CAROLINGIANS

CAROLINGIANS. This name refers to the court of Charlemagne (q.v.), and in particular to the theologians and church leaders whom that king and his successors sponsored in the late 8th and early 9th c. The importance of the Frankish Kingdom (present-day northern France and West Germany) begins in fact with Charlemagne’s father and founder of the dynasty, Pippin I, and the latter’s alliance with Pope Stephen II and the papacy (q.v.) in 754. The alliance promised the popes freedom from the manipulations of princes (including the emperors at Byzantium [q.v.]) in return for recognition of the dynasty’s legitimacy. It marked thus an epochal shift in the ancient axis of the Christian oikoumene (q.v.), from a line running east-west along the Mediterranean Sea to a north-south extension from Rome (q.v.) to the mouths of the Rhine. In this shift the Western Church turned in on itself and, more importantly, away from Constantinople (q.v.) as the throne of the sole Christian emperor. (One should note that the East under the Isaurian Dynasty [q.v.] was going through a similar process.) The shift is marked at once by a political schism, the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III in 800 as “Roman Emperor,” and by the efforts of the new emperor’s court theologians to isolate the “Greeks,” in support of their sovereign’s universal claims, by branding the Church of Constantinople and the Empire it served as heretical. They drew strength from the establishment and stimulation of new schools and a program in Latin, all of which took place in the context of the Church.

The Carolingian theological program saw, among other things, the addition of the filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (qq.v.), together with an insistence on the addition as a necessary article of the Christian faith. Particular stress was also laid on the papal office, an emphasis that was marked in turn by the creation of documents, such as the Donation of Constantine (q.v.), purporting to be ancient testimonies to the pope’s role both as governor of the universal Church and as source of all Christian political legitimacy. In effect a kind of revolution, the Carolingian reform paved the way for modern Europe and, more proximate to its own time, for the Gregorian reforms of the 11th c., the ensuing final rupture between the East and West, and the great papal theocracy of the High Middle Ages.