Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

Though it was not yet a century old, the Frankish kingdom already had an illustrious history. Its founder, Charles “the Hammer” Martel, had stopped the Muslims at the battle of Tours, permanently turning the tide of the formerly irresistible Islamic advance into western Europe. His son Pépin the Short had come to the rescue of the pope while the Byzantines had been busy fighting over iconoclasm and was personally crowned and rewarded with the rank of patrician by the grateful pontiff. It was with Pépin’s illustrious son, however, that the kingdom of the Franks really came into its own.

For someone who was known to history by the nickname “the Short,” Pépin had a remarkably tall son. Named Charles like his grandfather, he stood nearly six-foot-four, and he had a personality as large and dominating as his frame. By the year 800, he had transformed the relatively minor kingdom he inherited into the most powerful state of western Europe, an empire unparalleled in the West since the days of ancient Rome. After crossing the Alps at the pope’s request, Charles the Great—or Charlemagne, as he was soon to be known—descended on Italy in December of the year 800 and testified on Leo’s behalf. The pope swore on the Gospels that he was innocent, and with the looming figure of the Frankish king behind him, the assembled clergy accepted his word. Two days later, while Charlemagne was kneeling at the Christmas Mass, Leo lifted a jeweled crown from the altar and placed it on his head, declaring to the startled assembly that Charlemagne was now a “Holy Roman Emperor”—adding for good measure that he was descended from the biblical kings of Israel. Shock waves rippled through the electrified crowd. After four hundred years in abeyance, an emperor had returned to the West.

Life in Dark Ages Europe was all too often brutish and short, but the inheritors of the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire were fully conscious that it hadn’t always been so. The white marble ruins of ancient Rome were sprinkled from Britain to Sicily, constant reminders of a time before the light of learning had given way to darkness. They longed for the day that the empire would rise again, phoenixlike, from its own ashes and restore the proper order to the world. Now, on Christmas day at the dawn of the ninth century, Pope Leo had declared that that day had come.

The coronation was breathtaking in its presumption. By placing the crown on Charlemagne’s head, Leo was implying that the true crown of the Roman Empire was his alone to give—and what he could make, he could unmake as well.^* The church, Pope Leo was firmly declaring, was a higher authority than the state. Such statements struck at the very heart of Byzantine authority, for if Charlemagne was the true Roman emperor, than obviously Irene—or anyone else on the Byzantine throne—was not. At a stroke, Leo had created a rival empire that not only dared to claim equality with the ancient line of the Caesars, but also declared Constantinople’s throne to be full of impostors, mere pretenders to the throne of Augustus.

Leo, of course, didn’t have the slightest authority to create a new emperor, but to bolster his position he trotted out what was surely the most shameful forgery of the Middle Ages—the “Donation of Constantine.”† According to this document, Pope Sylvester had miraculously cured the emperor Constantine of leprosy, and the grateful emperor had “retired” to Byzantium and given the pope authority over the Western Empire and the ability to bestow the crown on whomever he chose. The Latin it was composed in was anachronistic and referred to events that had taken place after it was supposedly written, but education in the West had sunk so low that it was used to bolster papal claims for the next six hundred years.

The news of the coronation was greeted with horror in Constantinople. Just as there was one God in heaven, there was only one Roman Empire and only one emperor here on earth. Irene may not have been a satisfactory ruler, but that didn’t mean an illiterate barbarian could claim equality with her throne. The blasphemous coronation was an affront to the correct world order, and that the pope had performed the ceremony made the betrayal that much worse.

Tempers were not improved when early the next year the ambassadors of this boorish Frank arrived in Constantinople with a startling marriage proposal, offering their monarch’s hand to Irene. The empire would again be united under a single hand, they said, and Irene could rule like a new Theodora over both the East and the West. To the shocked Byzantine courtiers, the only thing more insulting than the arrogance of the barbarian envoys was the fact that Irene actually appeared to be seriously considering their proposal. Now almost universally hated in her own domains, she felt the walls closing in, and this seemed like the perfect escape.