FIG. 1-1 Europe in the eighth century, shortly before the earliest notations of Christian chant.
Thus, when in 773 Desiderius, a later Lombard king, made renewed forays against Adrian I, a later
pope, it was a foregone conclusion that Pepin’s son and successor Charles I, known as Charlemagne
(“Charles the Great”), would intervene. Charlemagne did even better than his father, defeating the
Lombards in Italy on their own ground and incorporating their kingdom into his own. After yet another
intervention, this time on behalf of Adrian’s successor, Pope (later Saint) Leo III, Charlemagne entered
Rome in triumph and was crowned by Leo on Christmas Day,800 CE, as temporal ruler (with Leo as
spiritual ruler) of the reconstituted Western Roman Empire. This date is traditionally said to inaugurate
the so-called “Holy Roman Empire,” which lasted—in name, anyway—until the early nineteenth century.
(The actual title Holy Roman Emperor was first assumed by Otto I, crowned in 962.)
THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE
The nexus of imperial and papal authority thus achieved ushered in a short period comparable to the pax
romana (“Roman peace”) of late antiquity, in which the existence of an invincible and unchallengeable
state brought about an era of relative political stability in Europe. Until the partition of Charlemagne’s
Empire in 843, the only significant changes in the map of Europe were those that marked the Empire’s
expansion, which reached a peak around 830. The period from the 780s, when Charlemagne finally
gained the upper hand in a protracted, savage war with the pagan Saxons to the east, into the reign of his