Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich Page A

stature, stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. But if Leo conferred a great honor on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and scepter, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, even revolutionary. No pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege—not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the emperor whom he had created.
    Historians have long argued whether the imperial coronation had been jointly planned by Leo and Charles or whether, as appeared at the time, the King of the Franks was taken by surprise. His first biographer, Einhard, quotes him as claiming that he would not have set foot in the basilica had he had any idea of the pope’s intentions. True, he had never shown the faintest interest in claiming imperial status, and for the rest of his life he continued to style himself Rex Francorum et Langobardorum. Nor, clearly, would he have wished to owe any obligation to the pope. On the other hand, once the thought of the coronation had occurred to Leo, is it really conceivable that he would not have suggested it in advance to Charles, even if only as a simple courtesy? As for Charles himself, would not the advantages of the imperial title have easily outweighed the drawbacks? We are forced to the conclusion that pope and emperor had already discussed the idea at length, probably at Paderborn, and that Einhard’s statement—together with Charles’s own later protestations—was disingenuously designed to deflect the criticism that he was obviously bound to incur.
    Of one thing we can be virtually certain: that neither Leo nor Charles would have touched the crown had there been at the time a male Emperor of Byzantium. The concept of two simultaneous emperors would have been unthinkable; it was the presence of a woman on the Byzantine throne that put an utterly different complexion on the matter. At the same time, that very fact gave Charles a further important reason to accept the crown that he was offered: for now, at this one critical moment of history, he recognized an opportunity that might never be repeated. Irene, for all her faults, remained a marriageable widow—and, by all accounts, a remarkably attractive one. If he could but persuade her to become his wife, all the imperial territories of East and West would be reunited under a single crown: his own.
    The reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles’s coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Greek it was an act not only of breathtaking arrogance but also of sacrilege. The Byzantine Empire was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand, the Roman power; on the other, the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and Equal of the Apostles, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed that, just as there was only one God in Heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler here on Earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.
    Moreover, unlike the princes of the West, the Byzantines had no Salic Law. However much they might detest their empress and even attempt to depose her, they never questioned her right to occupy the imperial throne. So much the greater, therefore, was their anxiety when, early in 802, Charles’s ambassadors arrived in Constantinople, and so much the greater still when they realized that Irene, far from being insulted by the very idea of marriage with an illiterate barbarian—for Charles, though he could read a little, made no secret of his inability to write—appeared on the contrary to be intrigued, gratified, and disposed in principle to accept.
    Her reasons are not hard to understand. Her subjects loathed her; her exchequer was empty. She had reduced her empire to