CHURCH AND EMPIRE
In 774 the Frankish king, Charlemagne, overthrew the Lombards and installed his son as king in the Lombard capital, Pavia. Charlemagne was influenced by the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin of York, whom he met in Parma in 781 and made royal tutor and adviser on educational and religious matters.
Alcuin revived the memory of Rome as caput mundi and this idea became a dominant feature of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance. On Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne sought to realise Alcuin's vision when he had himself crowned emperor at Rome by Pope Leo III and thus reconstituted his different kingdoms into a new empire. Both emperor and Pope exploited the mystical memory of Rome and her universal empire. The Roman crowd acclaimed Charlemagne as ‘crowned by God' and he could thus call his empire both ‘Holy' and ‘Roman’.There was now renewed interest in the relationship between Church and empire. In the spirit of the letter of Pope Gelasius I to the Emperor Anastasius in 494, the Popes had issued decretals with general application. Now Charlemagne and his successors claimed the power to make laws, without popular consent, for all their subjects, irrespective of their nation, on the model of the Roman imperial law. Their ‘capitularies’ formed a general territorial law, by contrast with the personal tribal laws, and was the first body of law to be designated as iut commune. The notion was attractive, since in many parts of the continent the various tribes had begun to fuse together and their Germanic languages were giving way to dialects of Latin.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries the equilibrium postulated by the Gelasian principle of two separate authorities, vested in Pope and emperor, was disturbed by the struggles between Church and empire, in which the papal lawyers argued that its divine mission made the Church superior to the empire, so that imperial law was only valid if it conformed with Church law.
Each side appealed to Roman law to justify its position. The texts of Justinian’s Code did not assist the Church. Justinian had rejected the Gelasian principle. He had held that the emperor united in himself not only the supreme temporal power, expressed in the notion of imperium, but also the supreme spiritual power of sacerdotium. In the opening fragment of the Code he announced that all peoples under his rule must practise the orthodox faith that St Peter had transmitted to the Romans. However, the leading Church lawyer at the end of the eleventh century, St Ivo of Chartres, argued that the fact that the compilations of what was now being called canon law included only particular Roman rules showed that Roman law was only applicable to the extent that it had been accepted by the Church.Matters came to a head with the declaration by Pope Gregory VII in 1075 prohibiting lay investiture, the claim of the emperor and other princes to invest an abbot or bishop with the ring and staff of his office. This declaration was effectively an affirmation of the independence of the Church and of its higher clergy from all secular states. The investiture controversy rumbled on for half a century and symbolised the struggle between Church and empire for dominance. It provided a stimulus to both sides to find legal arguments to support their case and gave both sides a sense that the whole of Europe was affected.
The controversy was formally concluded by Pope Callixtus II and the Emperor Henry V in the Concordat of Worms in 1122, based on an earlier compromise made with King Henry I of England. The concordat made a distinction between the spiritual office of a prelate and his position as a feudal vassal of the Crown and provided that he should do homage to the emperor for his feudal powers and then receive his ring and staff, as the symbols of his spiritual authority, from his ecclesiastical superior. Soon after the compromise had been reached, Callixtus wrote to Henry V of ‘how much loss the discord between Church and Empire had brought to the Faithful of Europe and how much our peace and unity would bear fruit' (Monumenta Germaniae Hictorioa, Const. 1.110). There was thus a sense of Europe as a Christian entity, ruled by Pope and emperor, and of the need to maintain its unity, but henceforth it was to be a Europe with two regimes, each with its own set of laws.
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More on the topic CHURCH AND EMPIRE:
- The struggle against the church
- It is important to note at the outset that the Byzantines did not recognize a separation between Church and state and, consequently, there was no strict distinction between secular and ecclesiastical legislative authority and jurisdiction.
- The struggle against the Empire
- 1.3 Empire
- The Survival of the Empire in the East
- The Demise of the Western Empire
- The later Roman Empire
- 9 THE DIVISION OF THE EMPIRE
- 11 THE END OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE
- THE EMPIRE AND THE LAW