Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
On Monday, 25 December 800 AD — 1,224 years ago today — Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in Old Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, on Christmas Day. What meaning, if any, does this event have for us today, more than a millennium later? The historian Friedrich Heer (10 April 1916–18 September 1983) concluded his book Charlemagne and His World with the reflection that the empire of Charlemagne constituted the beginning of the middle ages:
“German historians of the nineteenth century liked to call Charlemagne ‘the Father of Europe’. It is not inappropriate. Charlemagne came to the throne among the ruins of Rome, in the lull before the last eddies of the Germanic migrations; his creation of an empire was the first event of the middle ages.”
Charlemagne’s coronation as the first event of the Middle Ages is a later periodization of the advent of the Middle Ages than many historians would postulate, but the spirit of Heer’s observation is that Charlemagne inaugurated a new stage in the history of Western civilization. On top of that, this new stage in the history of Western civilization made Europe central to that tradition, and therefore central to the unfolding historical process, whereas it had been peripheral to classical antiquity, when Europe was a colonial backwater. This is still relevant to us today, because this is the foundation of the world that we now inhabit.
This whole historical process of the emergence of a new stage in Western history was, of course, much more than merely the coronation of Charlemagne, which was only one brief event in the Carolingen empire, but it’s a symbolic event that we can use as a point of reference. So what is the meaning, if any, of Charlemagne being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 AD? And, if we can find a meaning in a particular event like this, can we find a meaning in a cluster or a sequence of related events, like the sequence of events that brought Charlemagne to Rome on Christmas Day of the year 800, and the sequence of events that followed after his coronation? And if we can find meaning in a cluster of related events, can we find a meaning in the totality of related events that constitute the whole of history? In other words, does history have a meaning?
Since I’ve been talking about philosophy of history for a year now, it seems appropriate to trot out one of the big questions in philosophy of history, and the meaning of history is the grand daddy of big questions in the philosophy of history. It is, moreover, a paradigmatic question from speculative, or substantive, or material of philosophy of history, as it has variously been called, which is to say, a philosophical inquiry into the actual historical process, rather than a narrowly epistemological inquiry into how we obtain knowledge of the historical process. Questions like this don’t get a lot of love these days, but, in the spirit of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, I’m going to stick my neck out on the problem of the meaning of history, if only tangentially and inconclusively.
The way I’ve initially framed the problem of meaning mirrors Fernand Braudel’s tripartite distinction among the history of the event, the conjuncture, and the longue durée. Charlemagne’s coronation taken in isolation belongs to the history of the event, and we recall that Braudel wrote that: “Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.” The coronation, then, can be taken as merely ephemeral, soon to settle back into darkness and oblivion. Only it didn’t. I said earlier that Charlemagne’s coronation is symbolic, and because it was and is symbolic, it stood out against the background of ephemeral events and was seen in relation to larger historical developments. This symbolic event took its pride of place within the Carolingen conjunction, and then in the longue durée of European history. Beyond the symbolism of a single event, the sequence of events immediately connected with Charlemagne’s coronation is an historical conjuncture. Braudel said that a conjuncture lasts about a generation, and Charlemagne’s career as leader of the Franks endured about a generation. We could even say that the Carolingen Empire only endured about a generation, so that the Carolingen Empire constituted an historical conjuncture — the Carolingen conjuncture.
When it comes to the longue durée we run into some problems. I could, with some justification, say that the entirety of Western civilization since the dark ages, about 1500 years or so of Western civilization, constitute the longue durée of which Charlemagne’s empire marks the beginning, as suggested in the quote from Friedrich Heer. I could also, with perhaps as much justification, limit the scope of the relevant longue durée to the Middle Ages, or even limit the relevant scope to the early Middle Ages only. The dark ages alone endured long enough to constitute a longue durée within history. All of these are periods of hundreds of years, so each could itself count as a longue durée, but all of them also fall far short of the totality of human history, and this interests me in a couple of ways.
Firstly, it interests me in the way I discussed scales of historical time in my episode on Fernand Braudel, extending the levels of historical time from Braudel’s three, to the six levels of time discussed by Steven J. Dick. While I have found Braudel’s tripartite distinction to be helpful, when we escalate the scale of time under consideration to planetary or cosmological scales of time, we should measure historical time in orders of magnitude. Secondly, it interests me in a way that has what I take to be important implications for the philosophy of history. One of the formulations we find time and again in philosophy of history, and especially in any discussion of speculative philosophy of history, is an appeal to the totality of history. We can find an example of this in W. H. Walsh’s classic, where he characterized philosophy of history during the period from Herder to Hegel such that:
“Its aim was to attain an understanding of the course of history as a whole; to show that, despite the many apparent anomalies and inconsequences it presented, history could be regarded as forming a unity embodying an overall plan…”
This is such a pervasive presupposition of both those working on speculative philosophy of history and those criticizing speculative philosophy of history that it seems to me to be long overdue to be called into question. I’ll return to this, but let’s get back to the events of Christmas Day 1,224 years ago. Here’s a description of the event by Heinrich von Fichtenau from his book The Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne:
“…on Christmas day of the year 800, the decisive act took place. In the church of St. Peter in Rome, pope Leo III placed a crown on the Frankish ruler’s head, and Charles was proclaimed emperor. The pope had recently been tortured and imprisoned by his enemies in his own capital. He had been obliged to defend himself against serious charges in a trial before Charles. The situation was hardly auspicious for an imperial coronation. Nevertheless the coronation was a moment of historical significance. Those members of the Roman nobility, who attended the ceremony, may well have thought that the Franks were hardly mature enough to enter into the heritage of the populus Romanus. But for the Franks themselves it meant the fulfilment of all the things that had been hinted at in the prologue of the Salian law: they were the chosen people, founded by God and ordained to rule Europe.”
The first thing we notice about this passage is that Fichtenau attributes many meanings to the crowning of Charlemagne, and these meanings are historically conditioned in a profound way. For example, Fichtenau uses the Latin phrase populus Romanus for “the Roman people.” I could say that this was a curious way for Fichtenau to frame the crowning of a Frankish king. What did the Frankish kings of Europe have to do with the Roman Empire? In my episode on Nikolay Danilevsky I noted that Danilevsky used the strange hyphenation of Romano-Germanic instead of referring to Western civilization, but there’s a precedent for this. Leopold von Ranke’s first book was Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, 1824), and it’s entirely possible that Danilevsky picked this up from Ranke. And, long before Ranke, but also long after Charlemagne, the political project that Charlemagne started would be known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
Of course, the event at issue is Charlemagne being crowned Holy Roman emperor, which has the twin meanings that Charlemagne is taking on the mantle of the Roman empire, and he is doing so as the king of the Franks, and these meanings in turn have the additional meanings that the Franks are being brought into the fold of the populous Romanus and that the Franks are now the leading people within this fold, on the cutting edge of history, taking up the torch put down centuries before by the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and carrying it forward into a new age. That’s a lot of meanings already attached to Charlemagne’s coronation, and I’m only getting started.
The primary meaning Fichtenau finds in the event, what he calls its historical significance, is its function as the fulfillment of the destiny of the Frankish people, but he also finds it meaningful that the pope had suffered at the hands of his enemies prior to this, that some who attended the event thought that the Franks were not yet ready to the assume the mantle of the rulership of Europe. Some but not all of these meanings were already present in the earlier accounts of Charlemagne’s coronation. Einhard, a contemporary of Charlemagne who wrote an account of Charlemagne’s life, the Vita Karoli Magni, described the coronation thus:
“He therefore came to Rome to restore the condition of the church, which was terribly disturbed, and spent the whole of the winter there. It was then that he received the title of Emperor and Augustus, which he so disliked at first that he affirmed that he would not have entered the church on that day — though it was the chief festival of the church — if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope. But when he had taken the title he bore very quietly the hostility that it caused and the indignation of the Roman emperors. He conquered their ill-feeling by his magnanimity, in which, doubtless, he far excelled them, and sent frequent embassies to them, and called them his brothers.”
In the generation after Charlemange, Notker the Stammerer (believed to be the same individual as that referred to as the Monk of St. Gall) also wrote an account that mentions the coronation:
“As Charles stayed in Rome for a few days, the bishop of the apostolic see called together all who would come from the neighbouring districts and then, in their presence and in the presence of all the knights of the unconquered Charles, he declared him to be Emperor and Defender of the Roman Church. Now Charles had no guess of what was coming; and, though he could not refuse what seemed to have been divinely preordained for him, nevertheless he received his new title with no show of thankfulness. For first he thought that the Greeks would be fired by greater envy than ever and would plan some harm against the kingdom of the Franks; or at least would take greater precautions against a possible sudden attack of Charles to subdue their kingdom, and add it to his own empire.”
Notker thus repeats Einhard’s claim about Charlemagne’s reluctance to be crowned emperor, but he places this reluctance in a wider context of divine preordination and the human, all-too-human political context of the coronation. If the actual coronation was anything like the paintings we have of it, which all date from hundreds of years after the fact, there could have been nothing secretive or spontaneous about it. The paintings show elaborate ceremonial and regalia which would have required considerable preparation and the cooperation of Charlemagne, who could not then have seriously maintained that he didn’t know about Leo III’s plan or his role in the plan. It’s not too difficult to imagine ways that preparations might have been made on the QT so it could have been sprung on Charlemagne unawares, or maybe it was downplayed before the fact and turned into something more than Charlemagne expected. I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall and to have seen it as it happened.
Earlier I asked whether, if we found an event meaningful, the sequence of events leading up to that event and the sequence of events following that event, could also be found to be meaningful. We can find support for a wider meaning of the sequence of events implicated in Charlemagne’s coronation. Fichtenau’s account is predicated upon the coronation as the culmination of a sequence of events, giving to history both directionality derived from a kind of teleology, and the coherence that follows from clear directionality. Both Einhard’s and Notker’s accounts could be assimilated to either providential or political history, either or both of which place Charlemagne in a sequence of meaningful events, which, taken together, constitute the meaning of the Carolingen conjuncture. Fichtenau goes beyond this and places the Carolingen conjuncture within the longue durée of medieval civilization.
Could any of this have been foreseen at the time? Was the office of Holy Roman Emperor meaningful at the time when Charlemagne was crowned? If we maintain that the crowning of Charlemagne created the office of Holy Roman Emperor, and in fact created the Holy Roman Empire, then the position didn’t previously exist, so it couldn’t have been meaningful. Obviously, though, the position was modeled both on the ancient Roman emperors and the then contemporaneous emperor of the eastern Empire. When Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer in 476 AD, 324 years before Charlemagne’s coronation, the regalia of the Western emperor was sent to the remaining eastern emperor in Constantinople, so it could be argued that it was the eastern emperor who properly had the right to bestow this regalia to a new representative of the empire in the west, should that ever again become necessary or desirable.
One of the reasons Leo III seemed to have been ready to crown Charlemagne was his interest in promoting Charlemagne as a nearby power to protect him from Constantinople. Previous popes had played the great game of their age by playing off the Frankish ruler against the imperial house in Constantinople, but Leo III hadn’t been as skillful and found himself in a bad position. One of the many meanings of Charlemagne’s coronation was the return of the western Roman emperor and the revival of Roman institutions. The Pope could crown an emperor, but he couldn’t wave a wand and resurrect defunct Roman institutions, except insofar as the church itself was a Roman institution, and the recovery of the church from its Dark Age nadir was, in a sense, a recovery of Roman institutions.
It’s clear that there are many meanings of Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor, many meanings of the sequence of events of which Charlemagne’s coronation is an integral part, and many meanings that can be imposed upon the totality of human history as a whole. Instead of asking the obvious question of which of these many meanings, if any, is the true meaning, let’s take a different approach. Is there any limit to the number of meanings that can be associated with an event, with a sequence of events, or with the totality of history? Can there be an infinitude of meanings of history? Even though many meanings of history have been suggested, these attributions of meaning are still in fact finite, though an idealized account might attribute an infinitude of meanings to a given event.
We can also ask what the upper and lower bounds of meanings are for history. Presumably, the lower bound is zero, if history is meaningless, and the upper bound is infinity. We can rule out the null scenario in which there is no meaning of history. We’ve already seen that there are many meanings of Charlemagne’s coronation and of the larger historical wholes of which the coronation is a part. Likewise, we can rule out any arbitrarily low number of meanings of history. This leaves us with some arbitrarily large number of historical meanings, up to an infinitude of meanings. It’s entirely possible that a given event might have an infinitude of meanings associated with it, intrinsically so, and not as the result of confusion, conflation, or ambiguity. It’s this possibility that sets the possible upper bound of meaning at infinity.
I could argue that an infinity of meanings is effectively no meaning at all. This kind of reasoning is quite common, but it’s also fallacious. An infinitude of meanings could still be highly selective among the total possible meanings, in the same way that prime numbers are a subset of the natural numbers, and, while highly selective, are still an infinite set as numerous as the set of natural numbers. An infinite set of meanings that are integrally related to each other, and which also exclude an infinitude of possible meanings, could constitute a robust meaning for the totality of history. If it’s possible for an individual event to take on multiple meanings up to an infinitude of meanings, then the totality of history, taken as a whole, and therefore as a unity, could take on multiple meanings up to an infinitude of meanings.
What about historical wholes that more than a conjuncture, and maybe even more than a longue durée, but less than the totality of history? In a word, what about civilizations? Do the histories of civilizations have meaning? What if one history, say the history of Egyptian civilization or Minoan civilization, has one meaning, and another history has another meaning? Why shouldn’t there be different meanings for different histories? When historians speak of “medieval Japan” or “medieval India,” they are applying an historical category from Western history to a history that was, at the time, disjoint from Western history. We can take “medieval” as a term of periodization, and while it is this, it’s also more than this. Because “medieval” has meanings that transcend mere periodization, to employ this periodization to a contemporaneous but disjoint civilization is to import an alien meaning. Therefore, we ought to welcome a multiplicity of meanings as a way to understand distinct civilizations. This points to an important ellipsis in philosophy of history.
The presupposition of totality in philosophy of history, illustrated by my earlier quote from Walsh, tends to blind us to more modest and limited historical wholes. Philosophies of history that explain the history of one civilization but not necessarily another I call parochial philosophies of history, and I hope to talk more about them in the coming year. What I’m getting at is that the question of the meaning of history, when taken in absolute generality, is premature. We have much more work to do today on understanding the meaning of the histories of individual civilizations, to the extent that they can be individuated. Toynbee of course said that the proper unit for the study of history is the civilization, since anything less comprehensive than a civilization would constitute an incoherent fragment of a whole. This implies that civilizations are isolatable wholes, and while this may have been true for some pristine civilizations that originated, developed, and went extinct in isolation, by far the greater number of civilizations in history have interacted with adjacent civilizations to a greater or lesser extent. The more any individual civilization interacted with another, the more difficult it is to tell the story of that civilization without discussing the adjacent civilization with which it interacted.
In my episode on Eugene Bolton, of the Bolton thesis, which is the idea that American history is properly hemispherical history, I argued that the reasoning of the Bolton thesis naturally expands the scope of history from national history to regional history to hemispherical history to planetary history. In a similar way, the consideration of the explanation and meaning of the history of any one civilization may naturally expand in scope to other civilizations as well, but we need to lay the foundations with a single civilization before we can escalate to the totality of history. But we can go farther than this yet.
What if Egyptian civilization has one meaning, Minoan civilization has another meaning, but the two taken together have yet another meaning as part of the larger historical structure of ancient civilization? And suppose this larger historical structure of ancient civilization, with its distinctive meaning, in turn takes its place in the totality of human history, which has its own distinctive meaning. This latter approach would allow us to square the question of the meaning of history with the apparent multiplicity of meanings we find — at least partially. The multiplicity of meanings that we find in history could be the meanings of different levels of history, with “levels of history” here meaning telescoping periodizations from the briefest, like the history of the event, to the longest, cosmological history. To confuse or to conflate these meanings would be the historical equivalent of what Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake.
Add to this the multiple meanings that any single event may have, in the same way that a person can be seen from the front or the back or the side, and appear different to every perspective, the meanings that an event have are like distinct perspectives on that event. These meanings that cluster around an event might be related to a central meaning, so that all other meanings relate to the central meaning. Alternatively, these meanings may be related to each other but not all to a central meaning, so that the meaning of an event has a reticulate, or net-like structure. So there may be not only an infinitude meanings of history, but also a multiplicity of structures by which meanings hang together for historical wholes that take these meanings.
