eceive such a gift
at the hands of the pope. He did not recognise the right of a Roman
pontiff to give away the imperial crown. What could be given could be
taken away. It was a precedent of evil omen.

But none the less the coronation of Charles the Great, as men came to
call him, was the greatest event in the Middle Age. It allowed the
vitality of the idea of empire which the West inherited from the
Romans, and it showed that idea linked to the new power of the popes.
It founded the Holy Roman Empire. Twelve years later the Empire of the
West won some sort of recognition from the Empire of the East. In 812
an ambassage from Constantinople came {154} to Charles at Aachen, and
Charles was hailed by them as Imperator and Basileus. The Empire of
the West was an accomplished and recognised fact.

[Sidenote: Results of the revived Empire.]

Its significance was at least as much religious as poetical. Charles
delighted in the works of S. Augustine and most of all in the _De
Civitate Dei_; and that great book is the ideal of a Christian State,
which shall be Church and State together, and which replaces the Empire
of pagan Rome. The abiding idea of unity had been preserved by the
Church: it was now to be strengthened by the support of a head of the
State. The one Christian commonwealth was to be linked together in the
bond of divine love under one emperor and one pope. That Constantine
the first Christian emperor had given to the popes the sovereignty of
the West was a fiction which it seems was already known at Rome:
Hadrian seems to have referred to the strange fable when he wrote to
Charles the Great in 777. It was a legend very likely of Eastern
fabrication, and it was probably not as yet believed to have any claim
to be authentic; but when the papacy had grown great at the expense of
the Empire it was to be a powerful weapon in the armoury of the popes.
Now it served only, with the revival of learning at the court of
Charles the Great, to illustrate two sides of the great movement for
the union of Europe under two monarchs, the spiritual and the temporal.
The coronation of Charles was indeed a fact the importance of which, as
well as the conflicts which would inevitably flow from it, lay in the
future. But it showed the Roman Church great, and it showed the
absorption of the great Teutonic race in the fascinating ideal of unity
at once Christian and imperial.

[1] _Cod. Car._ in Muratori, _Rer. Ital.