ate.
Like every great man he valued time; he gave audiences and heard cases in
the morning while dressing and putting on his shoes. Behind his poise and
majesty were passion and energy, but harnessed to his aims by a clairvoyant
intelligence. His vital force was not consumed by half a hundred campaigns;
he gave himself also, with never aging enthusiasm, to science, law,
literature, and theology; he fretted at leaving any part of the earth, or
any section of knowledge, unmastered or unexplored. In some ways he was
mentally ingenuous; he scorned superstition and proscribed diviners and
soothsayers, but he accepted many mythical marvels, and exaggerated the
power of legislation to induce goodness or intelligence. This simplicity of
soul had its fair side: there was in his thought and speech a directness and
honesty seldom permitted to statesmanship. He could be ruthless when policy
required, and was especially cruel in his efforts to spread Christianity.
Yet he was a man of great kindness, many charities, warm friendships, and
varied loves. He wept at the death of his sons, his daughter, and Pope
Hadrian. In a poem Ad Carolum regem Theodulf draws a pleasant picture of the
Emperor at home. On his arrival from labors his children gather about him;
son Charles takes off the father’s cloak, son Louis his sword; his six
daughters embrace him, bring him bread, wine, apples, flowers; the bishop
comes in to bless the King’s food; Alcuin is near to discuss letters with
him; the diminutive Eginhard runs to and fro like an ant, bringing in
enormous books.
He was so fond of his daughters that he dissuaded them from marriage, saying
that he could not bear to be without them. They consoled themselves with
unlicensed amours, and bore several illegitimate children. Charlemagne
accepted these accidents with good humor, since he himself, following the
custom of his predecessors, had four successive wives and five mistresses or
concubines. His abounding vitality made him extremely sensitive to feminine
charms; and his women preferred a share in him to the monopoly of any other
man. His harem bore him some eighteen children, of whom eight were
legitimate.
The ecclesiastics of the court and of Rome winked leniently at the Moslem
morals of so Christian a king. He was now head of an empire far greater than
the Byzantine, surpassed, in the white man’s world, only by the realm of the
Abbasid caliphate. But every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens
up new problems. Western Europe had tried to protect itself from the Germans
by taking them into its civilization; but now Germany had to be protected
against the Norse and the Slavs. The Vikings had by 800 established a
kingdom in Jutland, and were raiding the Frisian coast. Charles hastened up
from Rome, built fleets and forts on shores and rivers, and stationed
garrisons at danger points. In 810 the king of Jutland invaded Frisia and
was repulsed; but shortly thereafter, if we may follow the chronicle of the
Monk of St. Gall, Charlemagne, from his palace at Narbonne, was shocked to
see Danish pirate vessels in the Gulf of Lyons. Perhaps because he foresaw,
like Diocletian, that his overreaching empire needed quick defense at many
points at once, he divided it in 806 among his three sons- Pepin,
Louis, and
Charles. But Pepin died in 810, Charles in 811; only Louis remained, so
absorbed in piety as to seem unfit to govern a rough and treacherous world.
Nevertheless, in 813, at a solemn ceremony, Louis was elevated from the rank
of king to that of emperor, and the old monarch uttered his nunc dimittis:
“Blessed be Thou, O Lord God, Who hast granted me the grace to see with my
own eyes my son seated on my throne!”
Four months later, wintering at Aachen, he was seized with a high fever, and
developed pleurisy. He tried to cure himself by taking only liquids; but
after an illness of seven days he died, in the forty-seventh year of his
reign and the seventy-second year of his life (814). He was buried under the
dome of the cathedral at Aachen, dressed in his imperial robes. Soon all the
world called him Carolus Magnus, Karl der Grosse, Charlemagne; and in 1165,
when time had washed away all memory of his mistresses, the Church which he
had served so well enrolled him among the blessed.
