Carolingian Empire

Charlemagne's coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on the Frankish king's head, revived a Western imperial title that had lapsed more than three centuries earlier and bound it explicitly to papal endorsement. A history of the empire that grew from this act treats the coronation as less a single dramatic event than the culmination of a partnership decades in the making: Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short had already intervened militarily to protect the papacy from Lombard attack and had granted the pope territory in central Italy, the beginning of what became the Papal States, in exchange for a papal anointing of his own kingship in 754.

The 800 coronation made that alliance formal at the highest possible level, and it set a precedent that shaped Western political theology for centuries afterward: a Western emperor's legitimacy now ran, at least in the form the ceremony asserted, through papal approval rather than through Frankish military power alone. The precedent proved durable well past the Carolingian dynasty's own decline in the following century, since German kings from Otto I onward revived and claimed the same imperial title, crowned in Rome by the same office, founding what later became known as the Holy Roman Empire on a template Charlemagne's coronation had set.

Charlemagne's court sponsored a deliberate program of religious and textual reform, generally called the Carolingian correctio, aimed at correcting the corrupted Latin biblical and liturgical manuscripts then in circulation across Frankish territory and at standardizing church practice around the Roman rite rather than the varied local usages it was displacing. The program drew scholars from across Western Europe to the Carolingian court and to the monastic centers the dynasty patronized, producing more accurate texts of scripture and the church fathers and a new, more legible script, Carolingian minuscule, that spread through the copying houses the reform funded.

The same reign pursued religious uniformity by harsher means on its frontier. Charlemagne's decades long war against the pagan Saxons, beginning in 772 with the destruction of a sacred pillar the Saxons called the Irminsul, combined military conquest with compulsory Christianization, and surviving Carolingian capitularies record death as the prescribed penalty for Saxons who refused baptism or who continued pagan sacrifice after their territory's submission. A history of the empire that emerged from this reign treats the Saxon wars as the harsher complement to the correctio's scholarly reform: one Carolingian program corrected texts inside an already Christian realm, the other imposed Christianity by force at its edge.