Charlemagne, St Peter’s, and the Imperial Coronation

Abstract This chapter returns the analysis to St Peter’s basilica, focusing on Charlemagne’s imperial coronation at Christmas 800 and on the inscriptions that were visible there to Frankish viewers. It argues that the form, script, and materials of the epitaph made for Hadrian reflects ideas about empire that were current in the 790s in Carolingian court circles, and that the inscription probably arrived in Rome before the end of 796. It discusses the sources for the early years of the pontificate of Leo III, and the build-up to the attempted assassination of the pope in 799, which precipitated his flight from Italy to Charlemagne in Francia, and the events leading to the imperial coronation in Rome the following year. Contemporary texts and manuscripts are discussed, including Theodulf’s debt to the verse of Corippus describing earlier imperial ceremonial in Constantinople. Inscriptions in St Peter’s associated with Constantine are discussed in the context of Carolingian understanding of the antiquity of that building and its connection to the first Christian emperor. Carolingian manuscripts are the first to record some of these inscriptions, and modifications to those texts, possibly done in the fifteenth century, serve to illuminate the internal struggles of the late medieval Church and the arguments surrounding the veracity of the document known as the Donation of Constantine that underpinned the temporal powers of the Church. The chapter also analyses antiquarian sources for the famous Lateran mosaic, much discussed in the sixteenth century because of its supposed connection to the Donation, which showed Pope Leo and Charlemagne kneeling at the feet of St Peter. This chapter closes with a discussion about the role of materiality and spatial intertextuality in the patronage of inscriptions set within sacred spaces and how a building can shape the content, form, and audience engagement with such texts.