The Tale of the Greatest Divine King - Essay Example

The Tale of the Greatest Divine King I. Introduction The advent of Charlemagne’s rise into power in 768, a power shared with his brother until the latter’s demise in 771, pledged an extension of the policy of papal alliance yet in attributes far beyond imagining. The conflict between the Franks and Lombards was perceived as mended when, in 770, Charlemagne bowed to marry the daughter of the Lombard king, however not a year passed, he disposed her, with or without marrying her is still a mystery. Nevertheless, it is evident that any cordial relationship with the Lombards had been terminated. Charlemagne did what his father had done, he led an army into Italy and subjugated the Lombards, yet dissimilar from his father, Charlemagne transferred the king of the Lombards to a monastery and proclaimed himself the new ruler of the Lombards (Easton & Wieruszowski, 1957). At some stage in 774, Charlemagne journeyed to Rome and at Easter time he accompanied Pope Hadrian I to St. Peter’s Basilica, where they avowed mutual oaths, hence validating the union of Charles’ father with the papacy. The implication of the alliance was revealed by Charlemagne in a correspondence to Pope Leo III in 796, “It is our part with the help of divine holiness to defend by armed strength the holy church of Christ everywhere from the outward onslaughts of the pagans and the ravages of the infidels and to strengthen within the knowledge of the Catholic faith. It is your part, most Holy Father, to help our armies with your hands lifted up to Gold like Moses, so that, by your intercession and by the leadership and gift of God, the Christian people may everywhere and always have victory over the enemies of his holy name and that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified throughout the world” (Logan, 2002, 73). Through this letter, written by Charlemagne himself, it is logical to assume about his motive in forging alliance and good relationship with the church. Here is an idea of a perfect Christian society, to whose security and prosperity both king and pope were tied together in a joint effort. II. Charlemagne and the Papacy Four years following the letter of Charlemagne, at Christmas in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo anointed and crowned Charlemagne as the new Roman emperor. Charlemagne, a king whose roots are barbaric, received the title of emperor in an occasion whose entire implication still mystifies modern scholarship. Since 487, there had been no Roman emperor in the West; the lone emperor was the woman named Irene, ruling the vestiges of the ancient Roman Empire from Constantinople (Rops, 1959). There are several remarks that can be made about this unexpected incident in St. Peter’s. Primarily, no matter what the internal disorder of Roman politics and the predicaments endured by Pope Leo, the bestowal of the imperial title had to have been Charlemagne’s design, and the narrative recounted by his biographer several years later of a hesitant, shocked Charlemagne bears no conviction. Moreover, the conferral of this title through the pope may have abided by the example of a pope five decades earlier perhaps awarding the title of king on Charlemagne’s father. Furthermore, an empire was not established that celebration of Christmas day (Sullivan, 1959). The territories occupied by the Franks, significantly expanded as they had been by the Carolingians, failed now to form an empire with imperial governance. The Franks, as a matter of fact, merely continued to preserve what they have held in a similar manner: a chain of holdings each with its individual structure of administration, not dissimilar with the Hapsburg holdings in the early modern era. Lastly, the coronation of Charlemagne as monarch, as it were, legitimized the alliance between the papacy and the Franks (ibid). However, the emphasis amidst all the dates and events should be on the reality that the Frankish kings assumed religious obligations to safeguard the papacy. That there also exist political considerations few would refute, yet these crowned personalities from north of the Alps, themselves not various generations indifferent to animism or the worship of nature-spirits, defined their office as possessing a spiritual breadth. With justification did those at Charlemagne’s court christened him ‘David’ (Mombert, 1988, 24). As an ongoing, ceremonial, agreement-based relationship, the Franco-papal alliance did not live to tell the tale after the fall of the Carolingian dynasty. When Carolingian territories were distributed in 840 among the three sons of Louis the Pious, there commenced the course of division. In 855, one of these sons died, and his realm was subdivided into three kingdoms. The progression of disbanding and collapse was imminent. The influence of the local nobles, which was seized under control by Charlemagne, at the moment reasserted itself. The administrative centre of the monarch was to be headed by increasingly pathetic and inefficient successors of Charlemagne (Russel, 1930). A significant alliance could not continue its existence with such shift of political power. III. Charlemagne’s Perception of the Church The people, as well as the playwrights of Charlemagne, who were, essentially, also theologians, exhibited a stubborn inclination to reflect as concretely as possible regarding divine matters. Legitimately, nobody would have the guts to doubt that God was as ethereal and as all-powerful as the leaders of the Church had deemed to believe. Layman as well as preachers had regular visions of the other world from which people can identify their idea of the other world were of a tangible and vigorous nature (Fichtenau & Munz, 1957). The insights of the Jews living in the Frankish kingdom were no less real; they envisaged that God was “sitting in the manner of an earthly king on a throne in a large palace” (ibid, 48). The lyricists in the era of Charlemagne interpreted this palace as a citadel. This association was in complete agreement with a more olden echelon of Frankish ideas. In this citadel, nevertheless, there were to be located divided apartments for important individuals, such as the saints and the magnates of the empire, and its scheme matched up strongly to the agenda of the palace of Aix-la-Chapelle. God the Father, as stated in a song sung in the temples of Lyons, was the master of the divine citadel. It was He who had delivered His son from the citadel to the soil of the earth. The entire conception of such a family unit obeyed the rules of Germanic ideas (Davis, 1900). Yet the need for a solid defence against Arianism had compelled the figure of Christ progressively more into the forefront. At the onset, people had simply stressed the unity of the three Persons in the Trinity; but in the last part Christ himself had turned out to be the Lord of the Heavens and the ‘thunderer’ (ibid, 3). Since the Franks, particularly Charlemagne, assumed upon themselves the protection of conventional beliefs, Christ came to be perceived by them as the architect of the universe. He had moved down to the mortal world but had never stopped to be as one with the Father. He had been conceived and brought out to the world but had remained simultaneously as divine as the Father himself. Christ ruled the world and the heavens, and every nation and every sovereign must be subject to Him. He had journeyed into the underworld so as to batter down the iron gates of hell and to shock Tartarus (Buckingham, 1963). On His triumphant return to Heaven as a king he had been welcomed by the holy armies and the magnates of the kingdom of Heaven as a mortal ruler was to be honoured. He would come back on the day of the final Judgment to inflame the torches and burn the sinful. Apparently, the ancient pagan conception of the enormous inferno was still present (ibid). Charlemagne, whose imperial title augustus had long since lost its majestic ancient significance, was notoriously known as the dreadful and devout king. From time beyond of people’s mind had anticipated the terror of the ruler’s rage to be aimed at against the adversaries of his government. This was predictable of the divine king as much as it was predictable of his contemplation and representative, the mortal ruler. A scholar remarked to Charlemagne, “God’s grace has impressed the terror of your power upon all nations. Those who could never be subdued by armed might approach you now in voluntary subjection” (Fichtenau & Munz, 1957, 53). Once the military might of the Frankish armies was embodied symbolically by a sole personality it was achievable for the ruler’s overwhelming fright to work like a shock. Several tribes on the borders may have given way to that shock rather than to the sheer force of arms (ibid). IV. Charlemagne: Patricius Romanorum Scholars have inferred that the coronation of Charlemagne centres basically on the thought that this incident was one of the steps in the establishment of a structure of papal government. Pope Leo I gave lasting speculative complex to the monarchic quality of Church administration through claiming that the entire ecclesiastical organization centred on an individual commission created by Christ to Peter. Leo mentions of the Roman Church having a principatus, implying that the Church has legitimate predominance within the Christian body (Sullivan, 1959). According to some historians, the emperors opposed the assignment of a principatus to the Roman Church, mainly because this incident will threaten the authority of the monarchs, who by ancient power had the right to control religious life. This developing ‘caesaropapism’ (Smollett, 1901, 32) previously started to obtain a response from Leo I, who contested that the emperor was a constituent of the Christian society with the responsibility of safeguarding that society (ibid). On the other hand, Pope Gelasius I designed a more accurate definition of the function of the emperor in the Christian body. He claimed that the emperorship was certainly exquisitely ordained, established to accomplish a particular function in society. Yet the emperor is secondary to the religious power and is responsible to acknowledge the path of the spiritual selected few in society. A Spanish scholar from the sixth century, Isidore of Seville, balanced the Gelasian concept through putting forth the idea that the purpose of the emperor was to prop up and perform the priestly edicts through force if the situation calls for it (Bulfinch, 1913). Set against this context it is possibly understandable that Charlemagne should have had no uncertainty in assuming the title and in performing the function of the ‘patricius Romanorum’ (Easton & Wieruszowski, 1957, 8). The moment ‘Romanus’ became equivalent to ‘Christianus’ (ibid), there was thereby no hindrance to thwart his taking on that role which in effect meant nothing more than that of a military protector of the Romans, that is also the Christians, a responsibility which in reality he was adapted to play in any instance. For Charlemagne, the title signify that his defensive function originally encompassed also those Romans who were the embodiment of all the Romans dispersed throughout the globe, specifically, the geographical Romans; they were simply Christians, so to speak, in a dense and solidified form. And it was his duty as ‘patricius Romanorum’, in his role as a defender of the Church of Rome, that he not merely corroborated the contribution of his father but as well added a substantial portion of Italy to the lands which his father had reinstated to their rightful proprietor, the Church of Rome (ibid). Apparently, the Easter agreement of 774 had the similar character as its forerunner of two decades prior; in every instance the transaction involved restoration of property, pillaged by the Lombards from its rightful owner, the Roman Church. For both Venetia and Isria remained Byzantine and hence belonged to the empire. The persistent demands of the pope placed Charlemagne for the execution of the ‘donation’ of 774 (Fichtenau & Munz, 1957, 51), demonstrate the conflict between the pope’s objectives and the king’s actions, a conflict that appears to have turned out to be particularly obvious after Charlemagne’s taking on of the title ‘Rex Langobardorum’ (ibid, 52) on the same year as of the ‘donation’. Furthermore, the core attributes of these several letters sent by the pope, is the prominence on the purpose of the Roman Church as the ‘spiritualis mater’ (ibid) of the king and the stress on his mission of safeguarding his spiritual mother; consequently, he should be a guard “for seeing that justice in done for St. Peter” (Sullivan, 1959, 74). The possibility of appropriate reward is not mislaid in these papal correspondences; if he accomplished his promises the king would pay tribute to the Roman Church and together with this the universal Church, and thus the mainstream Christian faith would be preserved (ibid). The adulation by Charlemagne of the Roman Church is a matter of fact the prevailing premise in all these manifold papal petitions to the Frankish king. In one of his announcements the pope goes beyond to remind Charlemagne of the adoration of the Roman Church by the Emperor Constantine; he is upheld to the Frank as the exemplar, for he had applauded the Church through his grant and had conferred upon the pope these components of the West (Buckingham, 1963). Various emperors, Adrian I declares, patricians and other faithful men had compromised to St. Peter and the apostolic Roman Church lands. Therefore, Charlemagne should emulate the celebrated emperor Constantine who venerated the Church and who had bestowed upon the Roman Church the privileges over these Western sections of the world (ibid). V. Conclusion Following the discussions aforementioned, it is sensible to assume that Charlemagne and the Roman Church had a positive relationship for various reasons. However, among these several reasons, only few are evident, as espoused by scholars and historians. Obviously, Charlemagne maintained a good-natured association with the Church because of his father’s prior ‘donation’ to the rightfulness and authority of the Church. Charlemagne might have felt the responsibility of sustaining this agreeable relationship between the emperorship and the papacy as a respect to his father’s memories. Aside from this, Charlemagne’s could have harboured personal motives in maintaining an amiable alliance with the church; knowing that the emperor ordained by the Church has the responsibility to defend the Romans, that is the Christians, all over the world, Charlemagne had deduced that the emperor has the opportunity to further rise into power through military might granted to him by the Church. However, looking at the softer side of the story, Charlemagne favoured the Church during his reign because of the enduring belief, espoused by his lyricists, that the emperor resembles Christ, the defender of the Heavens and the Earth. Perhaps, Charlemagne realized that his anointment by the Church as the new Roman Emperor is a sign from the Creator that He wants salvation for the Roman world through sending a powerful and wise leader, who in that instance is Charlemagne himself. More likely, Charlemagne perceived his coronation in St. Peter’s as a good riddance from the Church, which bestowed upon him the almighty duty of defending the entire Christianized world. Works Cited Buckingham, J. (1963). The Church in the Seventeenth Century . London: J.M. Dent & Sons. Bulfinch, T. (1913). Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable; The Age of Chivalry; Legends of Charlemagne. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Davis, H. C. (1900). Charlemagne (Charles the Great): The Hero of Two Nations. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Easton, S. C. & Wieruszowski, H. (1957). The Era of Charlemagne: Frankish State and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Fichtenau, H. & Munz, P. (1957). The Carolingian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Mombert, J. (1988). A History of Charles the Great (Charlemagne). London: Kegan Paul Trench. Rops, H. D. (1959). The Church in the Dark Ages. London: J.M. Dent & Sons. Russel, C. E. (1930). Charlemagne: First of the Moderns. Boston: The Riverside Press. Smollett, T. (1901). The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version [Ancient and Modern History, V. I Charlemagne. Paris: E.R. DuMont. Sullivan, R. E. (1959). The Coronation of Charlemagne. Boston: D.C. Health. \ Read More