Charlemagne and the Rome That Never Died
On Christmas Day, 800 AD, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of the Frankish king Charles in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the assembled congregation acclaimed him Emperor of the Romans. Whether Charlemagne was surprised by this — his biographer Einhard claims he said he would not have entered the church had he known what was to happen — is debated; the staging suggests coordination, and Charlemagne was not a man who was often genuinely surprised by political events. What is not debated is what the coronation meant: four centuries after the conventional date of Rome’s fall, the most powerful ruler in western Europe was being crowned not as King of the Franks or King of the Germans but as Emperor of the Romans, in Rome, at the greatest shrine of Roman Christianity, by the successor of St. Peter. Rome had not died. It had changed form.
The political logic of the Roman title was specific to Charlemagne’s situation. The Eastern Empire — Byzantium, which still called itself Rome — had been temporarily in the hands of a woman, Irene, who had deposed and blinded her own son to take power. This created a theoretical vacancy: if the Eastern Empire’s legitimacy was compromised by its ruler’s gender (in the view of western churchmen who did not recognize female rule as legitimate) and her method of seizure, then the Roman imperial title might be considered available. The coronation in Rome by the Pope was an assertion that western Christendom could create its own Roman emperor, independent of Constantinople, giving the Frankish king both the title’s prestige and the legitimacy that came from papal authorization.
The practical content of the Roman claim was limited. Charlemagne ruled the Franks, the Saxons he had converted at the point of a sword, the Lombards of Italy, and the peoples on his various frontiers. He did not govern the eastern Mediterranean, did not maintain the Roman legal system in its classical form, and presided over a political structure fundamentally different from the Roman Empire in its administrative and economic organization. His court at Aachen was not Rome; his administration operated in Latin but without the Roman bureaucratic machinery; his economy was agrarian rather than the commercial economy of the classical Mediterranean. The Roman title was a claim about legitimacy and cultural inheritance rather than a description of institutional continuity.
The cultural inheritance was real and consciously cultivated. The Carolingian Renaissance — the intellectual and artistic revival associated with Charlemagne’s court — was explicitly organized around the recovery and transmission of Latin learning. Charlemagne recruited the best Latin scholars of his era — Alcuin of York, Paul the Deacon, Theodulf of Orléans — to his court, established palace schools, promoted uniform Latin literacy in the monasteries, and sponsored the copying of classical manuscripts that preserved texts that might otherwise have been lost. The script that Carolingian scribes developed — the Caroline minuscule — became the standard for Latin manuscript production across Europe and is the direct ancestor of the lowercase letters you are reading now. Charlemagne could not read easily himself; he created an intellectual environment that preserved the reading matter for everyone who came after.
The Holy Roman Empire that evolved from Charlemagne’s coronation — the institution that lasted, in various forms and with varying degrees of reality, until Napoleon dissolved it in 1806 — was not a Roman empire in any institutional sense. Its relationship to Rome was symbolic, theological, and aspirational rather than administrative or legal. But the aspiration was genuine and consequential: the idea that there should be a Roman empire in the Christian west, legitimated by the papacy and embodying the continuity of the Roman universal order, shaped European political imagination for a millennium. The competing claims of Pope and Emperor, each asserting different versions of the Roman inheritance, structured the major political conflict of the medieval west for centuries.
What Charlemagne’s coronation most clearly demonstrates is the persistence of Rome as a political and cultural category in the centuries after the empire’s institutional collapse. The barbarian kings who followed Roman emperors in the western provinces did not abandon the Roman framework; they worked within it, claimed its legitimacy, adopted its vocabulary, and used its institutional remnants for their own purposes. The Pope who crowned Charlemagne was operating in a building — St. Peter’s — that Constantine had built, in a city — Rome — that still defined itself by its ancient identity, within a church that wrote in Latin and whose organizational structure reflected its origins in a Roman provincial society. Rome as an institution was gone; Rome as a framework of meaning was not.
The lesson is about the durability of cultural prestige and the ways in which political legitimacy requires connection to the past. Charlemagne needed to be Emperor of the Romans, not merely King of Everything Else, because the Roman title carried a weight that no alternative could match in the political culture of eighth-century Europe. The civilization that the western empire’s collapse had ended was so thoroughly embedded in the mental furniture of the successor cultures that even those who had never lived under it, who were several generations removed from any family connection to it, organized their claims to authority in its terms. Rome was gone. Rome was everywhere.