Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (7 page)

PART I

Ideal

1

Two Swords

HOLY

The problems of defining the Empire are already apparent in the confusion over its title. For most of its existence it was simply ‘the Empire’. The words Holy, Roman and Empire were only combined as
Sacrum Romanum Imperium
in June 1180, and though used more frequently from 1254, they never appeared consistently in official documents.
¹
Nonetheless, all three terms formed core elements of the imperial ideal present from the Empire’s foundation. This chapter will consider each in turn, before investigating the Empire’s troubled relationship with the papacy.

The holy element was integral to the Empire’s primary purpose in providing a stable political order for all Christians and defending them against heretics and infidels. To this end, the emperor should act as chief advocate, or guardian, of the pope, who was the head of a single, universal Christian church. Since this was considered a divine mission, entrusted by God, it opened the possibility that the emperor and Empire were themselves sacred. Like the Roman and imperial elements, the holy character of the Empire was rooted in the later, Christian phase of the ancient Roman empire, rather than the pagan past of the first Caesars or the earlier Roman republic.

Christian Rome

After more than three centuries of persecuting Christians, Rome adopted Christianity as its sole, official religion in ad 391. This step partially desacralized the imperial office, since the singular Christian
God would not tolerate a rival. The emperor no longer considered himself divine and had to accept the church’s development as a separate institution throughout his empire. These changes were eased by the church’s adoption of a clerical hierarchy modelled on Roman imperial infrastructure. Christian bishops resided in the chief towns, exercising spiritual jurisdictions (dioceses) that generally matched the political boundaries of the empire’s provinces. Moreover, though no longer considered a god, the emperor retained a sacral role as mediator between heaven and earth. The
Pax Romanum
remained an imperial mission, but changed from providing an earthly paradise to advancing Christianity as the sole path to salvation.

The later Roman empire faced internal tensions and external pressures. Parts of the empire were already devolved to co-emperors after 284, and this resumed after a brief reunification under Constantine I, who revived the ancient Greek town of Byzantium as a new capital, immodestly dubbed Constantinople in the 330s. The split into eastern and western empires became permanent after 395. Both halves survived through accommodating invading warriors, especially the western empire, which absorbed successive waves of Germanic invaders, notably the Goths and, later, the Vandals. These poachers were turned into gamekeepers through the attractions of Roman culture and settled life. They abandoned raiding to serve as the empire’s border guards and became partly Romanized, including adopting forms of Christianity.

Their embrace of Rome was always conditional on the benefits of subordination outweighing the lure of independence. This balance tipped against the western empire during the fourth and fifth centuries. The western Gothic tribes, known as the Visigoths, established their own kingdom in former Roman Spain and southern Gaul in 395, and sacked the imperial capital only fifteen years later. The Franks – another tribe about which we will hear more shortly – assumed control of northern Gaul around 420 after 170 years of alternately attacking and serving the local Roman defenders.
²
Having seen off the Huns, a fresh set of armed migrants arriving in the mid-fifth century, the victorious Goths under Odovacar toppled the last western emperor, fittingly called Augustulus, or ‘Little Augustus’, in 476.

Only later was this regarded as the ‘fall of the Rome empire’. For contemporaries, Rome simply contracted to its eastern half based in Constantinople, which still regarded itself as a direct continuation of
ancient Rome, despite its much later distinctive label as the Byzantine empire. Nonetheless, the events of 476 were significant. The city of Rome was no longer capital of the known world, but a precarious outpost on the western periphery of an empire whose primary interests now lay in the Balkans, Holy Land and north Africa, and whose culture was predominantly Greek rather than Latin by the seventh century. Byzantium underwent periodic revivals, but was short of manpower, especially after costly wars against the Islamic Arabs, generally known as Saracens or Moors, who emerged as a new enemy as they overran Palestine and north Africa by 640.

Byzantium was obliged to secure Rome by relying on the Ostrogoths, another tribe displaced by the Huns’ eruption into central Europe in the fifth century. Following established practice, Byzantium offered status and legitimacy in return for political subordination and military service. The Ostrogoth leader, Theodoric, had been raised in Constantinople and combined Romanized culture with the Gothic warrior ethos. Having defeated Odovacar, he was recognized as ruler of Italy by Byzantium in 497. Cooperation broke down during the reign of Emperor Justinian, who capitalized on his temporary reconquest of north Africa to try to assert more direct control over Italy. The resulting Gothic War (535–62) saw the eventual defeat of the Ostrogoths and the establishment of a permanent Byzantine presence in Italy. Known as the Exarchate, this had its political and military base at Ravenna in the north, with the rest of the peninsula divided into provinces, each under a military commander called a
dux
– the origins of both the word ‘duke’ and the title
duce
taken by Benito Mussolini.

Success proved temporary as the Lombards, another Gothic tribe that had served as Byzantine auxiliaries in the recent war, launched their own invasion of Italy in 568. Unlike Odovacar’s Goths, they failed to take Rome, or the new Byzantine outpost at Ravenna, but nonetheless established their own kingdom based initially in Milan, and then Pavia from 616.
³
Italy was now split in three. The invaders’ new kingdom of Langobardia extended along the Po valley, giving that region its modern name of Lombardy. Lombard kings exercised only loose control over southern Italy, which was largely organized as the separate Lombard duchy of Benevento. The remainder was known as the Romagna, or ‘Roman’ territory belonging to Byzantium, and surviving today as the name of the region around Ravenna.

The Emergence of the Papacy

A fourth political factor emerged with the growing influence of the papacy, based in Rome. The popes traced their origins as the church’s ‘father’ (
papa
) through ‘Apostolic Succession’ from St Peter, though they were only really free to function once ancient Rome tolerated Christianity. Rome was only one of five primary Christian centres, but the loss of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria to the Arabs (638–42) increased its importance alongside Constantinople. Additional prestige derived from Rome’s own continued importance as an imperial city, and its emotional and spiritual significance in the development of early Christianity. Beginning with the execution of St Peter and St Paul in the year 64, all 30 Roman bishops prior to Constantine’s toleration Edict of Milan (313) were subsequently recognized as saints and claimed as martyrs by the church.
⁴

It was important for the later Holy Roman Empire that the Roman papacy developed differently to the eastern patriarchate in Constantinople. Byzantium retained the centralized imperial structure, with its culture of hierarchical subordination and written administration deriving directly from ancient Rome. This imparted two characteristics largely absent in the early western church. The patriarch remained subordinate to the emperor, while the desire to fix theology in written statements made doctrinal differences much more pronounced than those in the western church, which was both more decentralized and less concerned with communication in writing. The eastern church distanced itself from the version of Christianity known as Arianism, which retained a strong following amongst the Lombards, while a dispute over the human and divine aspects of Christ’s nature had forced the emergence of a separate Coptic church in Syria and Egypt when these were still Byzantine provinces.

The absence of durable imperial structures in the west deprived the Roman popes of the strong political backing afforded the eastern patriarch. Papal authority relied on asserting moral rather than direct administrative leadership of the western church, which remained a loose agglomeration of dioceses and churches. Since the fifth century, popes used the argument of Apostolic Succession to claim the right to pronounce on doctrine without reference to any political authority. This was extended to the right to judge whether the candidates chosen
by the various Christian Gothic kings and nobles were suitable to become bishops or archbishops. Authority was symbolized through the practice of investiture developed in the seventh century: no archbishop could take office without receiving a special vestment known as the
pallium
from the pope. In turn, popes made archbishops responsible for checking the credentials of bishops within their archdiocese, thus extending papal influence indirectly deeper into the localities. Wynfrith, an Anglo-Saxon monk later known as St Boniface, who was the first archbishop of Mainz and a key figure in the Empire’s church history, was given cloth that had lain across St Peter’s tomb as his
pallium
in 752. The message was clear: opposing the pope was equated with disobeying St Peter.

The early medieval popes would have preferred a strong emperor who could protect them and allow them to pursue their spiritual mission. Rome was one of the military duchies established in Italy after the Gothic War, but Byzantine power was flickering, while Byzantium had to deal with its own practical problems. As bishops of Rome, popes were further bound to local society through canon law, the as yet largely uncodified customs governing the management of the church and its personnel. Bishops were to be elected by the clergy and inhabitants of their diocese. Local young men tended to be preferred: 13 of the 15 popes in the century before 654 were Romans who often had an uncomfortable relationship with their city’s clans, or leading families, who held much of local wealth and power. Gregory I, the most important of these popes, hailed from a family of Roman senators and pushed the papacy into the void left by contracting Byzantine power. Within a century, his successors had assumed ducal authority across the city and its hinterland, known as St Peter’s Patrimonium (
Patrimonium Petri
), a coastal strip either side of the Tiber.
⁵
Over time, this territory became the material basis for papal claims to supremacy over the western church. Popes steadily appropriated the symbols and political claims of Byzantine emperors, whilst simultaneously deliberately obscuring or minimizing their continued ties to Constantinople. For example, by the late eighth century, popes issued their own coins and dated their pontificates like the reigns of kings.
⁶
Meanwhile, their spiritual influence grew while Byzantine political authority contracted. Gregory I and his successors sent missionaries to Christianize Britain and Germany, areas long since outside any Roman imperial orbit.

However, the popes did not follow seventh-century Islamic leaders in establishing their own imperial state. Latin Christianity alone proved insufficient to reunite the kingdoms and principalities emerging from the former western Roman empire. The papacy still needed a protector, but Byzantium proved increasingly unhelpful. Constans II made the last serious attempt to eject the Lombards from southern Italy in 662–8, and was the last Byzantine emperor to visit Rome, but he spent his time transferring ancient treasures to Constantinople. Friction increased after 717 through Byzantine tax demands and interference in western Christian practices. The Lombards seized the opportunity to capture Ravenna in 751, essentially extinguishing Byzantine influence. The pope was left alone facing the Lombards, who now claimed former Byzantine rights, including secular jurisdiction over Rome and thus the papacy.

The Franks

The pope looked north-west to the Franks as alternative protectors. Like many of the peoples of post-Roman western Europe, the Franks had emerged as a tribal confederacy; in their case in the Weser-Rhine area of north-western Germany known then as Austrasia and later, loosely, as Franconia. Unlike their southern neighbours, the Alamanni of Swabia, the Franks assimilated much from Rome as they spread westwards into Gaul after 250.
⁷
By 500 they controlled all Gaul under their great warrior, Clovis, who united all the Frankish tribes and was proclaimed king. Clovis accepted baptism directly into the Roman church, rather than the usual Germanic choice of Arianism, while his successors cooperated with papal missionaries, notably St Boniface’s activities on the eastern and northern fringes of their realm.

These factors probably influenced the pope’s choice, as did the extent and proximity of the Frankish realm. By 750 it extended beyond Gaul and north-western Germany to include Swabia, and – crucially – Burgundy, which then encompassed western Switzerland and south-east France, and so controlled access over the Alps into Lombardy. These huge territories, known as Francia, were ruled by the Merovingian family descended from Clovis. Unfairly criticized by later French historians as
les rois fainéants
(‘the do-nothing kings’), the Merovingians had achieved much, but they were suffering from inbreeding and the
Frankish custom of partitioning property amongst sons, which led to repeated civil wars during the seventh and early eighth centuries. Power slipped to what became known as the Carolingian family, which held the office of ‘mayor of the palace’ controlling the royal household.
⁸