The Reign of Charlemagne

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The reign of Charlemagne was full of wars and invasions. Charlemagne became king of half of the Frankish empire while the other half was given to his brother, Carloman. When Pepin died, there was a void that needed filling and Charles and his brother were both made kings by the Frankish people. This division was not peaceful and the reign was marked with each brother fighting for the other’s land and power. When Carloman died and his wife Gerberga fled to Italy, Charlemagne became king of both halves of the Frankish kingdom. Charles became the strongest ruler in Western Europe overnight, and as soon as he had control over both halves of the kingdom he swung promptly into action carrying out a plan of dominating many lands in all directions. This new reign was full of wars in the beginning as Charlemagne was starting to dominate a lot of different places at the same time. He fought with the Lombards and the Saxons while simultaneously leading expeditions into Spain to take land and castles. He waged wars with the Huns, a Slavic set of wars, and the Danish War. All of these exploits by Charlemagne made him a very powerful ruler but he neglected the lands that he already ruled and famine and uprising was happening. Charlemagne dealt with these problems and continued to thrive as a ruler.
During the reign of Charlemagne, the church in Rome was going through tough times with a string of disliked popes and problems with the Byzantine church. After the death of Pope Adrian I, his predecessor Pope Leo III, relied on Charlemagne to be the protector of the Holy See. Charlemagne too, even as Pepin had done, made the same gift of donation to St. Peter and his successors, Charlemagne actually did more, he added to what was done in the past...

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...ary in fact resulted from debates, which Charlemagne and his councilors had during and after a large assembly gathered for discussing a program of imperial government over church and state in the empire.
In crowning Charlemagne the papacy was tacitly admitting its need for political support in order to provide adequate pastoring to Western Europe. Before the crowning, the papacy was in no way dependent upon Charlemagne’s authority or influence to keep its rule over the areas around the Papal States. The church was not the same church as in the centuries before and it was falling into a corner from the rest of the world pushing it around. For centuries to come, the relative independence that Charlemagne conferred on the papacy gave the Bishops of Rome an immense and far-reaching capacity for influence and authority enjoyed by no other pastors in Christian history.

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