|
4.
What
action did the Roman pope take in 800 that would result in political conflict
in the Roman world?
In an action that was to become the
greatest source of political and cultural alienation between the East and West,
the pope crowned the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, as emperor in 800. The Eastern Empire, in its adhering to
the principle of imperial unity, could only regard Charlemagne as an intruder
and the pope's coronation of him as an act of schism within the empire. Even
many of Charlemagne's contemporaries in the West saw him as a usurper, for the
legitimate Roman Empire in Constantinople had not ceased to exist, nor had it ever given up its claim to rule the
entire Christian world. The Eastern emperor therefore refused the political recognition
that Charlemagne sought from him. Charlemagne, in his turn, sought to establish
his own legitimacy by trying to ruin the legitimacy of Constantinople's claim to universal
jurisdiction by accusing the East of heresy: he charged the East with falling
into idolatry because of its veneration of icons. He further accused the East
of dropping the word filioque (Latin
for and from the Son) from the Nicene
Creed, even though the word was a Western innovation and never was a part of
the Creed as it was formed by the First and Second Ecumenical Councils.
From the outset, there was a marked
antipathy towards things Greek in the court of the new, so-called Holy Roman Empire. The hostility and defiance of the new empire towards Constantinople soon extended beyond
the political field and into the cultural realm: literati in Charlemagne's
court sought to create a new Christian civilization not patterned after Byzantium.
(Even the term Byzantine was given
first by the Franks in a derisive sense and with the idea of regarding
themselves as the successors of the Romans). The Byzantines, for their part,
dismissed all Franks as barbarians and refused to take Western learning
seriously. The schism between the two civilizations had thus become firmly
fixed.
|