Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich

of Hadrian’s death on Christmas Day, 795, the two were once more on excellent terms.
    It was just as well that they were, for the climax to the story was now rapidly approaching. The new Pope Leo III—not, of course, to be confused with the Byzantine emperor of the same name—could boast neither the birth nor the breeding of his predecessor. There is a theory that he may even have been of Arab stock. From the moment of his elevation he was the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of Hadrian’s family and friends, who had expected the papal throne to pass to one of themselves and were consequently determined to remove him. On April 25, 799, a group led by the late pope’s nephew actually attacked Leo in the course of a solemn procession from the Lateran to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. They failed in their original intention of blinding him and cutting out his tongue—mutilations which would have obliged him to resign the Papacy—but they left him unconscious in the street. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles’s court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome in November, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges leveled by his enemies, including simony, perjury, and adultery.
    Whether or not the pope was guilty of these charges was almost immaterial, though Charles certainly had his suspicions. There was another question, infinitely more important: by whom could he possibly be tried? Who, after all, was qualified to pass judgment on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances the answer given by some would have been the emperor at Constantinople, but the imperial throne was at that time occupied by Irene. That Irene was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, also immaterial; it was enough that she was a woman. The female sex was known to be incapable of governing and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from even attempting to do so. As far as Western Europe was concerned, the Throne of the Emperors was vacant; Irene’s claim to it was merely an additional proof, if any were needed, of the degradation into which the so-called Roman Empire had fallen.
    By the time he himself reached Rome in November 800, Charles had been firmly reminded by his chief adviser, the Englishman Alcuin of York, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgment over the successor of St. Peter, but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted Christendom lacked not only an emperor but a pope as well, and he was determined to clear Leo’s name. Obviously anything resembling a trial was out of the question; but on December 23, at the high altar, the pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges leveled against him—and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head.
    CHARLES HAD RECEIVED , as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title; the imperial crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; for it meant that, after more than four hundred years, there was once again an emperor in western Europe. There remains the question of why the pope acted as he did. Not, certainly, to engineer a deliberate split in the Roman Empire, still less to bring about two rival empires where one had been before. There was, so far as he was concerned, no living emperor at that time. Very well, he would create one, and because the Byzantines had proved so unsatisfactory from every point of view—political, military, and doctrinal—he would select a Westerner, the one man who, by his wisdom and statesmanship and the vastness of his dominions, as well as by his prodigious physical