The Holy Roman Empire

There were at least three different Roman Empires before about 1500, all centered in different places.  To make it more confusing, they all asserted they were the same Roman Empire.

Let's start with the original Roman Empire, the territory conquered in (roughly) the five centuries BC, which ended up including the whole Mediterranean basin and Europe west of the Rhine.  Its capital was Rome, and from the first century BC it was ruled by emperors, absolute rulers who originally were assumed to be semi-divine.

This Empire split in the first half of the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine moved his capital to Constantinople (the modern city of Istanbul), in Greek-speaking Byzantium (now Turkey).  (I wonder why it's named Constantinople?)  (See more here on the "fall" of the Roman Empire.)

Constantine also converted to Christianity, a religion that soon became official throughout the Empire.  Though no longer semi-divine, the emperors continued to be absolute rulers.

From the early fourth century to the late fifth, the real capital of the Empire was Constantinople, but there were still sometimes co-emperors headquartered in the city of Rome.  The last of these western co-emperors was killed at the orders of the Byzantine emperor, leading to over three centuries of just one Roman emperor.  These Byzantine Roman emperors indeed continued to rule until 1453, when the Turks finally took Constantinople.

Meanwhile, back in the west, the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope in the year 800.  (See more here on Charlemagne.)  Now there were two emperors, one with his capital at Aachen, near what is now the French-German border, and the other in Constantinople.  Both called themselves Roman Emperors.  Neither was in Rome.

Charlemagne's empire, which was originally (more or less) the territory that now corresponds to France, Italy, and western Germany, became by the eleventh century just Germany and Italy, as France went its own way.  German kings would be elected by the German princes, then cross the Alps, beat up some Italians, and be crowned Roman emperor by the pope.  (See more here on medieval Italy.)  Since 800, it was very clear that no western king could call himself emperor unless the pope crowned him.

As you can doubtless imagine, there was a great deal of hard feeling between emperors and popes, who felt that the other guy ought to do what he wanted.  The Investiture Controversy (on which see more here) was a knock-down, drag-out fight that continued on and off from the late eleventh century to the late twelfth.  At one interlude during this Controversy, the German emperor decided that not only was he Roman emperor, he was Holy Roman Emperor.  (Take that, pope!)  The title sticks.  Indeed, to avoid confusion, a lot of historians refer to the "Holy Roman Empire" as starting with Charlemagne, to keep it distinct from either the original Roman empire of antiquity or the Byzantine Roman empire.

In the late Middle Ages, the German princes, deciding that if they elected someone king that was good enough, declared that one could be Holy Roman Emperor without the bother of crossing the Alps and beating up Italians in order to be crowned at Rome.  The Holy Roman Empire eventually was joined by marriage to the Spanish Empire of Ferdinand and Isabella, busy conquering the Mediterranean and the New World, but that takes us into the post-medieval period.

To reiterate, there's the original Roman Empire, centered at Rome, until the early fourth century.  There's the Byzantine Roman Empire, centered at Constantinople, from the fourth century until 1453.  And there's the Holy Roman Empire, not called "holy" until the twelfth century, but really starting with Charlemagne and persisting (with majors changes) until the end of the Middle Ages.  All clear now?

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on the Holy Roman Empire and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Charlemagne

Even if a person knows very little medieval history, they have almost certainly heard of Charlemagne.  "He was great or something."  (That's right, the name means "Charles the Great," the great-part from the Latin magnus, as in 'magnum'.)

The real Charlemagne was king of the Franks from 768 to 814, king not only of what is now France but also of much of western Germany and the Benelux countries.  He was also king of Lombardy (northern Italy) in at least his own mind, though the Lombards had doubts.  He is now imagined as "father of Europe," and there is a statue of him at the European Union headquarters.  Given that he became king of all these territories through conquest, and that his biographer was very irritated with the Germans who refused to stay conquered, maybe we shouldn't press this analogy too far.

In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by the pope.  Now you'll recall from earlier posts that the capital of the Roman Empire had moved in the fourth century from Rome to Constantinople (what is now Istanbul, in Turkey).  There were intermittently independent emperors in Rome as well as Constantinople for over a century, but from the 470s on, the Roman Emperors, the heirs to the Caesars, were solely in the Greek East (Constantinople), where they remained until their empire finally fell to the Turks in 1453.

So how did Charlemagne get declared Roman Emperor?  (Usually modern history books call him "Holy Roman Emperor" to keep him distinct both from the Caesars and from the Greek Orthodox emperors in Constantinople, but the term "Holy Roman Emperor" wasn't used until the twelfth century.)

In part the popes owed him one.  Early medieval popes were quite weak and little respected, and the pope of 800 had been having terrible trouble with the Lombards.  He also had decided that the current Emperor in Constantinople was a heretic.  Irene, the emperor, was also a woman, which only made it worse.  She believed that the Ten Commandments forbidding "graven images" meant that one could not have images in the church and was thus an "iconoclast," one who broke up such images.  (This is very depressing to art historians.)  This was not at all how western theologians and the pope interpreted the Ten Commandments.

Feeling that the imperial throne was thus vacant, the pope announced that Charlemagne was the only true emperor and crowned him on Christmas Day 800 in the church of St. Peter's in the Lateran.

On the one hand, this was great, Charlemagne and his descendants (known as the Carolingians, from Carolus, the Latin version of the name Charles) got to call themselves emperors.  But a precedent had been set, that one was not really an emperor until crowned by the pope, which gave the pope power at least potentially.  The bases of the eleventh-century crisis of church and state were laid down.

A thousand years later, Napoleon remembered this all too well and refused to be crowned emperor by the pope, instead snatching the crown from the pope's hands and crowning himself.

Charlemagne himself had doubts about the whole procedure, mostly because he was concerned about the Greek Roman Emperors.  He seems even to have asked Irene to marry him, hoping to resolve it that way.  But she died quickly, and her successor, a man, basically told Charlemagne that if he wanted to call himself emperor in the God-forsaken northern European forests, where they didn't even speak Greek, he was welcome to do so.

The image is from one of his coins.  To the left, behind his head (crowned with laurel like a Roman), you should be able to read his name, Karolus.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval kings, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.