Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich Page B

degradation and penury. Sooner or later—probably sooner—a coup d’état was inevitable. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival, an adventurer, and a heretic; if he was as uneducated as reports suggested, she would probably be able to manipulate him as easily as she had manipulated her late husband and her unfortunate son. Meanwhile in marrying him she would preserve the unity of the empire and—in her eyes far more important—her own skin.
    There were other attractions, too. The proposal offered an opportunity to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the imperial court. Though twenty-two years a widow—during which time she had lived surrounded by women and eunuchs—Irene was probably still in her early fifties, perhaps even younger: what could be more natural than that she should look favorably on the prospect of a new husband at last—particularly one rumored to be tall and outstandingly handsome, a superb hunter with a fine singing voice and flashing blue eyes? But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank in his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his name except by stenciling it through a gold plate, just as Theodoric the Ostrogoth had done three centuries before. On the last day of October 802 Irene was arrested, deposed, and sent into exile; a year later she was dead.
    If Charles had married Irene … the speculation is irresistible, even though, like all such speculations, ultimately sterile—would the West have taken over the East or vice versa? Charles would certainly not for a second have considered living in Constantinople; in theory, at any rate, the capital would have moved back to the West. But would the Byzantines have accepted such a state of affairs? It seems most unlikely. A far more probable scenario is that they would have declared Irene deposed and would have crowned a new emperor in her place—just as, in fact, they did—effectively challenging Charles to do something about it; and that he, much as he might have wished to retaliate, would have been unable to do so. The distances were too great, the lines of communication too long. He would have been in a humiliating position, indeed, and powerless to extricate himself. He might never even have acquired the name of Charlemagne. And who in any case was to know that within a few years of his death his own, Western, Empire would effectively crumble away? How lucky he was that the Byzantines took their strong line then rather than later, and that Frankish emperor and Greek empress never came together after all.
    POPE LEO III was an unremarkable man; it is one of the ironies of history that he should have been responsible for one of the most momentous acts ever performed by a pope. He had worked his way up through the hierarchy from relatively humble beginnings, and he remained essentially a simple man, for whom the coronation of Charlemagne meant a simple division of responsibilities. The emperor would wield the sword; the pope would fight for the faith, protecting it and extending it wherever possible, and would provide the spiritual guidance for his entire flock, the emperor included.
    All would have been well if Charles could only have seen things in the same way. He had already made a moderately disastrous intervention in the iconoclast debate; in 810 he involved himself yet again in theological matters, this time over another old warhorse, the filioque clause. The original Creed determined by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople had held that the Holy Ghost “proceeded from the Father”; to this, from the sixth century on, the Western Church had added the word filioque , “and the Son.” By Charles’s time this addition was generally adopted throughout the Frankish empire, and in 809 it was formally endorsed by the Council of Aachen, his own