the king the third degree in the scale of earthly dignities. He sent to Charles from Tours before his
coronation a splendid Bible with the inscription: Ad splendorem imperialis potentiae.^251
On his return to France Charles compelled all his subjects to take a new oath to him as
"Caesar." He assumed the full title "Serenssimus Augustus a Deo coronatus, magnus et pacificus
imperator, Romanum gubernans imperium, qui et per misericordiam Dei rex Francorum et
Longobardorum."
Significance of the Act.
The act of coronation was on the part of the pope a final declaration of independence and
self-emancipation against the Greek emperor, as the legal ruler of Rome. Charles seems to have
felt this, and hence he proposed to unite the two empires by marrying Irene, who had put her son
to death and usurped the Greek crown (797). But the same rebellion had been virtually committed
before by the pope in sending the keys of the city to Pepin, and by the French king in accepting
this token of temporal sovereignty. Public opinion justified the act on the principle that might makes
right. The Greek emperor, being unable to maintain his power in Italy and to defend his own subjects,
first against the Lombards and then against the Franks, had virtually forfeited his claim.
For the West the event was the re-establishment, on a Teutonic basis, of the old Roman
empire, which henceforth, together with the papacy, controlled the history of the middle ages. The
pope and the emperor represented the highest dignity and power in church and state. But the pope
was the greater and more enduring power of the two. He continued, down to the Reformation, the
spiritual ruler of all Europe, and is to this day the ruler of an empire much vaster than that of ancient
Rome. He is, in the striking language of Hobbes, "the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting
crowned upon the grave thereof."
The Relation of the Pope and the Emperor.
What was the legal and actual relation between these two sovereignties, and the limits of
jurisdiction of each? This was the struggle of centuries. It involved many problems which could
only be settled in the course of events. It was easy enough to distinguish the two in theory by,
confining the pope to spiritual, and the emperor to temporal affairs. But on the theocratic theory
of the union of church and state the two will and must come into frequent conflict.
The pope, by voluntarily conferring the imperial crown upon Charles, might claim that the
empire was his gift, and that the right of crowning implied the right of discrowning. And this right
was exercised by popes at a later period, who wielded the secular as well as the spiritual sword and
absolved nations of their oath of allegiance. A mosaic picture in the triclinium of Leo III. in the
Lateran (from the ninth century) represents St. Peter in glory, bestowing upon Leo kneeling at his
right hand the priestly stole, and upon Charles kneeling at his left, the standard of Rome.^252 This
is the mediaeval hierarchical theory, which derives all power from God through Peter as the head
of the church. Gregory VII. compared the church to the sun, the state to the moon who derives her
light from the sun. The popes will always maintain the principle of the absolute supremacy of the
church over the state, and support or oppose a government—whether it be an empire or a kingdom
or a republic—according to the degree of its subserviency to the interests of the hierarchy. The
papal Syllabus of 1864 expresses the genuine spirit of the system in irreconcilable conflict with
(^251) But the date of the letter and the meaning of imperialis are not quite certain. See Rettberg, Kirchengesch. Deutschlands,
I. 430, and Baxmann, Politik der Päpste, I. 313 sqq.
(^252) The picture is reproduced in the works of Vétault and Stacke above quoted.