strategies to win control, including forced baptisms, mass executions and deportations,
and settlement of Franks in the area.
The large area under Charlemagne’s authority was tied socially to the royal power
through the system of benefices, lifetime grants to nobles of lands in different parts of the
realm in return for oaths of vassalage and services to the monarch, particularly military
service. As under earlier Frankish kings, administration still operated primarily at the
local level. The main instrument of local government during Charlemagne’s reign was
the count, who within his county exercised the absolute power of the royal ban on the
king’s behalf. But local government was linked to the central administration by the
annual assemblies of the most powerful aristocrats and by the missi dominici, magnates
selected as the king’s representatives who undertook for him regular tours of inspection
throughout the kingdom. One method used to instruct the missi in their duties as well as
to promulgate new legislation involved documents known as capitularies, which issued
from Charlemagne’s court at a rate far surpassing anything seen under earlier Frankish
rulers. Legislative authority, however, continued to rest with the king’s oral
pronouncement and was based on the royal ban, not on the capitularies.
Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day
800, in St. Peter’s, Rome. Whether the papal or the Frankish court instigated the move, it
is clear that for some years previously Carolingian churchmen, such as Alcuin, had been
developing a concept of Charlemagne’s role as the successor to the first Christian
emperor, Constantine I, and the leader of a new Christian-Roman empire in the West.
The decision to bestow the imperial title on Charles was inspired by such thinking and, in
Rome, by the political difficulties of the pope, threatened by hostile factions within Rome
that sought his deposition.
The imperial coronation testified not only to Charlemagne’s success at increasing the
territory under his authority but also to his work on behalf of the church. Ecclesiastical
reform was a major subject of several capitularies issued before 800, among them the
Admonitio generalis (789) and the Capitulary of the Council of Frankfurt (794). In
addition to the efforts in these documents to regulate the lives of clergy, monks, and
female religious, to reform the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to ensure that the clergy knew the
basic articles of the Christian faith, and to provide guidelines for the religious conduct of
the laity, certain of the capitulary decrees and the very proliferation of such texts testify
to a new drive, encouraged by Charlemagne, to make the written word the keystone of his
administration. That drive—despite the problems that Charlemagne himself encountered
in his own efforts to learn to write, according to his biographer, Einhard—built upon, but
vastly exceeded in scope, anything under Charles’s father, Pepin III. The degree to which
Charlemagne and his churchmen perceived mastery of written language as the hallmark
of his court is manifested in the Libri Carolini, completed in 793. Encompassing 228
pages in the current printed edition, this massive treatise, in which Charlemagne is
presented as the one who speaks, denounces the Byzantine empire for its inferiority to the
Carolingians on a host of issues; but most fundamentally, it rebukes the eastern
government for its failure to understand Scripture, because of the Greeks’ inability to
match the Carolingians in their command of the written word.
The importance that Charlemagne and his court attached to the skills relating to
written language fueled the artistic and intellectual “renaissance” that occurred during his
reign, again beginning even before his imperial coronation. The prose writings and poetry
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