Charlemagne, King of the Franks and the Lombards, Emperor

CHARLEMAGNE, King of the Franks and the Lombards, Emperor. -

I. BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS

An energetic and vivid personality, a rich and complex and fascinating nature, both as a man and as a leader, C., whom already contemporary chroniclers called, a singular fact in history, "the Great," closes, hastening the spontaneous maturing of the times, the barbarian age and opens feudal civilization. Between the decline and the passing away of the Empire in the West and the rise of the Holy Roman Empire in its most singular representatives, Otto I and perhaps Barbarossa or even Frederick II, the greatest temper is his, which stands out mightily against the background of the Frankish people, Christianized but still primitive, and carries it impetuously to dominate on the stage of Europe, forging for it, after the first forming of autonomies at the disintegration of Rome, the face that would remain with it throughout the long Middle Ages.

His work links up with that of his father and grandfather (and, seen in this light, is its attentive and sagacious perfection); his place is in the great current of the neophytes of Christ and of the Roman Church, though adapting himself to it with the freedom of an exuberant temperament, his action is anything but an uninterrupted succession of prodigies or fortunes. But where the habit of compromise still prevailed, he substitutes the line of the upright and sure, and clear and coherent action, which does not stop until the goal is reached. Widening the boundaries of Pipin's not narrow kingdom he pursues, it is evident, the realization of a Christian empire that would be the grandiose legacy of the Middle Ages and its highest conquest, until the formula (attuned in the Lateran mosaic, "Beate Petre donas vitam Leoni papae et victoriam Carolo regi donas," where the Apostle gives to the two figures kneeling at his feet with one hand the pallium and with the other the standard), of perfect equilibrium, and of unity, between the supreme powers, did not fail in the face of the rise of individual consciousness. And the greatness of C. is perhaps more in his defeats, of which he accepts the warning and uses the experience, in the tenacity and patience that admirably combine in him with the rapidity of his moves and the immediate perception of reality. Also the heir of a tradition, he is nevertheless, in the face of enemies and friends, like a force of nature: not only for his physical qualities, as well as his moral ones, and for personal valor, but for the scant prominence of biographical data and news about his personal life, so much so that the silence, even of the closest sources, about his life before his assumption of the kingdom can even appear as an expedient to exalt, beyond the customary limits, his personality. From nature he has the gift of passing from violence and indomitable fervor to serenity and great calms, of recollection and expectation and of composing himself in a superior equilibrium, which is the quality that most astonishes and most elevates the man, though nourished on passions; while there is nothing he does not understand or that escapes him — and even in theological problems he wants to leave his mark — just as he, uncultured and almost illiterate, makes himself the animator of a movement of culture that will remain bound to his name.

He was born perhaps in 742 (if it is true, as Einhard writes, that C. died at the age of seventy-two according to a late obituary of the monastery of Lorsch), on April 2, from the stock of the ancient mayors of the palace who had, first in fact and then also in name, supplanted the Merovingian dynasty, continuing with renewed energy its work of unifying France. As the date is not certain, so the place of birth is unknown: so that one has been able to infer from this, also to explain the absence of any detail of his youth and the careful silence of the sources, a birth preceding the marriage of his parents, and illegitimacy would perhaps explain the deep hostility of his brother toward him.

He was born at the end of the first year of the government of his father, Pepin the Short, the victor of Poitiers and founder of the family's power, Charles Martel, having died in 741. At the age of nine, he sees the maturing of his father's design, with the deposition of the last of the rois fainéants, Childeric III; while, with the Lombard invasion of the Exarchate and the Duchy of Rome and the journey beyond the Alps of the new pontiff Stephen II, in search of Frankish aid against Aistulf, there opened the drama of Italy, of the Church and of Rome, which the unwitting child would be called to resolve. Certainly, among the rare memories of the youth of the future emperor, is the meeting, at which his father wished him present, with his younger brother Carloman, between Pepin and Stephen II. At Ponthion and at Quierzy the foundations were laid of the agreements whose distant source was to be the Respublica Romana Francorum and the renewal of the Empire in the West and, in the meantime, the Promissio Carisiaca (founded on the claim, expressed in the false Constitutum Constantini, of the ecclesiastical circles to dominion over vast former imperial possessions) and the conferral on the king of the Franks of the Roman patriciate. On August 28 of that year, 754, C. is present at the ceremony in St-Denis in which the Pope crowns Pepin and Berta or Bertrada and is consecrated king by Stephen II, together with his brother Carloman. In exchange, Pepin moved, against the restless Aistulf, to the first, and then to the second war, the pacts agreed with the Lombard not having been kept. Then, between 760 and 763, C. appears in certain monastic donations, accompanies his father in the Aquitanian expedition, receives certain counties from him.

The death, in the flower of his age, of Pepin, on September 24, 768, brings the two brothers to government. The Frankish kingdom is, by testament, divided: to C. go Austrasia and Neustria north of the Oise, to Carloman Neustria south of the Oise, Burgundy, Gothia, Alamannia, Thuringia. The disputed Aquitaine is also divided. The future capital, Paris, is in the domains of Carloman. With him the Lombards of Italy border; Bavaria, semi-independent with Tassilo, cousin of the Frankish kings and son-in-law (like Arichis of Benevento) of the Lombard Desiderius, borders on the possessions of C. On the same day, October 9, the two brothers, each in a locality of his own kingdom (C. at Noyon), are consecrated kings. Between them there is no concord, nor good will: the revolt that breaks out shortly thereafter in Aquitaine shows this, and C. is forced to put it down by himself, the appeals to his brother remaining vain. In the attempt perhaps also at a turn, which might bring peace, there is outlined at this point, above the activity of the two kings, a policy of the queen-mother, Bertrada: overturning what had been the action, prudent so as to appear tardy, but of broad scope, of Charles Martel and of Pepin — the agreement with the Church against the Lombards and the intervention in Italy — she becomes the inspirer of marriages, between C. and a daughter of Desiderius, Desiderata, and between the sister of the Frankish kings, Gisela, and a son of Desiderius, perhaps Adelchis, the firstborn. For this, an act unusual in a woman of that time, Bertrada goes to Pavia, then to Rome to persuade the Pontiff of her move, and returns to France by way of Pavia, bringing with her the spouse for her C. It is a policy of peace and of détente that is outlined, and that goes well beyond the family understanding: in reality, to the antagonistic impulse of the Franks there is substituted the three-way Frankish-Lombard-Bavarian agreement, of which the beneficiary is Desiderius, who assumes a central position and freedom of movement in Italy, and the loser is the Pontiff, who finds himself gripped in a vise with no way out, in conditions worse — because of the manifest weakness of Byzantium and the progressive waning of Greek influence in Rome — than in the time of Gregory the Great. It was, perhaps also, the way (what must have been closest to Bertrada's heart) of strengthening C.'s relations with Carloman, pro-Lombard and pro-Bavarian and inclined to a policy of peace. Faced with the danger, even before meeting Bertrada, the new pope Stephen III writes the least dignified letter of the not brief collection, using every means so that the young king not take his spouse from the "most nefarious" Lombard people. Recourse is even had to the canonical ground of a previous marriage of the king (but it was a non-juridical bond, even if it had not been without consequences: certainly not the last, despite the four spouses of C.): but the will of Bertrada is still prevailing and Desiderata becomes Frankish queen, around Christmas of 770.

II. CONQUESTS IN ITALY

A few months pass: and 771 does not end before the young daughter of Desiderius is sent back to her father and the understanding pursued by Bertrada is broken. It happened that on Dec. 4 Carloman died, and C., without taking account of his brother's sons, had himself acclaimed king also by the other part of the realm, and the widow of the dead man, Gerberga, with the orphans, took, at the same time as Desiderata, the road to the court of Pavia, with which relations were abruptly broken off. These are closely connected facts, but which in turn have their explanation in something that may have had the power to bring C. back onto the path marked out by Pepin. Having secured his rear with the new marriage policy, Desiderius had resumed the push toward the lands considered the patrimony of St. Peter, perhaps pursuing the vain dream of a Lombard Italy, whose premises had been laid with the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. To tear from the Pontiff's side the representatives of the anti-Lombard party, Christopher, primicerius of the notaries, and his son Sergius, secundicerius, and under the pretext of settling the age-old dispute of the giustizie of St. Peter, Desiderius had gone to Rome: riots had taken place between his troop of fideles and the two notables, supported by rather slender Frankish troops (of their presence there, perhaps dating back to the beginning of Carloman's reign, not much is known) and the Lombards had prevailed. The Pope, putting a good face on bad fortune, had abandoned to Desiderius and to his intermediary or representative, the cubicularius Paul Afiarta, his friends: and had even written to the Frankish court reviling the memory of the one and praising the conduct of the others. But, virtually a prisoner, what he asserted concerning the restitutions that had taken place was not worth much. These neither took place nor would take place: the Roman Church was well convinced of it. Such and other news, having reached France, must have stirred up discontent there and a reaction against Bertrada's policy. The death then of Carloman, and the merging of the two parts of the realm, give free rein for Charlemagne to change his game: and clear proof of this is the repudiation of the Lombard bride. From peace at any cost, also because of the influence exerted by the wound opened in Desiderius's soul, events move rapidly toward war.

Stephen III had been succeeded by a pontiff of quite a different stature: Adrian I, of a noble Roman house and above the factions. There was an exchange of embassies between Rome and Pavia, but they came to nothing: on the one hand, Adrian no longer believed the Lombard king's promises; on the other, the latter was by now drawn to a program of vengeance against the man who had offended his daughter and demanded from the Pope recognition of Carloman's orphans, his guests, who to the advantage of the Lombards could have renewed the situation. There was perhaps a prudent refusal by Adrian I. Certainly, Desiderius invaded the lands of the Exarchate: he made of them a pledge in order to obtain the solidarity of the Pontiff. The treacherous killing of the envoy, the Afiarta, pushed relations between the Lombards and Rome to extreme tension: the Pentapolis too was accused and the Roman Tuscia invaded. At this point, Adrian repeated the move of Gregory III and Stephen II, invoking the aid of the Franks. But it would not have arrived in time (Desiderius, with renewed fury, had taken the road to Rome again, with an army and drawing along with him the widow and the two sons of Carloman), had not once again (as between Gregory II and Liutprand) the threat of anathema stopped the king and made him fall back as far as Pavia. Moreover, relations did not improve: each of the contenders was by now committed and could not withdraw. Whoever yielded could only lose. Also over the justices of St. Peter. In vain Charlemagne made the move of a payment of money almost as a ransom for the conquered and disputed territories. At the negative response, Frankish intervention took shape, made inevitable by reasons of prestige of the sovereign and of the dynasty. Having divided the army, and entrusted one part of it to his uncle Bernard, Charlemagne, after an assembly of the great men at Geneva, descended by the Mont Cenis: the encircling pincer closed in the valley of the Dora Riparia behind the defensive line drawn up at the Chiuse by Desiderius and his son. The rout was complete: the surviving Lombards shut themselves up with Desiderius at Pavia, and with Adelchis and Gerberga at Verona. It is Sept. 773. Shortly afterward Verona surrendered. The siege of the capital, however, lasted until June, though it did not limit Charlemagne's activity in the peninsula. The surrender was followed by the submissions of the dukes. King Desiderius, Queen Ansa, and the daughters were shut up in monasteries: of them nothing more would be heard. Of the royal family, only Adelchis, who escaped the surrenders of Verona and Pavia, would remain a proud adversary of the Franks, against whom, an exile on the Bosporus, he would fan hatreds at the Byzantine court. Charlemagne assumed the twofold dignity of king of the Franks and of the Lombards: the personal union of the two crowns left the Lombard order in being; apparently, everything seemed to continue on the same track, as if no revolution had been accomplished. In reality, drawn into the Frankish orbit, so as to leave no room for hopes or illusions (only in Friuli would the revolt flare up, immediately suppressed), for the Lombards there remained, in 774, nothing but the name.

Charlemagne had not waited for the fall of Pavia to go to Rome: in the spring, while the Lombard kingdom was by now entering into decomposition, accompanied by his great men, he had set out on his journey, welcomed thirty miles from the city by the representatives of the clergy and of the militias, whom he then found drawn up in his honor outside the walls. Adrian I awaited him before St. Peter's, embraced him and had him enter, holding him by the hand, into the basilica, while the clergy sang "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini." It was the Byzantine ceremonial that was applied to the Frankish monarch. The festivities lasted several days: on the fourth, Pope Adrian asked Charlemagne for confirmation of the pacts established between Pepin and Stephen II, the donations contemplated in the Promissio Carisiaca (there is a question of the extent, since it is impossible to believe the biographer of Adrian, in the Liber Pontificalis). It was, in any case, an entry into those relations of collaboration which the conferral, and the acceptance, of the patriciate made natural: with the limitation, however, that arose from his being now also, as patrician, king of the Lombards and therefore bound to reconcile the temporal and Italian interests of the papacy and of the crown.

Perhaps Charlemagne had not come down into Italy with a precise intention, with a plan, with respect to further action. The victory at the Chiuse showed him the intimate weakness of the Lombard monarchy: its dissolution, while the siege of Pavia still lasted, gave him, concretely, the possibility of the personal union and of the fusion of vanquished and victors; the Roman journey must have awakened his most hidden sentiments, in contact with the ancient idea of universal dominion. It was the Italian expedition, after the test constituted by the Aquitanian revolt, that revealed to him immense possibilities of action, the decisive act by which he emerged from the careful and sagacious preparation of the mayors of the palace for a policy of predominance of the Frankish people. That then, in the subsequent course of events, this policy should broaden and rise to be the expression of an empire already in itself universal, is due to the fascination, and the influence, of Rome.

From 774 to 800, in which the name of the Empire rises again, run the most intense years of Charlemagne's activity, those in which, on an orientation by now clear, but without ever failing in prudence and balance, he gives unitary form, as the ancient Empire had done, to Western Europe; the years, also, of continuous relations with the pontiffs, Adrian I and Leo III; of religious expansion, in which the Christian idea (and war as the means to its victory) becomes the substratum of the activity of the king, intimately religious, but also aware of the political value of the idea that animates him.

III. CONQUESTS OUTSIDE ITALY

These are the years in which the threefold thrust takes shape: toward Saxony, toward Bavaria, on the middle Danube. The struggles against the Saxons, the warlike tribes still pagan inhabiting Westphalia, last, one might say, as long as the reign of C.: it is a series of revolts, with the rise of an authentic national hero, Widukind, who forces the Frankish king into continual campaigns, into sudden returns, and who gives him no security in his rear; and he reacts violently with massacres (4,500 dead at Verden), with the destruction of idols, with forced mass baptisms. There is, however, gradualism; there is, amid undoubted ferocity, prudence; and there is, as in the Italian enterprise, a pursuing of the goal to its attainment, with the tenacity that scatters the ranks of others. The Bavarian question is simpler: it consists entirely in reducing Bavaria from a semi-independent state to a region of the Empire; and it is a family question, which leads back to relations with his brother-colleague, Carloman. The duke of Bavaria, Tassilo III, who had not stirred to prevent the fate of the Lombard people, had realized his error too late: the sources ascribe to his wife, the Lombard Liutberga, daughter of Desiderius, the weaving of plots with the Byzantine court (where Adelchis is) and the Beneventan court (where the other sister, Adelberga, is). At Regensburg too, as at Benevento, the fading of the central Lombard state and the supposed Frankish acquiescence enlarge appetites: from duchy one passes to principality and, for Bavaria, dreams of independence are spun, while Carinthia is annexed. With the sharp promptness that is his characteristic and his strength, C. interrupts, in 782, as soon as the Italian kingdom is consolidated, the ambitions of Tassilo. At the assembly of Worms the latter swears the oath of vassalage and leaves hostages. But he resumes weaving his web: discovered, in 787, fearful of C.'s vengeance, he asks for the support of the Church, with which Bavaria, a Catholic kingdom and always faithful, could not but find favor. But the king does not stop at the prayers of the «frater sum» Adrian, he even forces him to take a position against the rebel, that against one who withholds from his lord the fealty owed, and in 787, after a new expedition, Tassilo yields and renews his oath. Only to begin again, his heart perhaps failing him at seeing his State reduced to the rank of one of the many duchies of the Frankish kingdom. This time, C. pardons no more: condemned to death, Tassilo ends his days in a monastery, and Bavaria, as such, ceases to be an individuality in history. Bavaria was a necessary bridgehead for the third enterprise: that against the Avars, whose stirring in the middle zone of the Danube preluded a new leap toward the West. To stop them in time was, amid the continuation of the Saxon campaigns, the concern of the Frankish court: at first peaceful ways are attempted, so that at the assembly of Worms ambassadors of the Khan are seen and one may imagine Franks at his court. But when some collusion with the court of Regensburg becomes clear and every agreement proves impossible, in 791 the campaigns against the Avars open, long and bloody and which, after alternating fortunes, conclude with the forcing of the barbarian Ring, with immense booty and with the slaughter of the vanquished, in 799. To lead the armies, this time, are valiant lieutenants of C.: the Bavarian duke Gerold and the duke of Friuli, Henry, both fallen in battle. Saxons, Bavarians, Avars: these were three points taken up again from the program of Pepin the Short, with the strengthened relations with the Church and the settlement of the Lombard question. But what were anticipatory hints are now realizations that seemed prodigious to contemporaries, and the breadth of horizons now permits the delineation of the immense construction of the Carolingian Empire.

Elsewhere, for Benevento and Spain, which were the points of junction and friction with the only two land powers that C. felt to be equal or at any rate formidable, the Byzantine Empire and Islam, he will use far different prudence. Only at the fourth descent into Italy does C. show that he has become aware of the claims of independence of the Beneventan prince and of the the danger that it represents as an ally of his enemies, Adelchis and Tassilo, and certainly not hostile to the Byzantine court itself: but at that time, in 786, and then subsequently, he takes good care not to push things much further and is satisfied with the reconfirmation of the duchy of Benevento in the same situation of dependence in which it stood toward the Lombard crown. Even when the sudden death of Arechis and of his firstborn Romuald gives into his hands, with the second-born Grimoald as his hostage, the new duke, he does not refrain from sending him back, at the entreaties of his mother and his people: and yet he is well aware that Grimoald, even if he will at first give proof of loyalty by opposing the Byzantine invasion led by the logothete John and by Adelchis, cannot fail to follow the path of instinct, and to be among the natural enemies of Frankish power in Italy. In Spain, in the clash with the Muslims (and here too one must go back to Pepin: to the capture of Narbonne), he acts, especially after the ambush of Roncesvalles, with extreme caution, animated, rather than by the mirage of conquering the peninsula, by the will to place a bulwark between Muslims and Christians of southern France: and this was the Spanish March. One may ask the reason why C. did not continue in his Beneventan or Spanish attempts, and was not himself the unifier of the peninsula, indeed of the two peninsulas, Italian and Iberian, thus anticipating history by centuries. Behind Benevento stood the Byzantine Empire, which extended its thousand tentacles throughout southern Italy; behind the Muslims of Cordoba stood, although he considered them rebels, the power of the caliphate of Baghdad, ruled by those Abbasids, whose splendor always aroused the admiration of C. By way of marriages (of a daughter with the young Constantine or of himself with the basilissa Irene, the blinding one) or, what would later be granted him, of a clear delimitation of zones of influence, C. would seek for years an understanding with the Empire of the East; just as, out of an innate taste for knowing and for drawing near, he would wish to exchange embassies and gifts with the Caliph, that unreachable Hārūn al-Rashīd, fabulous sovereign of a world whose very limits were not even conceived. But when relations with the one and the other court draw closer, a decisive event has by now been accomplished in the West, and from it new experiences and new needs have been born: experiences and needs of the reborn Empire.

IV. SCHOOLS AND CULTURE

What had taken shape, through the conquests and the vassalages, during C.'s intense activity, and which extended from Britain, which acknowledged itself tributary, to the Marca hispanica, from Aquitaine to Langobardia with its dependent duchies, to Westphalia, to Bavaria, to Slavia, was the vastest aggregate of nations that the world had known after the Roman Empire. Not a unitary State: C. left to each people its customs and institutions, and was content with a religious-military formula, from which feudalism would draw great strength, thus favoring that autonomy of the great, which he was otherwise bent on leveling. But the reward of fidelity had become for him a canon of government. Yet from the Carolingian creation, a creation, let it not be forgotten, barbaric, there could not develop a harmonizing civilization, as that of the ancient Empire had been. There remained, as a unifying element which had drawn precisely from the campaigns of the Franks its maximum expansion, the Church. And C. clung to it, recognized its value, developed to the utmost its civilizing possibilities: but without sacrificing anything of his authority as regulator of temporal affairs, of his attributions of a power which he felt derived from God and by virtue of which the Pontiff could have value only as a mediator. As long as on the Chair of Peter there was a man like Adrian who, though perhaps more intent on creating a temporal base for the papacy, was nonetheless an upright and enlightened pastor, there was no friction or problem that was not peacefully settled. But when Adrian, at the end of Dec. 795, was succeeded by an obscure Roman priest, Leo III, lacking unanimity around him and of a more pliant temper, then the king's hand made itself more harshly felt. New then was the problem of the relationship between the king of the Franks and of the Lombards and patrician of the Romans and the Pontiff, and new was the relationship, after Christmas of 800, between the Empire of the East and the reborn Western Empire. The other problems, by contrast, could be said to be resolved or on the way to resolution. With admirable lucidity, in order to preserve the greatest autonomies, without having anything to fear from them, C. had placed at the head of certain territories his sons, with the title of king, but in reality with viceregal powers: Pepin in ex-Lombard Italy, Louis in Aquitaine. Sensitive to the currents of culture, to the arts and the sciences, so much so as to want an attentive and complete education for his sons, he gathered around himself men of letters, artists, philosophers, scientists of every origin, entrusting to them the establishment of a palace school and of an academy in what, definitively departing from Frankish tradition, was by then the fixed seat of the court, and the capital resplendent with new buildings and art treasures: Aachen. There assembled the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, the Lombard Paul the Deacon, the Frank Einhard: the first, the greatest scholar of the time and expert counselor of the king, met by chance at Parma in 781 and from then on never forgotten; the second, who had come to France to plead the cause of the Lombard prisoners, among whom was a brother, and had remained there, almost as a pledge of a higher collaboration in the ideal and in the interest of culture, the great historian of his people; the third, the most faithful, a biographer, attentive and acute. With them there also appear Peter of Pisa and Paulinus of Aquileia, a grammarian and a poet, the king's chivalrous cousin, Adalhard (the only one who raises a lament over the fate of Desiderata, the most unhappy of women), Rabanus Maurus, Gottschalk, Jonas, Agobard, Walafrid Strabo, Ermold the Black, himself a Carolingian, and then Ethelwulf, Angilbert, Fridugis, Theodulf. The conquests extend the field of the faith, but also, together, that of culture: churches arise, and, in the churches, schools. Episcopal schools for higher studies also arise: the intervention of the State is evident, when one bears in mind, for example, that capitulary of 825, of Lothair, which is like the living inheritance of the intentions of the great emperor.

V. RELATIONS WITH THE CHURCH

Personal inspiration and reasons of state likewise led him (and here a negative side of his centralizing personality was bound to be reflected) to direct interventions in the most sensitive field of the Church: in questions of ecclesiastical discipline and in theological controversies. As the animator of missionary activity, which from St. Boniface to St. Willibrord had reached its greatest momentum, C. does not hesitate to give instructions to the clergy himself, to set himself up as their judge and to regulate the liturgy (v. below). But at the summit of his thoughts are theological problems, whose distance from the passions of politics he does not perceive or, if he does perceive it, he wishes, by his authority, to help settle them on what he considers the right path. Indignant that without his participation (but with that of the papal legates) the Council of Nicaea of 787, which definitively condemned iconoclasm, could have been defined as ecumenical, he did not refrain from convoking a council himself at Frankfurt, in which the question was raised again and in which (and through the support of the secular arm it had the force of law) the obligatory nature of the ecclesiastical tithe was established. And Pope Adrian's embarrassment was considerable when, with the Libri Carolini, the whole question of images was taken up again, in opposition to the decisions of Nicaea, albeit with a return to the happy expression of Gregory the Great, that images could be an object of veneration only on condition that they served to stimulate devotion among the masses. Thus, in the question of Spanish Adoptionism (the heresy that made Christ, as man, the adoptive son of God, recently upheld by the bishop of Urgel, Felix) and in that of the Filioque (the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and by the Son: a Patre Filioque procedit), he wished to intervene, having the one condemned and the other upheld, in synods presided over by him. And the sincere warnings of the Pontiff were of no avail. But the times were not yet ripe for the clash, on this field, of the two powers. Only death, moreover, probably stopped C. in his design of a general ecclesiastical reform, of which plan traces remain in the sources and in the work of the continuators of the Carolingian movement: such as Hincmar of Reims and Gerbert of Aurillac.

A jealous guardian of the rights of the State, the acquisitions allowed to Adrian himself were very scanty: the confirmation of the Promissio Carisiaca was reduced to a formal act, the aspirations of the papacy over the former Lombard territories were for the most part eluded, except for the retrocession of southern Tuscia, where, around Viterbo and Orvieto, the Patrimonium Sancti Petri would be centered, the foundation, together with the donation of Sutri, of the temporal State. But even over what he cedes or recognizes, the authority of the king does not leave that of the Pope free: for, unlike Pepin, C. does not for an instant fail to attach to his title of patrician a meaning that is no longer purely honorary. In the face of the papacy, C. is indeed the devout believer, but, almost as a defender of the faith, he considers himself the one responsible for the order willed by God and accordingly assumes the attitude, not always easy to maintain, of protector. As patrician, he also gives substance to those special powers over the people of the eternal city that the pontiffs had never conceived of except as a defensive function for themselves and for their dignity.

The situation grows worse, and in a certain sense is resolved, with the succession of Leo III to Adrian I. As much as the latter's pontificate had obtained the consent of the Romans, so much did the pontificate of the successor announce itself, from the beginning, as undermined by conflicts and turmoils. Leo, as soon as elected, assumed toward the Frankish king an attitude almost of subjection: he writes to him, communicating his election and promising him fidelity and obedience, and sends him the keys of the confession of St. Peter and the banner of the city, asking him to send an envoy to receive from the Romans the oath of fidelity. C. sends Angilbert and admonishes, in his reply letter, the Pope concerning the duties of his office. Such manifest weakness was perhaps at the origin of the Roman conspiracy of 799: on April 5, as the Pope was moving in procession toward St. Lawrence, having reached the monastery of Sts. Stephen and Sylvester, he was set upon by a crowd of armed men, thrown from his horse, beaten and left half dead in the monastery of St. Erasmus (the legend, recorded by the papal biographer, says that the Pontiff's eyes were gouged out and his tongue cut off, from which he would later have been miraculously healed). From the improvised prison he was drawn at night by some faithful who led him back to St. Peter's: from there the duke of Spoleto, Guinigi, who had hastened at once, led him away with him, to safety. But, whether to excuse himself or to accuse, the Pope wished to set out for France, while C. was preparing for a new expedition against the Saxons. In July, at Paderborn, the king and the Pope met, and Leo was not lacking in the greatest tokens of homage. For two or three months the Pontiff stayed in France: but the sources tell us nothing of the conversations with the king. Toward the end of September, furnished with a numerous escort, Leo returned toward Rome, where he arrived on November 30. With him had come, charged with an inquiry, Frankish envoys who, having found the primicerius Paschal and the sacellarius Campulus guilty of the conspiracy and the attack, sent them as prisoners to France. The facts were, however, so grave as to make necessary the presence of C., which had moreover been promised to the Pope when he took leave of him. And of the task awaiting him, of reestablishing peace in Rome, he gives announcement, at the assembly of Mainz, in the year 800. He descends with an army (which, entrusted to his son Pepin, was to direct itself, from Ancona, toward the duchy of Benevento, but did not reach it, or was stopped by the plague, which was raging) and at Nomentum is received by the Pope in person and by the Roman nobility. On November 24 he makes his solemn entry into the city: a week later, in St. Peter's, before a numerous assembly of ecclesiastical and lay notables, Franks and Romans, he summons the parties. A Frankish chronicler says that the adversaries of the Pontiff did not succeed in proving their accusations. On December 23, in the same basilica, Leo III was induced to protest his own innocence with an oath. Only then, but some days later, C. had Paschal, Campulus and their followers brought before his tribunal and pronounced against them a capital sentence, afterward commuted to exile in France.

But, between the last two acts of the Roman drama, on Christmas Day a more grandiose ceremony had taken place. Present was the flower of the Roman and Frankish nobility at the Mass celebrated by the Pontiff. The king having knelt before the altar, Pope Leo imposed on him a golden crown, while from those present the acclamation rose three times: «Carolo Augusto, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico imperatori, vitam et victoriam!». Then, having knelt down, the Pope paid homage to the new emperor.

It was, and so the contemporaries understood it, the resurgence of the Empire in the West: and the fact that this happened in Rome, amid the rejoicing of the Romans, who from C.'s first coming had again heard the voice of the past (just as writers of every people have since vied with one another in celebrating the city, fosterer of universal glory), prevented one from pausing too long to think about the fact that the one conferring was the Pontiff, and about the other, that another Empire was alive, beyond the sea, and was likewise called the Roman Empire, inviolate until then by the barbarians, unlike the West. But if the Roman and Frankish circles, the politicians and men of letters of the two courts, among whom the idea of the imperial exaltation had taken shape, and who had skillfully manipulated the scene, had seen only its lights, the emperor must well have thought about it, then and afterward, if the famous phrase of Einhard (referring to the assumption of the imperial title: quod primo in tantum aversatus est, ut adfirmaret, se eo die, quamvis praecipua festivitas esset, ecclesiam non intraturum, si pontificis consilium praescire potuisset) really corresponds to a feeling of his. Not perhaps so much because of the part taken by the Pontiff (although the different arrangement of the coronation of Louis at Aachen in 813 may have its weight); but because of the diplomatic repercussions of the act on the court of Byzantium, to which the continuation of Einhard's text undoubtedly alludes (Invidiam tamen suscepti nominis, Romanis imperatoribus super hoc indignantibus, magna tulit pacientia), even if «sicit eorum contumaciam magnanimitate, qua eis procul dubio longe praestantior erat, mittendo ad eos crebras legationes et in epistolis fratres eos appellando).

VI. RELATIONS WITH BYZANTIUM

Charlemagne's position toward the Eastern Empire was one of the utmost delicacy: the hostility engendered by the conquest of Lombard Italy had not resolved into war only because of the patience and the pains taken by Charlemagne, who had not wanted Beneventan adventures and had set the city of Rome as the limit of his interests in the peninsula. On the other hand, the independent attitude of the Beneventan prince and the collusions in general of the Byzantines with his enemies greatly troubled him, without distance, and the absence of a fleet, being able to allow him a military solution. Charlemagne, who did not want war except when peace showed itself impossible, anxiously sought the paths of an agreement. This appeared possible to him when, during the third descent into Italy, at Rome, in 781, Byzantine envoys came to ask him for the hand of his daughter Rotrude for the very young Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who had ascended the throne the year before, with his mother as regent, the beautiful and ambitious Irene, inspirer, with the restoration of the cult of images, of a resumption of relations with the Roman Church and with the West. It was the time when the papacy was definitively detaching itself, under Frankish wings, from every, even formal, Byzantine dependence: every trace of it disappears from public and private acts and from coins. And the Pontiff must perhaps have taken advantage of the occasion, to obtain imperial consent to the changes that had occurred in Italy and to the independence of the Ecclesiastical State. But nothing is known of the hoped-for marriage between the two princes, still too young: or, rather, it is known only that it did not take place, perhaps because Charlemagne had become aware of Irene's ambitious designs or because of the sequence of clashes in the following years with Byzantium, whose connivance in the periodic Bavarian and Beneventan revolts was becoming manifest. In 788, in Calabria, Franks and Lombards, under the orders of Grimoald, together halted the Byzantines who had landed there. Even in the religious question, Charlemagne convoked a council at Frankfurt so as not to leave only that of Nicaea as ecumenical. A shudder of horror had arisen in 797 in Christendom at the news of the outrage perpetrated by Irene against her own son, whom she had had blinded and confined in a monastery so as to assume the throne herself. The Empire was then considered, both because of the crime and because it was occupied by a woman, vacant: and to the voices exalting Rome's illustrious past were added the first ideas of a translatio of the imperial dignity from the East back to the West.

It is within this framework of Franco-Byzantine relations that the ceremony of Christmas 800 is to be placed, which falls, from every point of view, opportunely, indeed as an element of singular value in historical life, to raise its tone and impart to it a beneficent shock. But afterward, when word came of the unfavorable repercussions in the East, when above all the sad usurper, with whom Charlemagne had likewise attempted approaches, was succeeded by an emperor of Nicephorus's energy, it was sought, without disavowing it, to cast upon someone (and it was the Pontiff) the responsibility for the act performed and to leave open the road to what Charlemagne cared about most: Byzantine recognition of the other Empire, arisen in the West. He was to reach it, precisely with that constancy of which his biographer speaks, when, Venice and Dalmatia having fallen under Frankish dominion and the Greek court being greatly alarmed by it, the new conquests served Charlemagne as a means of exchange for his recognition and for peace.

When this was signed at Aachen in 811, the long and intense life of the emperor was rapidly drawing to its end, saddened by the early loss of his sons, the king of Italy Pepin (810) and the firstborn Charles (811). The act of succession with which in 806 he had (once again following his father's example: but reserving the imperial title, of which so few times is mention made) divided the great Empire no longer had reason to exist: of his sons only Louis remained, to whom contemporaries, in the absence of other gifts, would have given the appellation of Pious. With peace with Benevento finally concluded, the viceregal powers over Italy transmitted to the young Bernard, son of the valiant Pepin, the emperor could die, in his Aachen, on 28 Jan. 814.

VII. THE FRANKISH EMPIRE

A vast construction, with contours too imprecise and of too ponderous a conduct, lacking unity and a life of its own, and therefore lacking solidity, Charlemagne's Empire, founded upon the exceptional personality of its founder, may be said to enter into crisis as soon as he is dead. It will be a long crisis: from 814 to 888. But even when, for the second time after the collapse of the Roman world, the nations and States of the West receive life from that crisis, Charlemagne's work will not prove less great and, for the purposes of history, less providential. From him, who had nonetheless traversed them bloodying them and had held them firm with his hard fist, great nations such as France and Germany acquire physiognomy and structure. Italy too owes him, even with the arrest of the Lombard unifying function, at least the first unitary name of the kingdom of Italy. Christian civilization becomes the common denominator of diverse peoples, the only possible basis for a moral and political unity subsequent to that of the Empire of Rome. Which is, moreover, if one looks closely, the first European unity, that is, Western, and which transcends the boundaries of Latinity or of Germanic barbarism, and founds them and sets them on course toward an organic process of culture.

Tradition and personal creation are blended in Charlemagne's work. With the coronation of 800, Leo III paid the debt contracted toward the Frankish people, faithful neophyte of Christ, by Stephen II and Adrian I, who had used it to prevent the moral and material suffocation of the papacy. Not for nothing had the Frankish kings, from Charles Martel onward, been the secular arm for the justices of St. Peter. Nor does it matter that, when the coronation takes place, the Empire is by then an established fact: by long tradition the Church recognizes and sanctions, and one sanctions only works that are accomplished. Thus, to arrive at the result of the Franco-Byzantine agreement and of the other recognition - that by Byzantium of the imperial title - all the historical experience from 476 onward had been necessary, along with the framing of relations with the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Church on the part of the barbarian rulers of Italy: from Odoacer to Theodoric, to the Lombard kings. There was, moreover, in that anxiety for recognition, in that value given to formality and ceremonial, the living imprint of the barbarian mentality. It may be said that Rome had educated the barbarians in the sense and respect of tradition: which makes them preoccupied and hesitant before symbols or defenseless peoples, bends them to the sources of wisdom, without taking anything away from their shrewdness or their daring. But some of them, like Charlemagne, opened the furrow of the future: casting the seed of nations, spreading the sense and practice of justice, ensuring social equality, as before the faith so before culture. The military organization, based on the border marches, was taken up again from the example of Rome; the legislative activity, founded on the assemblies and on the capitularies, was imposing; the sovereign's control - by means of the missi dominici - over officials and vassals was original, in the impossibility of a more flexible articulation. And there is at times the flash of an anticipation that strikes one: as when (and it could not have been the least welcome success of his life) the relations established with the infidels, in particular with Hārūn ar-Rashīd, led him to obtain for himself the recognition of a moral protectorate over the holy places, for Christian pilgrims, a more concrete protection from the Abbasid caliph. It was like the necessary prologue of the Crusades, the laying of their fundamental premise: the guardianship of the Holy Sepulchre.

One understands how, already surrounded in life by an admiration and respect such as men had not known for many centuries, legend formed around C. Suggestions offered by Einhard or by the Annales Laurissenses allow the fanciful biography of the monk of St. Gall. Then popular imagination takes possession of the emperor. The chansons de geste, the chivalric poems, dramatic poetry exalt the man and his deeds. Not only where his cult would seem most natural: in France, drawn to become the seat of a universal empire. Also in Germany, which he traversed as a victor, the saga raises him above the very heroes of resistance, Arminius or Widukind: perhaps there already worked in the popular soul the awareness of a nation drawn to civilization and history by the tenacious opponent of the Saxons. Also in Italy, in Spain, in England. Thus - perhaps his most fervent aspiration - he would have taken his place, in the imaginations and legends of the Middle Ages, beside those great men of antiquity, toward whom his thought had always gone and whose work he had more or less consciously taken up again.

VIII. CULT

In keeping with the idealization that the Middle Ages wove around the figure of the emperor, and which it colored in sagas and legends, with a particular political intent, at one of the crucial moments of the struggle between Church and Empire, the antipope Paschal III proceeded, in 1165, to the canonization of C. The initiative came from Rainald of Dassel, chancellor of Barbarossa. Although the decree found application in Aachen, where the cult flourished around the tomb and on the day of his death (28 days), the Church, as was logical, never recognized the act of the antipope.

In the Middle Ages and until the reform of the diocesan Proprium begun by Pius X (1912), C. was venerated in various dioceses of France and principally of Germany; today this cult is confined to the city of Aachen alone, of which he is the patron (cf. Proprium diocesanum, approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites and published in 1932).

IX. ICONOGRAPHY

The iconography of C. draws for the most part on legend. His features are those fixed by his biographers. The only contemporary image, perhaps, is the small bronze statuette, of Carolingian art, in the Carnavalet Museum, which represents him on horseback, upright in person and with a diadem. Crude, but not without some truthful element, is the miniature of Codex 84 of Gotha, of the Franconian school of the 1st century. Conventional is the figure of C., kneeling at the feet of St. Peter and beside the Pontiff, in the mosaic already existing in the Lateran triclinium and placed there by Leo III, later restored several times.

Pier Fausto Palumbo

X. REFORM OF THE LITURGY

To C.'s direct influence is due the establishment of the Roman liturgy north of the Alps and its definitive triumph in the Latin West. He accelerated and made effective that liturgical movement toward Rome, of which we have the first traces in the liturgical books of Gallican origin from the end of the 7th century and the first half of the 8th century, such as the Missale Gothicum (ed. H. M. Bannister, London 1917; C. Mühlberg, Augsburg 1929), the Missale Francorum (ed. J. Mabillon, Paris 1685), the Missale Gallicanum vetus (ed. J. Mabillon, ibid. 1685) and the Missal of Bobbio (ed. E. A. Lowe, London 1920), a movement intensified by the provident action of St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, of St. Chrodegang of Metz, of St. Remigius of Rouen, and above all of Pepin, after the stay at the Frankish court (753-55) of Pope Stephen II. Pepin's principal concern was the reform of the cantilena, that is, of the chant, which he wished to restore to the purity of the Roman sources (cf. MGH, Capitularia, I, p. 80: Epistola generalis, written between 786 and 800; Walafrid Strabo, De ecclesiasticarum rerum exordiis et incrementis, 35: PL 114, 957). Naturally the reform of the chant also brought about that of the other books needed for the psalmody, that is, for the entire choral office (Office and Mass) and in the first place of the Sacramentary. Thus there came about, toward the middle of the 8th century, through the work of a Benedictine, the book called by E. Bishop the Gelasian Sacramentary of the 8th century, which was able to satisfy the requirements of the reformer, fusing together the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary and a Gregorian one, while not neglecting certain usages of the ancient Gallican liturgy certainly very dear to the clergy (cf. P. de Puniet, Le Sacramentaire de Gellone, Rome n.d., offprint from the Ephemerides liturgicae, 1934-38; v. SACRAMENTARIO). Consequently there immediately followed the parallel composition of Lectionaries and Evangeliaries of the same type (cf. Th. Klauser, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum, Münster in W. 1935). The Capitulare de imaginibus (Libri carolini) assures us that Pepin was concerned with this reform « ut non esset dispar ordo psallendi, quibus erat compar ardor credendi » (I, 6: MGH, Concilia, II, suppl., p. 21) or, as the Admonitio generalis of 23 March 789, § 80, says: « ob unanimitatem Apostolicae Sedis et Sanctae Dei Ecclesiae pacificam concordiam » (MGH, Capitularia, I, p. 61).

C., an eminently unifying spirit and most devoted to all that touched on theology and worship (it suffices to recall his interventions in the questions of the images, of Spanish Adoptionism, and of Baptism) received with keen interest his father's reforming initiative and gave it a decisive contribution through the help of able specialists directed by Alcuin (v.), exquisitely Roman in his culture. With a truly ingenious gesture, C. ordered the total revision of the text of Sacred Scripture, the book par excellence of worship. The work was carried out in parallel by Alcuin and by Theodulf of Orléans: the latter had but scant following, the former, however, today called the Alcuinian, had wide success; Alcuin was still working on it in April 800, and on the occasion of a Christmas, not further specified, he offered the Gospels to C. (cf. MGH, Epistolae Karolini aevi, IV, pp. 322-23, [see also pp. 418-20]; PL 100, 374, 923). While this revision was proceeding, C. provided for the diffusion of liturgical books of "Gregorian type," in order to eliminate the hybridism of the liturgical books in use in his states, such as the Comes revised by Alcuin ca. 781 (ed. A. Wilmart, cited below) and above all the Sacramentary, called by liturgists the Hadrianum, because it was received, after repeated requests, from Adrian I between 785 and 791 (cf. Adrian's letter to C.: MGH, Epistolae Merovingici et Karolini aevi, I, p. 626); the original manuscript was placed in the imperial library of Aachen, and the bishops were invited to transcribe it and to disseminate it. The copies made directly from this manuscript bear the annotation: « ex authentico libro bibliothecae cubiculi scriptum ». The oldest copy hitherto known bearing this note is contained in cod. 159 (164) of Cambrai (ed. H. Lietzmann, Münster in W. 1921), executed by order of Edward, bishop of that same city, in 811 or 812. Alcuin, who had already revised the Comes (cf. notices and texts in Wilmart, pp. 146-48, 164; note that the supplement of the Comes is later than Alcuin), took care to fill the serious gaps of the Sacramentary that had come from Rome by providing it with an ample supplement. For this work, to which he prefaced the little preface Hucque, he made use of a Gelasian Sacramentary of the 8th century and of usages by then dear to the Frankish clergy and people (cf. the edition of a Gregorian with the aforesaid preface and the supplement edited by H. A. Wilson, The Gregorian Sacramentary, London 1915). In this way the "Temporale"

and the "Sanctorale" found themselves considerably increased with new texts and feasts (for example, the twenty-four Sundays after Pentecost) and completed with a rich collection of votive Masses, of episcopal blessings and of prefaces. By the 10th century Alcuin's supplement, enriched with other elements, passed into the very body of the Sacramentary (cf. the three sacramentaries of Corbie, used by H. Ménard in 1643 for his edition of the Gregorian: PL 78, 26-264 and A. Wilmart, v. Corbie, in DACL, III, 2933-40), thus giving rise to a book of somewhat hybrid content, which, in the course of the following century, then made its return to Rome, becoming the basis of the missal of the curia, forerunner of today's Roman Missal. Thanks therefore to C.'s action, the whole Gregorian Sacramentary "immixtum," received from Pope Adrian and, by means of the Alcuinian supplement, certain parts of the ancient Gelasian and texts of the Gallican liturgy have passed into our Roman Missal. The Ambrosian liturgical books also underwent here and there the influence of C.'s reform.

C. also provided for the compilation and diffusion of a new lectionary for the readings of the divine Office, which he entrusted to the well-known sagacity of Paul the Deacon (cf. MGH, Capitularia, I, pp. 80-81: Epistola generalis, written between 786 and 800; v. the edition of Paul the Deacon's lectionary edited by F. Wiegand, Das Homiliarium Karls des Grossen,

Leipzig 1897; the edition reproduced in PL 95, 1159 ff. is defective). This lectionary spread slowly, but ended up supplanting the older lectionaries of the Roman type, such as those of Agimundus, of Alan of Farfa and of Egino of Verona (cf. G. Löw, Il più antico sermonario di S. Pietro in Vaticano, in Riv. di archeol. crist., 19 [1942], pp. 143-83). Still by imperial will, the clergy had to devote itself to the systematic study of Roman chant (cf. Admonitio generalis, of 789, § 80: Capitularia, I, p. 61; Capitula de examinandis ecclesiasticis, of 802, § 2: ibid., p. 110; Quae a presbyteris discenda sint, of ca. 805, § 9; ibid., p. 235) and of the Roman use for the celebration of Holy Mass (cf. Interrogationes examinationis, after 803, § 4: ibid., p. 234; Conc. Rispacense, of 798 (Arnonis instructio, pastoralis, IV: MGH, Concilia II, p. 198) and the administration of the Sacraments, among them Baptism (cf. Duplex legationis edictum, of 23 March 789, § 23: MGH, Capitularia, I, p. 64; Council of Mainz, May-June 813: ibid., Concilia, I, p. 261). The Ordines Romani, small booklets containing the description of the papal rite of the Mass, of Baptism, of ordinations, etc., were at that same time collected north of the Alps into little manuals and adapted to the uses and needs of their new homeland. Moreover, the Sacramentary, which originally contained all the formulas that referred to the Mass and to the administration of the Sacraments, but without the rubrics, began even to divesting himself of the formulas relating to the latter; for practical reasons these were united with the Ordines, thus giving rise to the so-called Carolingian Pontifical — the earliest examples of which indeed date back to the beginning of the 9th century — the direct ancestor of the Romano-Germanic Pontifical of the 10th century and therefore of today's Roman Pontifical.

Nel suo lavoro di riforma, C. fu validamente aiutato dall'episcopato che si fece un dovere di aderire pienamente al volere imperiale, come risulta dagli atti dei sinodi tra i quali si ricordano quello di Rispach (Baviera) del 798 e i sinodi riformatori dell'812 tenuti ad Arles, Reims, Magonza, Chalon-sur-Saône e Tours (cf. MGH, Concilia, II, pp. 196 sgg., 245 sgg.), nonché dagli Statuti di Rispach, Frisinga e Salisburgo del 799 e dell'800 (cf. MGH, Capitularia, I, pp. 229-30), dai Capitula de examinandi ecclesiasticis, dell'802 (cf. ibid., p. 110) e dai Capitula ecclesiastica, dell'807-23, del vescovo Haito di Basilea (cf. ibid., p. 363).

C. also gave thought to the accurate transmission of the liturgical texts, which was then very difficult: in fact, in the Admonitio generalis of 23 March 789, § 72 (cf. ibid., p. 60), he decreed that the Gospel, the Psalter and the Missal be copied diligently by men of mature age, «perfectae aetatis»; this ordinance certainly helped to induce the great «scriptoria» — first of all that of Tours — of the Carolingian age to prepare the numerous scriptural and liturgical codices of great luxury, sometimes even purple, with letters of gold and silver, written in the clear Carolingian minuscule, with rare abbreviations, and richly adorned and illuminated, which still today constitute the finest ornament of many public and private libraries.

However, despite all the Emperor's exertions (there exist interesting legendary accounts on the matter) and those of the episcopate, the reform proceeded rather slowly, for various reasons. There were two main difficulties: 1) poverty prevented many churches and monasteries, often plundered, from immediately procuring the entire library then required for the celebration of the liturgy; 2) the differences existing among the principal liturgical books themselves, which had come from Rome, must have generated a certain confusion, as is also evident from the fact that Amalarius deemed it appropriate to deal with these discrepancies in his Liber officinalis and to compose the Liber de ordine Antiphonarii (cf. the critical editions of J. M. Hanssens [*Studi e Testi, 139-40], Vatican City 1948-49). For, with the exception of the general scheme of the "Temporale" and the "Santorale," no absolute unity existed among these books, for the simple reason that the major Roman basilicas from which they came each had its own calendar. Thus the Roman Comes, revised by Alcuin, and the Sacramentary*, sent by Adrian I, although they are of the same type and were simultaneously in use at Cambrai, do not agree with each other, except in Lent, in the Ember Days and in a few feasts of the "Santorale." In any case the liturgical reform, firmly established, was carried out with all the means then available and illustrated by the works of the great liturgists of the period, who were more or less indebted to Alcuin, such as Wala, abbot of Corbie, Walafrid Strabo, Paul the Deacon, Helisachar, Amalarius of Metz and Rabanus Maurus. The intense liturgical work promoted by Charlemagne's reform also has the merit of having preserved for us, in several manuscripts, almost all the documents of the Roman liturgy prior to the 10th century.

BIBL.-C. Kriev, Die liturgischen Bestrebungen im harolingischen Zeitalter. Antrittsprogramm, Friburgo in Br. 1888; S. Bäumer, Histoire du Bréviaire, trad. fr. di R. Biron, I, Parigi 1905, pp. 237-342; E. Bishop-A. Wilmart, Le génie du Rit romain, Parigi 1921; id., La réforme liturgique de Charlemagne, in Ephemerides liturgicae, 45 (1931), pp. 186-207; A. Wilmart, Les anciens Missels de la France, ibid., 46 (1932), pp. 237, 242-43; id., Le lectinnaire d'Alcuin, ibid., 51 (1937), pp. 136-97; Th. Klauser, Die Liturgischen Austauschbeziehungen zwischen der römischen und fränkisch-deutschen Kirche vom 8.-11. Jahrhundert, in Historisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft, 53 (1933), pp. 169-89; C. Callewaert, Liturgicae Institutiones, I, 3ª ed., Bruges 1933, pp. 69-79; Ph. Oppenheim, Introduktio in litteraturam liturgicam, 2ª ed., Torino 1945, pp. 28-33; id., De libris liturgicis deque iure ex eis manante, ivi 1940, pp. 17-82; M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen âge (VIIIe-Xe siècle): I. Les Manuscrits, Lovanio 1913, pp. 466-548; II. Les Textes, ivi 1948, pp. XVII-XIX; P. Borella,

Inflarsi carolingi e monastici sul Messale ambrosiano, in Miscellanea liturgica in honorem L. C. Mohlberg, Roma 1948, pp. 73-115.