The last history post for a while, honest! We’ll be back to doing books next week. But can’t you just feel all the character you’ve built learning all this history?
Charles the Great. Karolus Magnus. Charlemagne. Around 800 AD, he would be the last of our three wannabe reunifiers to attempt to recreate the Western Roman Empire. He had the right pedigree for it; his grandfather, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, is often credited with stopping the Islamic invasion of Christendom through Spain in a major battle.
Charlemagne was the leader of the Franks in Northern Europe, and was called to Italy to help defend the Papal state from the Lombards in the North of Italy. He did so, incidentally conquering the Lombards and most of Western Europe.
Having conquered the territory, however, he still needed a way to show he was emperor. The Catholic Church was respected, but it was reluctant to pronounce anyone emperor, since emperors were seen as the chosen of God and in some sense even outranked Popes. For some reason Popes weren’t wild about that. In 799 AD, however, an opportunity arose. The pope at the time, Leo III, was accused of various crimes, imprisoned, and barely escaped. After a meeting with Charlemagne, however, he was sent back with troops enough to protect him and ensure his authority. A year later, Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Leo III. Interpretation is left to the reader.
Even Charlemagne’s empire, however, would last only a century. Why? Heather argues that without Roman bureaucracy, a new Empire was impossible. The Roman Empire worked because local nobility wanted to become part of the imperial bureaucracy; that’s where power and influence was, but revenues still flowed to the Emperor. The Carolingian Empire, on the other hand, used gifts to buy the loyalty of nobles, often of land and the associated tax revenues. With the loss of the tax base, combined with the decreased agriculture productivity across Western Europe, emperors weren’t much wealthier than their nobles, and so nobles would rebel or support rival claimants to the throne, carving the empire up. This problem was only exacerbated as the Vikings attacked from the North, since the presence of a highly mobile attacking force meant even more resources had to be devolved to local areas, which would in turn feel less loyalty to the central power. The result was many smaller kingdoms, not one large empire.
It’s a difficulty all Empires face; devolving enough power to make regions able to solve their own problems, without giving them enough to be independent. In a time when it could take a month for a message to cross Europe, the problem was even worse, but its remnants remain in debates of decentralization and state power in the UK and the US.
And so ends our week and a half of history: back to book reviews!