Glimpses of Church History

 

4. Period 750 – 900 CE

 

Pepin & Pope Stephen III

Stephen II was pope for just four days in 752. His successor Stephen III who had practically been brought up in the papal court feared that the Lombards (barbarian invaders from the Baltic) might march into Rome. When appeals to the Lombard king and Byzantine Emperor proved fruitless, Pope Stephen crossed the Alps in the winter of 753 to seek the help of Pepin, the Frankish king (also called Pepin the Short). Clad in black robes and head covered in ashes, the pope knelt before the king and begged him to save Rome from the Lombards.

 

In an attempt to win over the king, Stephen handed him an ancient document called The Donation of Constantine, believed to be a deed made out by Constantine in 315, recounting how he had been instantly cured from leprosy when Pope Sylvester baptised him. In gratitude, Constantine had proclaimed Roman Christianity as the official religion of his empire and the Pope as the successor of Peter and himself. He had offered Sylvester the crown together with “the purple mantle, scarlet tunic and all the imperial trappings…also the imperial sceptre, standards and banners” (Ref 3). The deed went on: “We hand over our palaces, the City of Rome and all the provinces, cities of Italy and regions of the West to the most blessed pontiff and universal pope, Sylvester.”

King Pepin was duly impressed by the document. He fought and routed the Lombards and forced them to cede large chunks of territory to the church, effectively turning the pope into a feudal lord. This territorial grant, known as the Donation of Pepin established the temporal power of the papacy, thus freeing it from dependence on the Byzantine Empire.

 

A Grand Forgery

It turned out several centuries later (in 1440) that the Donation was a massive fraud. Constantine had not contracted leprosy; he was baptised in his last days by the Arian Bishop Eusebius. Sylvester was not even pope at the time, it was Mathiades. The author of the fraud was a papal cleric, Christophorus by name. Apparently his aim was to transfer temporal authority from the emperor and invest it in the pope. The forgery was exposed by another papal aide Lorenzo Valla in a book published in 1517 - the very year that Martin Luther was attacking the sale of indulgences by unscrupulous clerics. A copy of the book came into Luther’s hands; it only served to confirm his earlier views about papal excesses.

 

Rival Claimants

The pope now administered a score of towns and received their revenues. This made the papal office a major attraction for ambitious clerics. Surely enough, on the death of the next pope, Paul I, in 767, rival claims were made on the papacy. One influential local lord hastened to propose his own brother as successor (Constantine II). The objection that the brother was a layman was easily overcome. He was ordained cleric, sub-deacon and priest and then elevated to be bishop and pope - all on the same day. But one day rival supporters waylaid him, dug his eyes out and left him for dead. (Christophorus the forger was killed in one of the skirmishes.) A second contender was murdered outright. Eventually another aspirant, Stephen IV, threatened to bring in the feared Lombards and was accepted as successor.

 

 Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor

The next Pope, Adrian I, served for 24 years and was succeeded by Leo III (795-816). Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, was King of the Franks at the time. Despite the best of tutors he could neither read nor write. He was well disposed towards the church but was no more saintly than Constantine. In 782 he had 4500 Saxons beheaded on the banks of the river Aller. He had divorced his first wife, had six children by a second, two by a third and none by a fourth. He also kept several concubines.

 

Pope Leo III who had enemies, both outside and within Rome invited Charlemagne to Rome both for protection and to demonstrate papal supremacy. He was also facing a charge of adultery. Before Charlemagne arrived, Leo had been attacked by a hostile mob who tore out his eyes and cut off his tongue. As Charlemagne knelt in front of St Peter’s tomb on Christmas day in 800, Leo managed to place a crown on Charlemagne’s head, pronounced him Emperor and knelt in respect. Charlemagne was both surprised and pleased to receive the honour but not from a vassal.

 

Leo’s act had set a precedent  - the papal right to select, crown and even depose emperors. However, his predecessor, Pope Adrian I, had already granted Charlemagne the privilege of appointing the Roman pontiff. The question then was: who was greater? A pope approved by Charlemagne or the emperor crowned by a pope?  Charlemagne died in 814 and his son, Louis I’s reign was marked by feudal and family strife that culminated in the partition of the empire in 843. Despite these dissensions within Empire, the popes maintained the imperial set up for most of the 9^th century.

 

Muslims Enter Europe

When Mohammed (570-632), founder of Islam, died he had left a loyal band of Arab followers.  They were great warriors and soon conquered a vast swathe of lands from Palestine to Armenia, Afghanistan and down to Taskent and the Indus valley. To the west, the Arabs (called Moors or Saracens) swept along the Mediterranean coast. They invaded Spain in 711, crushed the Visigoths and retained a strong presence in Spain.

 

St Peter’s Shrine Attacked

About 160 CE, a simple stone shrine marked St Peter’s grave. The first basilica of St Peter’s was built over his tomb early in the 4^th century. In the 7^th century the great central door of St Peter’s basilica was plated with some 1000 pounds of silver. The tomb, considered the most sacred spot in Christendom, could be accessed from the main altar. By the 8^th century, the silver adorning the tomb was replaced by solid gold sheets and the silver statues by gold ones. The emperors seeking divine favour had more of the pagan temples demolished and the material used to adorn St Peter’s. The popes did the same with the revenues collected. By early 9^th century, ‘the ugly building contained an enormous treasure in bullion alone, an irresistible attraction to any band of robbers…’ (Ref 3)

 

Saracen bands who had established themselves in Sicily moved into southern Italy and in 846 launched an attack upon Rome itself. They entered St Peter’s and ripped off the massive silver plating  on the doors  and floor, stripped the precious ornaments from the altars and dismantled the golden statues. They even broke into St Peter’s tomb and scattered the contents. The invaders managed to escape to their ships on the Tiber with most of the loot.It was left to the energetic Pope Leo IV to set about restoring the basilica and walling the entire Vatican site. The walls were 40 feet high. With generous gifts from the emperor and church revenues, the task was completed in 852.

 

Trial of a Corpse

In the closing years of the 9^th century, rival factions battling for the Chair of St Peter brought Rome to the edge of social chaos. Matters came to a head in 896 when the deranged Pope Stephen VII (belonging to one faction) decided to unearth the 9-month old corpse of a Corsican predecessor, Pope Formosus (891-96) who had belonged to another faction. In what came to be known as the Synod Horrenda, he had the corpse dressed in full papal robes and placed on the throne in the Lateran palace. He then proceeded to interrogate ‘him’ personally. Formosus was charged with becoming pope under false pretences; he had accepted the bishopric of Rome when he was bishop of another diocese. This invalidated all his acts, especially his ordinations. He had also crowned a rival candidate emperor.

 

A chattering teenaged deacon served as counsel or the defence. After being found guilty by the Synod, the corpse was stripped of all but a hair-shirt clinging to the withered flesh. The two fingers used to give the apostolic blessing were hacked off. The body  was dragged through the palace and hurled on to the mob in the streets. They in turn dragged it  to the river Tiber and flung it in. The corpse held together by the hairshirt was recovered by Formosus’ supporters and given a decent burial. It was eventually returned to its tomb in St Peter’s.

 

Later in the same year 896 Stephen himself was seized and strangled. His supporters elected a certain Cardinal Sergius as pope while the opposing party elected one of their own. In the violence that followed, Sergius and his supporters were chased out of the city. Over the next 12 months, four more popes (among them Romanus and Theodore II) scrambled onto the bloodstained Chair of St Peter, maintaining themselves precariously for a few weeks (or even days) before being hounded out.

 

Holy Roman Empire

The dominant political entity in western Europe from the period 800 called itself the ‘Roman Empire’, then the Holy Empire and finally ‘Holy Roman Empire’ in the 13^th century.  Although the borders of the empire kept shifting, the principal area was always the German states and from the 10^th century its rulers were elected German kings. It continued for a 1000 years until 1806 when it was dissolved by Napolean. Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor then established the Empire of Austria.

 

The Holy Roman Empire was an attempt to replace the decaying western Roman Empire by independent kingdoms ruled by German nobles. (The western Roman empire had effectively ended with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476.) The Byzantine emperors (who ran the eastern Empire with Constantinople as capital) retained nominal control of the western provinces but the Germanic tribes were seizing more and more western territory. Many of these tribes were christianised in the 6th and 7th centuries with allegiance to the Roman church. This church found itself in conflict with the eastern church over practices like the use of images in ceremonies and finally severed relations with Constantinople in 730-32. The popes then befriended the Frankish kingdom ending in Pope Leo III crowning of their ruler Charlemagne emperor in 800.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note:  Rival popes are indicated by #

 

REFERENCES

1. Raymond Davis, Lives of 9^th century Popes, Liverpool University Press 1995

2  Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, Corgi Books 1994

3  E R Chamberlain, Bad Popes, Barnes & Noble 1993