Free Millenium by Tom Holland Page B

the jaws of all his travails. Two days after the Pope's acquittal, Charlemagne attended Christmas Mass in the shrine of St Peter in the Vatican. He did so humbly, without any insignia of royalty, praying on his knees. As he rose, however, Leo stepped forward into the golden light cast by the altar candles, and placed a crown on his bare head. Simultaneously, the whole cathedral echoed to the ecstatic cries of the congregation, who hailed the Frankish king as 'Augustus' - the honorific of the ancient Caesars. Leo, never knowingly less than dramatic, then prostrated himself before Charlemagne's feet, head down, arms outstretched. By venerable tradition, such obeisance had properly been performed only for one man: the emperor in Constantinople.
    But now, following the events of that momentous Christmas Day, the West once again had an emperor of its own.
    And it was the Pope, and no one else, who had granted him his crown.
     
    The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
     
     
    So it was that Charlemagne came to rule as a second Constantine. The emperor's joy was not entirely unconfined. Though he was content to acknowledge the hand of God in his elevation, he was reluctant, as was only natural, to admit that he might owe anything to the Bishop of Rome. The whole coronation, Charlemagne would later declare, had come as a surprise to him, a bolt from the blue. Indeed, 'he made it clear that he would not have entered the cathedral that day at all, although it was the very greatest of the festivals of the Church, if he had known in advance what the Pope was planning to do'. 47 Here he spoke, not as an emperor, but as a proudly Frankish king: disdainful of the customs of other peoples; reluctant even to set aside his native dress; pointedly unwilling, when in Rome, to do as the Romans did. While his new title was glamorous, Charlemagne refused to be dizzied by it. He never forgot where his power base lay. He certainly had no intention of alienating his own people by appearing to be in hock to a foreign bishop.
    Cause enough, then, for the new emperor to deny all foreknowl­edge of his coronation. Yet still an aura of mystery lingered around the ceremony. Had Charlemagne truly been as ignorant of Leo's plans as he subsequently claimed to be, then it was all the more eerie a coinci­dence that he should have been in Rome, and in St Peter's, on the very morning that he was. Eight hundred years had passed to the day since the birth of the Son of Man: an anniversary of which Charlemagne and his advisers would have been perfectly aware. Over the preceding decades, the great programme of correctio had begun to embrace even the dimensions of time itself. Traditionally, just as popes had employed the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople on their documents,

     
     

    The Empire of the Franks and Charlemagne and his successors
    so other churchmen had derived dates from a bewildering array of starting points: the accession of their local ruler, perhaps, or an ancient persecution, or, most extravagantly, the creation of the world. Such confusion, however, to scholars sponsored by the Frankish king, was intolerable. A universal Christian order, such as Charlemagne was labouring to raise, required a universal chronology. How fortunate it was, then, that the perfect solution had lain conveniently ready to hand. The years preceding Charlemagne's accession to the Frankish throne had witnessed a momentous intellectual revolution. Monks both in Francia itself and in the British Isles, looking to calibrate the mysterious complexities of time, had found themselves arriving at a framework that was as practical as it was profound. From whose acces­sion date, if not that of some earthly emperor or king, were years to be numbered? The answer, once given, was obvious. Christ alone was the ruler of all mankind - and His reign had begun when He had first been born into the world. It was the Incarnation - that cosmos-shaking moment when the Divine had