Charlemagne for help against Desiderius of the Lombards. The campaign in the winter of 773-4 was short and decisive. Desiderius was exiled, and Charlemagne, 'king of the Franks', added 'and of the Lombards' to his title; later he appointed his son Pippin as king of Italy. But popes were still not free of all their enemies. In 799 Leo III was ambushed by a rival party of Roman aristocrats, who tried to gouge out his eyes and cut off his tongue. Leo fled to Charlemagne, who was at Paderborn preparing for another war against the Saxons. Charlemagne ordered Leo III to be restored, and later in the year 800 came to Rome himself. On Christmas Day, in St Peter's, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans.
Probably no event in medieval history has occasioned more scholarly comment, to less effect. Contemporary accounts of the event differ. We do not know if the coronation had been planned beforehand by Charlemagne, or whether it was a plot of Leo's to bind the king of the Franks closer to the Roman cause. Who were the 'Romans' of whom Charlemagne was to be the emperor, the inhabitants of Rome, or those of the papal states (Romagna)? Was it only afterwards that Charlemagne and his clerics began to think of it as a 'restoration of the Roman Empire', or was that inherent in his acclamation as Augustus in St Peter's? Is it relevant that even before the coronation the former head of the palace school at Aachen, Alcuin of York, had been talking in terms of Charlemagne's imperium or that Alcuin had written to Charlemagne reminding him that the Empress Irene's deposition in 797 of the legitimate emperor in Constantinople had upset the world order? The usefulness of the imperial coronation from Charlemagne's viewpoint may have been that it gave him, who ruled as king and duke over a wide variety of realms, a simple and awe-inspiring title, and one that all were free to interpret as they chose. It would be interesting to know more about how contemporaries regarded it, like Irish kings, who, according to Einhard, 'never addressed him as anything but their lord, and called themselves his slaves and subjects', or the Northumbrians, whose rightful king Charlemagne and the papal envoy were somehow able to restore to power. The emperor
-95-