Summary: Welcome to the 49th installment of CS. This episode is titled “Charlemagne Pt. 2.”After his coronation on Christmas Day AD 800, Charlemagne said he didn’t know it had been planned by Pope Leo III. If setting the crown of a new Holy Roman Empire on his head was a surprise, he got over the shock right quick. He quickly shot off dispatches to the lands under his control to inform them he was large and in-charge. Each missive began with these words, “Charles, by the will of God, Roman Emperor, Augustus … in the year of our consulship 1.” He required an oath be taken to him as Caesar by all officers, whether religious or civil. He sent ambassadors to soothe the inevitable wrath of the Emperor in Constantinople.What’s important to note is how his coronation ceremony in St. Peter’s demonstrated the still keen memory of the Roman Empire that survived in Europe. His quick emergence as the recognized leader of a large part of Europe revealed the strong desire there was to reestablish a political unity that had been absent from the region for 400 years. But, Charlemagne’s coronation launched a long-standing contest. One we’d not expect, since it was, after all, the Pope who crowned him. The contest was between the revived empire and the Roman Church.In the medieval world, Church and State were two realms comprising Christendom. The Medieval Church represented Christian society aimed at acquiring spiritual blessings, while the Medieval State existed to safeguard civil justice and tranquility. Under the medieval system, both Church and State were supposed to exist side by side in a harmonious relationship, each focused on gaining the good of mankind but in different spheres; the spiritual and the civil.In reality, it rarely worked that way. The Pope and Emperor were usually contestants in a game of thrones. The abiding question was: Does the Church rule the State, or the State the Church? This contest was played out on countless fields, large and small, throughout the Middle Ages.Charlemagne left no doubt about where sovereignty lay during His reign. He provided Europe a colossal father figure as the first Holy Roman Emperor. Everyone was answerable to him. To solve the problem of supervising local officials in his expansive realm, Charlemagne passed an ordinance creating the missi dominici or king’s envoys. These were pairs of officials, a bishop and noble, who traveled the realm to check on local officials. Even the pope was kept under the watchful imperial eye.Though Charlemagne occasionally used the title “emperor” in official documents, he usually declined it because it appeared to register his acceptance of what the Pope had done at his coronation. Charlemagne found this dangerous; that the Pope was now in a position to make an Emperor. The concern was—The one who can MAKE an emperor, can un-make him. Charles thought it ought to be the other way around; that Emperors selected and sanctioned Popes.In truth, what Pope Leo III did on Christmas Day of 800 when he placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head was just a final flourish of what was already a well-established fact – Charles was King of the Franks. One recent lecturer described the coronation as the cherry on the top of a sundae that had already been made by Charles the Great.In our last episode we saw a major objective of Charlemagne’s vision was to make Europe an intellectual center. He launched a revival of learning and the arts. Historians speak of this as the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne required monasteries to have a school for the education of boys in grammar, math and singing. At his capital of Aachen he built a school for the education of the royal court. The famous English scholar Alcuin headed the school, and began the difficult task of reviving learning in the early Middle Ages by authoring the first textbooks in grammar, rhetoric, and logic.It was Charlemagne’s emphasis on education that proved to be his enduring legacy to h
