Charlemagne and later \"Roman\" emperors

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi Matt,

Not to play devil's advocate, but how is Charlemagne being a "usurper" as opposed to "emperor" any different than half the "Real" Roman Emperors, many of which were "usurpers"

A point that hardly anybody made a point of. Of course Constantine the Great was nothing more than a usurper, but whereas Magnus Maximus lived on a such, the only difference between both men was that Constantine succeeded. Possession is 9/10 of the law. In the case of Charles, it was the pope who coronated the emperor, to which he had of course no right whatsoever.

Hello Kai,

Later Western Roman Emperors had little worries using the imperator Romanorum title when they were in opposition to the East, Otto I e.g. did that. Pope John XIII went even further by calling Nikephorus imperator Graecorum, emperor of the Greeks. It seems the WRE were perfectly comfortable with that from the late 10th century onward.

Perhaps that had something to do with a) the power of the Byzantines and b) that the Western Roman empire was nothing more than a name. I do not recall that any ‘Roman emperor’ after Charlemagne ever laid a legal claim to the former territory of the WRE, nor expressed any wish or duty to recover these lands, let alone re-institute the legal basis of the WRE. The ‘Roman empire’ after 800 was never more than a title, an empty one at that.

Even if we are to ignore that it is a highly awkward face-saving ploy by the impotent ER Emperor, who would have loved to smack down the usurper hard but could not, the important part is the imperium.
Charlemagne made one problem Byzantium had more than obvious; the universal claim of the emperor was nothing but a farce. Playing in-group/out-group by suddenly monopolizing Roman-ness served masking the withdrawal from the universal claim. The WRE had no such problems, their imperium continued to include many nations, as it was with the old empire.

Yes and no. The WRE did not exist. The ‘many nations’ were indeed ‘many nations’, some ruled by the Franks, some outside their grasp. But it was very different from the old WRE, which had vanished.
Of course any universal claim was nothing more than a farce, but the ERE had at least far more recent experience with enforcing that claim. By 800 it was a moot point of course, since even the ERE no longer had any plans of re-occupying Spain, Gaul and Britain.
The real problem was the conflict over Venice and other disputed lands on both side of the Adriatic. This is where Charlemagne meddled, and this is what the ERE was mad about – a claim of Roman Imperium could (to them) have meant a real threat of the Franks moving into the East. And if you look at the large territorial gains which Charles had made during his reign, such a fear was by no means unfounded.

What I am asking myself is why one should care about what the ERE is doing… Since when did the eastern Emperor had the right to appoint the Western one?

Like David said, this was due to earlier circumstances. And I can elaborate on that, because it had been a long-standing practise for any Augustus to appoint another one if no successor was ready. Theodosius was appointed by Gratian after Valens died at Adrianople, and so had the ERE appointed Augusti in the West during the mid-5th century, and supported other candidates in the face of rebellions earlier. From that point of view, Constantinople had every right to approve upstarts without any legitimacy (which Charles legally was of course). Had this idea taken hold and had the Franks somehow really institutionalised the WRE, this might have changed, did they never did. The title remained just that, an empty one to add to other (more important) ones.

I for one cannot but to smile about a big irony: in the years between 535 and 800 the eastern Empire had first ravaged the west and then effectively abandoned it - both of which directly led to the steep rise of the Franks. What goes around comes around.

You speak in riddles. What irony? I fail to follow your point of view. The Franks had already risen sharply during the late 5th and early 6th centuries. After that they had stalled, and only after the Carolingian dynasty had supplanted the Merovingian dynasty had they began conquering more territory. The ERE hardly ever ‘ravaged the West between 535 and 800, then abandoning it’(are you referring to the Justinian reconquest?). parts of Italy and Africa 9and a slice of Spain) had been reoccupied, but largely lost over the following centuries. Hardly ‘ravaged and subsequently abandoned’, I think. Neither, in any case, led to the rise of the Franks, who had invaded Italy already during the 6th c. and reacted to the Islamic conquest of Spain after that.